Why are you participating for Based Africa?

Our motivation for participating in Based Africa comes from a strong connection to the region and a belief in its potential for digital growth. Africa has a young, creative, and entrepreneurial population, but many face challenges in accessing global platforms and financial opportunities. We want to help unlock this potential by supporting initiatives that empower African creators and businesses.

Being involved in the tech and innovation space, we see Based Africa as an important platform to showcase how Africa can lead in the Web3 revolution. We're passionate about contributing to this growth and providing tools that can help drive positive change in the region.

What challenges are you focusing on?

We are focusing on the challenges of limited access to global digital platforms, difficulty in monetizing content, and the lack of decentralized identity management. In many communities, especially in Africa, creators, businesses, and individuals often struggle to showcase their work on a global scale and face barriers in earning revenue through traditional means

How does your submission address this challenge?

Our project helps individuals, creators, and businesses share and monetize their online presence by combining Web2 and Web3 features. BaseURL allows users to create profiles that link their social media accounts and Web3 assets in one place, offering a unified digital identity.

Users can mint their usernames as NFTs, giving them ownership and exclusivity, and they can receive tips in cryptocurrency. This opens up new revenue streams, especially in regions like Africa, where access to financial opportunities is often limited.

BaseURL has the potential to make a significant impact by empowering people to control their online identity, connect globally, and earn income through digital methods.

We believe this project goes beyond the hackathon, with great potential to onboard users curious about Web3. By allowing easy sign-ups with email/password or Web3 wallets and providing a simple toggle between Web2 and Web3 features, we can bring more people on-chain and meet them where they are.

Challenges we ran into

Coinbase Wallet Issues
Initially, we faced problems testing with Coinbase Wallet. We couldn't effectively test the platform due to access issues. To resolve this, we used a VPN, which allowed us to bypass the restrictions and continue testing. This workaround enabled us to proceed with development without significant delays.

Accessing Talent Protocol
We wanted to use Talent Protocol to verify some of the profiles on our platform. However, there was no easy way to access it directly. The only option was to fill out a form, which would have slowed us down if we wanted to depend on them so we scraped it

First-Time Smart Contract Deployment
Deploying a smart contract on Base was a significant challenge. As someone with little prior experience, I had to read through many articles and tutorials to understand the process. It took time, but finally, I was able to deploy the smart contract. This was a big achievement for me, and the smart contract now handles both NFT minting and the tipping functionality for our platform.

Here is the link to the smart contract on sepolia.
https://sepolia.basescan.org/address/0x2857cA0A68e6640Acdd3EE74c8A19Ad4337f05b3#code