Pengsquare | Devpost

landing page
example profile - theme one
example profile - theme two
how profiles and publishing work

Inspiration

We are a small startup dedicated to changing the way digital interactions work. We started out as a platform for sharing and collecting digital art in 2015. We then pivoted to a coding shop for niche markets. We built apps to help developers translate content easily, apps to streamline web designer workflows and many more. We were exploring how we can make interactions with smart devices even more meaningful in the context of our award-winning technology Koriander Touch.

And now we are back to where we start: helping creative people to share their content! With the new pengsquare alpha version built on the Solana blockchain, we are bringing our first ideas to the new world of blockchain-backed content and non-fungible tokens. We are more inspired, than ever before!

What it does

Pengsquare is not a platform, but a decentral app helping you to share content with the world, appreciate the works of thers and show your appreciation by buying, swaping or simply squaring! Squaring? Yes, we don't support likes, but squares - a square is pretty much a 'like' but it also comes with a few lamports donation to the profile owner. The app is built on top of Solana. It comes with a couple of technical protocols, on-chain programs and this very UI. But without the power of the Solana chain, nothing would be possible!

The world of Web3 is going to be different and so is content and content distribution. Pengsquare is built to help explore, enjoy and define this new world!

How we built it

With blood, sweat and tears! The current version of Pengsquare is still very, very early and only available on devnet. We started two weeks ago to pull together earlier ideas about on-chain profiles and art creation, publication and appreciation. From a paper-based draft, to the current (rather unstructured) code, it took a lot of nights and early mornings.

Technical Concepts

The core concepts are a mixture of what we learnt from Metaplex using program derived addresses to store and easily address data, and a unique chain building to support publish feeds of infinit length on chain. In a nutshell:

A Pengsquare profile is basically an NFT that is assinged to a wallet via a profile account (PDA for wallet).
The profile token has a seperate PDA-based account to store profile information, e.g. title, description, urls, themes, etc.
Every profile token has a PDA-based publish root account that serves as entry point for publishing feeds
Every publish action generates a PDA-based account using the profile and actual NFT to publish as seeds (not the wallet!). The account itself contains a reference to the last publish account for the respective profile, the NFT address and additional information - e.g. squares (aka likes).
As last step of the publish action, the publish root account is updated to now contain a reference to the newest publish account. In this way, the feed of published content for a profile can be seen as a linked list.

Overview profiles

Openness & Economics

The profile token is a standard SPL token and can also be moved to other wallets, traded, swapped, etc. Together with the mechanics of the Square feature, and the fact that it is bound to a profile token, a new economic incentive could be introduced to the ecosystem.

In addition to trading tokens, also trading published tokens via profiles does add value. Everything is on-chain and accessible from any client app understanding these protocols, therefore an open market could be created around profiles.

Challenges we ran into

Solana is super cool, but translating the concepts and ideas into executable code was challenging at times! We still have some open points in our design that we will address in the next iterations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of rekindling the fire of Pengsquare! To be honest, we considered blockchain back in 2015, but discarded it nearly immediatly due to the complexity and missing usability. But with Solana powering this latest iteration of Pengsquare, we can accomplish something great!

What we learned

We did learn so much about Rust, Solana and blockchain in such a short amount of time might. It has just been a crazy ride! But this will just be the beginning...

What's next for Pengsquare

Yes, we have a proof-of-concept, yes we will make it the app to do arts and content! Yes, we want to be tumblr of the 2020s!

Before we make it there, we will publish a whitepaper on the fundamental ideas of on-chain profiles and publish chains, soon. Hopefully, we will also make our team bigger or find more time to spent with making Pengsquare a beta version!