Inspo

Inspiration

The idea came from Jason's list of 'things I want to build eventually' but probably never will. Originally, the idea was a blogging platform / CMS that encouraged its users to post by financially incentivizing them to do so. Here's a little excerpt from the Trello card that he dumped the original idea into back in June.

I'm sure we've all seen dead blogs before, where its creator built a new site with a blog and wrote about how they would post frequently, and then never posted again. If only there was a way to make them post frequently...

Meet Ghost Pepper! (name totally not inspired by epic but boring open-source CMS Ghost) Ghost Pepper is a CMS that will make you post a blog at least once a month... or you'll have to pay some moneeeez!

Thinking about this a little more, and I guess the best way to do this would be to have people commit an initial amount of money (maybe like $5-10 idk), and every week or month that you don't post something loses you 1/3 to 1/5 of your money, which is put towards hosting and maybe donated to a charity voted for by users each month?

After talking as a team, we saw how this could be useful for almost any sort of habit you want to keep, like staying physically active, committing to GitHub frequently, uploading to YouTube, and so much more. After discussion, we settled on the name Inspo: a social network for public accountability.

What it does

Inspo centers around the idea of commitments.

Users publicly commit to doing a certain task with a selectable frequency for a duration of their choice, by sending an arbitrary amount of ETH to a smart contract, which could look something like 'Jason will commit to GitHub at least once every day for the month of October'. Every time they do the task, whether it's posting a video or blog post or committing code to GitHub, they get some of their ETH back until they have it all again. Task checks are fully automated using platform APIs (ex: we can check on YouTube's API if a person actually posted every week, or GitHub APIs to check how often someone committed). Because this runs on a smart contract, user activity is public for all to see, forcing users to be accountable for their actions (or lack of them) and making it easy to verify that users really did something they said they did.

If a user fails to follow through with their commitment, most of the ETH they send to our contract is immediately sent to a reputable charity of their choice. If a user manages to keep good habits and complete their commitment, all of their ETH is returned to sender, and a portion of leftover ETH from failed commitments is sent to a charity of their choice, incentivizing users to complete their tasks or face the risk of losing their ETH.

To check on how a user is doing, the app utilizes oracles. Smart contracts run in a sandbox and are actually unable to interact with the world outside the Ethereum network. However, oracles allow blockchain applications to get data off the chain, like from websites or APIs. The oracles poll APIs and/or handle webhooks from platforms we integrate with to verify if and when a user completes an action, like publishing a post or committing to a repo, and pass this information on to our smart contracts.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had any experience with building on Ethereum or blockchain in general. After talking with a mentor (thank you Markov!), We quickly realized that building the full version of this would literally not be possible in a single weekend. We were planning to build a quick MVP using Next.js and Firebase, but at this point it was pretty late for us all. Eventually we fell victim to the 'lets sleep for an hour and come back', knowing fully well we probably wouldn't wake up. Overall it was pretty fun working on designs and developing the idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although incomplete, we made some pretty slick designs in Figma, and we really took the original idea and turned it into something even cooler.

What's next for Inspo

Eventually we want to fully build this out. Once thats done, we want to build integrations for more providers like Apple Health, Strava, WordPress, and YouTube, as well as making it easier for users to write their own integrations.

Built With

• nextjs
• solidity
• vercel
• web3