Hello there, and welcome to the third edition of Base Directory's newsletter.
Every weekday, I'll send you a concise email highlighting everything you need to know about an onchain product built on Base, what I think about it, and how you can get started using it.
Today's spotlight is on Surreal, an app that lets you curate your onchain media collection in one place: art, music, videos, and podcasts.
What does this mean?
Spending a lot of time onchain often means collecting many items, whether from minting an artist's pieces to support them, collecting a commemorative NFT, or acquiring artwork that serves as proof of involvement with a project. We tend to collect a bunch of things but don't necessarily curate or showcase them.
Surreal helps here by presenting all the media you've created and collected onchain within a very appealing interface. You can look back on the trail of pretty much everything you've engaged with onchain.
More importantly, it offers a social element where your friends can also see what you have in your collection. If what we collect speaks to our identity, then showcasing these items helps people get a better sense of who we are.
But it doesn't stop there. There's also a discovery angle to Surreal via the in-app feed. You can scroll down your feed like you would on TikTok to see what people are generally sharing onchain, whether you know them or not. You can collect media that resonates with you or that you find appealing.
So Surreal essentially lets you do three things:
Curate your onchain media collection (everything you've ever collected onchain)
Discover and engage with what people are sharing onchain.
Create onchain.
To get started with Surreal, all you have to do is download the app and connect your wallet. You don't even have to connect your wallet to scroll through the feed, and I really enjoy the trend of more products allowing you to gain some value (in this case, entertainment value) without needing to connect your wallet. That's just very cool.
I would like to see embedded wallets within Surreal sometime in the near future as well because it's also a gateway product for people new to crypto. You can get into doing things onchain by just posting your pictures and videos via an app like Surreal, and the fewer steps required to get started if you don't own a crypto wallet, the easier it is.
You can keep up with updates from the Surreal team via their X profile (fka Twitter) and download the app here.
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Some extra stuff:
I really enjoyed this deep dive from Packy McCormick into Blackbird, a truly novel product built on Base that aims to improve how the restaurant business model works. It's a very good read.
Thanks for reading through. See you tomorrow!
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