The problem Arrival solves

Arrival is the first ever combination of DALLE-2 with web3. It's a unique consensus-driven culture exchange mechanism. A group of users, who are "artists", write 1-line prompts about art they wish to create. These prompts are stored on-chain and the entire Arrival community votes on each prompt. The highest voted prompt is actually converted into an art piece that is auction off to the community. This is unique because AI-generated art is growing popular but there's no way to assign intrinsic value to it like with art painted by artists. Arrival combines social capital, artists and financial value to give meaning to AI-generated art. This unique community-driven mechanism to produce art plays a role in capturing the cultural zeitgeist on the blockchain. The impact of such a project can be measured looking at Google's Doodles. It captures culture and can be a great platform for distributing culture/ideas to the wider world. There are a lot of interesting marketing/community extensions to this project.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use DALL-E or Midjourney but neither or them had an API, so we built a bot network that posted on a bunch of midjourney servers, scraped the results, uploaded them to IPFS, and then displayed it to the users after doing all the stuff behind the scenes.

We also wanted the "artists" to just have a single chance of putting up a prompt, so we built it on Polygon so that we could generate the images, upload them to IPFS, and then submit them onchain without exposing it to the user without paying a lot of gas.