Why are you participating for Based Africa?

We (Blocverse) are participating in Based Africa because we are driven by a mission to redefine the user experience (UX) in crypto, lowering the barrier to entry by 10x and making it accessible and usable for everyone. This aligns perfectly with what Base is working to achieve across Africa.

Our goal is to play a pivotal role in bringing the next billion users on-chain, starting with Africa. As Africans ourselves, living and working in the region, we see firsthand the challenges around access and financial freedom. Our aim is to equip ourselves and others with the tools necessary to overcome these obstacles and unlock the full potential of blockchain technology for all Africans.

What challenges are you focusing on?

The challenges we're focusing on in our community, with the help of Base, are centered around two key areas:

Accessibility: Many Africans face significant barriers when trying to engage with blockchain and crypto technologies due to complex user interfaces and a lack of understanding. We aim to simplify the crypto user experience, making it 10x easier for anyone to access and use blockchain applications.

Financial Freedom: In many parts of Africa, access to traditional financial services is limited, restricting economic opportunities. We're addressing this by providing tools that enable individuals to seamlessly access decentralized financial solutions, empowering them to take control of their finances and gain greater financial independence.

How does your submission address this challenge?

Our submission, Azza DeFi, directly addresses the challenge of accessibility by making crypto onboarding, wallet creation, token transactions, and swaps as simple as sending a text message. By integrating these services into WhatsApp, a platform familiar to millions, we dramatically lower the barrier to entry.

Azza’s gasless transactions ensure a seamless user experience without the need for complex fee management, while passkeys provide strong security for user funds. This AI-powered wallet on WhatsApp makes interacting with blockchain technology effortless, particularly for new users, helping to drive broader adoption in Africa.

Challenges we ran into

-Debugging tx errors with on-chainkit could be easier, because it seems there's an underground tx simulation process but on-chainkit masks that - it does okay for simple errors like not enough balances, but for more complex errors, it just adds a simple message, with no further context... So it would have been helping to see the simulation result for the transactions, not just the execution results.

-Also with onchain kit, I think it might be helpful to not just disable the TransactionButton when no account is connected, or at least mention cases when the button might be disabled in the docs.

-The coinbase.com domain requires a VPN to work in certain locations, which kind of limits adoption and adds a hoop..
For instance to use in NG, you need to be aware of the VPN issue.

-Custom LLMs are expensive to train, host and deploy.

Overcoming the challenges:

• TX errors: testing/debugging with different configurations to understand what was missing.
• Transaction Button issue: Added a check to display the ConnectWallet component if no account is found.
• Custom LLM cost issue: Prompt engineering to facilitate context awareness.

Additional Features

Before the hackathon, we developed Azza, a cross-chain wallet and decentralized on-and-off ramp tool powered by the Yellow Card API, which is still in active development. For the hackathon, we initiated a new build specifically focused on DeFi, called Azza DeFi. This version has a fresh codebase and leverages a completely different set of tools and technologies, tailored to meet the unique needs of decentralized finance.