The problem Crate Protocol + Gatefold Music solves

The motivation behind the project was music discovery. We wanted to be able to explore music through people with similar music tastes which is hard to do without some sort of transparent curation.
With the protocol bad actors or people out of tune with the list get flushed out and people who contribute and participate correctly gain more influence over the list.
Transparency allows for us to track a users onchain reputation over time. If some one has a lot of influence over a list, they likely have a good grasp on what the list is curating.
The protocol can work for a single individual but it really shines bringing community mindsets to life. Crates can be curated by any erc20 (including usdc, degen, enjoy etc.)
Reach consensus amongst a community by challenging, voting and reward contributors for keep the list true to its original intentions.
Shared infra like Zora 1155s to manage how popular a crate is becoming amongst users. All clients surfacing the crates can manage "likes" in the same way.

When spotify's most valuable asset is its playlists which can literally make or break and artist, what would happen if we made playlists just as valuable onchain, with transparent curator activity and a shared infra to manage how popular a single list is getting regardless of which client the list is being consumed from. The possibilities are exciting.

Challenges we ran into

Biggest hurdle we ran into was not so much the implementation of smart wallets, but the understanding of it. Smart wallets really change what were used to as web3 devs and users. The concept of paymasters, bundlers, abstraction are pretty complex topics and while getting a general understanding of the new tech isn’t so bad, getting in depth knowledge proved to be difficult. Documentation on the topic is pretty general and seems to be specific to whoever’s offering it is. This is what made the implementation more difficult than it had to be. Getting started was simple enough but once something wasn’t working, it made it very hard to trouble shoot without actually having a true grasp on what all the moving parts were doing. Workshops and office hours seem to be the best way to get more in depth questions answered on the topic in general as opposed to provider -speific instructions on how to get something working. 
In addition to that, the other biggest hurdle we ran into was implementing Zora’s protocol. It’s great and very robust but there were a couple of things that add a bunch of complexity to our project. No free mints forces a user to have eth in their wallet to pay which goes beyond just paying for gas. Not being able to set a contract wide admin also add some unnecessary complexities. This means that for each new token on an 1155 address, we have to set the admin privileges even if it’s the same for each one. We were able to somewhat work around all these issues but definitely burned Time, effort and made the offer all user experience a bit more finicky.