Why are you participating for Based Africa?

We've seen firsthand how Web3 innovation can drive social impact across Africa. Our community DreampiperDAO, spanning Benin City, Coal City, and Lagos Nigeria, is committed to using decentralized tech and AI to address local challenges.

Chowlive's submission for Based Africa resonates with our voices and social needs of the African market where we come from, and that includes the following highlights;

• Nigeria’s youth-driven population: As one of the youngest populations globally, Nigeria offers a prime opportunity for blockchain-based social innovation.
• Bypassing traditional financial restrictions: Many African countries face barriers in accessing decentralized social networks. Chowlive, built on Base’s infrastructure, can overcome these obstacles.
• Empowering artists and music lovers: We aim to create a decentralized platform that bridges the gap between artists and audiences, breaking down barriers posed by traditional social media.
• Tapping into Africa’s growing Spotify user base: With the rise of Spotify across Africa, we see a fertile opportunity for creating music-centric social experiences.

What challenges are you focusing on?

• Social Connection: Chowlive creates a space for music sharing, listening parties, and direct interaction between artists and fans—without the limitations of mainstream platforms.
• Onboarding Friction: We simplify things by letting users join with existing Spotify accounts, making it easy to create and link a Coinbase smart-wallet to their Spotify account without the usual hassle.
• User Experience: Take away the complexity of web3 transactions, as we eliminate the need for users to worry about transaction fees when interacting socially.
• Economic Model: We are pitching a model where fees collected for creating rooms on the mainnet help cover the cost of gasless transactions, and Base’s low transaction fees make this approach possible.
• Financial Barriers: We’re making it easier to overcome restrictions in African countries and allow participation in decentralized networks without relying on traditional banking systems.
• Cross-chain Accessibility: With Chainlink’s CCIP, we ensure users can engage from across different blockchain networks, allowing them to subscribe to rooms and access perks, no matter the network they prefer.

How does your submission address this challenge?

Our Solution

Chowlive is designed to transform how we experience music together online by creating decentralized social spaces that empower creators, connect social groups, and extend shared listening into music discovery.
On top of Base’s infrastructure, Chowlive offers gasless transactions for Base-to-Base interactions. With Chainlink’s CCIP integration, users from other blockchain networks can also join rooms and claim perks, ensuring inclusivity across different ecosystems.

• Decentralized Social Spaces: Users mint listening-room NFTs and invite friends to join. These rooms go beyond music, allowing for chats and special events.
• Empowering Creators: Artists and creators can reward subscribers with perks, fostering closer connections within social groups. This opens up new earning opportunities for both artists and listeners, beyond traditional platforms.
• Seamless Onboarding: Smart Wallet linked to each user’s Spotify account, removing the need for external private-key wallets and making it easy, and welcoming for non-crypto users.

Potential Impact

Chowlive is poised to drive talent discovery and a new wave of blockchain adoption.

• Collaborative spaces for music listening, curation, and sharing can push emerging artists to reach new audiences, especially in underrepresented regions.
• With account abstraction, gasless interactions, and cross-chain infrastructure, Chowlive can introduce more people to the benefits of decentralized technology, accelerating blockchain adoption among both artists and music lovers in Africa and beyond.

Challenges I ran into

Technical Challenges:

• Gasless Subsidy for Cross-Chain Interactions: Base’s infrastructure allowed us to create and fund a paymaster for gasless transactions from the Coinbase Developer Portal. However, for cross-chain interactions (like Sepolia), we ran into a limitation. To overcome this, we implemented a second paymaster on Biconomy for other chains. We passed the bundler URL to the Viem bundler client, enabling gasless transactions across multiple chains.
• 3D Avatar Rendering: Generating Chowlive’s 3D avatars demanded significant CPU/GPU resources. We had to run the ROG Crate on turbo mode to get the image outputs used in our UI, which took an entire night! 😏 But the results were worth it, thanks to Blossom.

Non-Technical Challenges:

• Equipment Failure: While interviewing friends (potential users) about what they enjoy at real-life parties, our microphone broke! Despite this hiccup, we gathered valuable insights. The survey led us to conclude that creators should offer room perks to recreate the full party experience online, beyond just music.
• Power Outages: The national power grid in Nigeria collapsed three separate times in the same week, slightly slowing down our progress. Internet connectivity was affected, but we switched to mobile alternatives as much as possible. Thankfully, the outages didn't last long on any occasion.

Additional Features

Building Roadmap

Conception (<1%):

The idea for Chowlive was born during On-Chain Summer but wasn’t built at the time due to constraints.

Pre-Buildathon Iteration (<15%):

One week before Based Africa, we developed an early iteration of Chowlive using the listen-together open-sourced API, Firebase functions, and auth + web3auth integration, along with a test contract on Avalanche L1 (Intersect), Base, and Sepolia.

Development During Based Africa (>85%):

Chowlive Africa was primarily built and developed during Based Africa, including:

• Coinbase Smart Wallet integration
• Coinbase Bundler integration
• Biconomy integration
• 15 custom 3D avatar renderings
• User interface with Nextjs frontend
• New smart contracts developed with Foundry and deployed on Base and Sepolia