November 1, 2024

The Graveyard of dApps

This Halloween 2024, I’m opening the “dApps” I used in 2021. And it is really scary: Domain expired. Deployment suspended. Page not found. Service unavailable.

November 27, 2023

BasePaint

“This is the most fun I had onchain in a long time” — creators and users of BasePaint. Let me tell you a story about building BasePaint, a collaborative pixel art project that is unlike what you typically see in the crypto space. I’ve been writing this post for the last 100 days and did my best to make sure it’s not too boring. Buckle up and consider minting!BasePaintInspired by /r/Place & The Million Dollar HomepageI remember the first time I saw the source code for an NFT smart contract. My...

February 5, 2023

XO: Party vs Party

I built an on-chain game that can only be played by two DAOs. I can’t predict nor influence what will happen next, but it gives me insight into how DAO governance works (and how to make it better). Imagine a tic-tac-toe game on a very large field. To win, you must get 5 in a row, column, or diagonally before your opponent does. But there’s a twist: the players are PartyBid parties.Game state as of 2023-02-05This means each move you see on this board relies on the governance process. Someone m...

January 9, 2023

Zero to Governance

One day, cleaning up your garage, you discover an old hard drive. You plug it into your fancy new MacBook and start looking through the files. One of them makes your heart rate go up — it's an archive with your old Ethereal wallet.Level 1: WalletLedgerYou are a lucky owner of 1,000 ETH and you decide to start a crypto venture fund. Your plan is to invest in promising new projects by buying their tokens. Since you are a one-person fund, you keep all the assets inside a single hardware wal...

October 20, 2022

Runes of Ethereum

What if there was an NFT collection that can't be bought with money, but needs to be earned with skill and dedication? Here's a story about a project I had a ton of fun building. I hope I can share at least a small fraction of my excitement with you through this post!Every NFT collection on Ethereum is a smart contract. But the majority of NFT projects have a very simple way of getting the collection’s items: minting them for a fee. I thought it was very underwhelming, and set to ex...

October 16, 2022

How to get better at Solidity

1. Read “Mastering Ethereum”https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Contracts/dp/1491971940 Initially, I was skeptical. The book was released in 2018. The space moves so fast, surely the content won’t be relevant in 2022? But I’m so glad I gave it a chance! “Master Ethereum” is full of extremely helpful context: elliptic curve math, how wallet addresses work, why sha3 instruction is actually keccak256, the history of the original DAO, and the most famous hacks. It also talks ...

September 13, 2022

NFT project story: building and open sourcing Rings for Loot

What does it take to build an NFT project? How does it work end-to-end, from an idea to collectibles in the user's wallet? How much does it cost?Rings (for Loot)Rings (for Loot) is the first and largest 3D interpretation of an entire category in Loot. Adventurers, builders, and artists are encouraged to reference Rings (for Loot) to further expand on the imagination of Loot. The Rings project is Jeremy Goldberg's idea. Jeremy made all the stunning artwork, 0xHab helped shape tokenom...

August 16, 2022

Deploy your contract from a burner wallet

Here are a few reasons why you should always use a burner wallet to deploy new contracts. In the end, I also have an example of how I do this for my own projects.1. SecurityEvery time someone asks you for your private key, you should get very suspicious. Even if it's a developer tool for deploying smart contracts. Malicious software and browser extensions can monitor your keyboard or clipboard and steal your private key as you are typing it. Vendor attacks are becoming more popular. The ...

July 28, 2022

How to implement a `mint` function in your NFT contract?

Here’s the simplest NFT contract:import '@openzeppelin/contracts/token/ERC721/ERC721.sol'; contract SimplestNFT is ERC721 { function mint(uint256 tokenId) external { _safeMint(msg.sender, tokenId); } }It delegates the heavy lifting to the base contract implementation (in this case, OpenZeppelin). _safeMint is responsible for matching the ERC721 spec: it does some checks, stores data about ownership, emits events and calls callbacks. But you don’t want to allow anyone to call this function wit...

June 22, 2022

The tokens and NFTs are not actually in your wallet

You mint or buy things, and they show up in your wallet — you see them in MetaMask, Rainbow, whatever you have. "Wallet" is a useful concept when explaining web3 to people. But if you look under the hood, it's not at all how it works. Your wallet is just an address: a 160-bit number that looks like 0x123a…c8f9. It doesn't really store anything. The things you have "in your wallet" are actually defined by the contracts. Each NFT or token you interact with is a contract — a piece of c...