The problem FIRSTBA$E solves

For the past month, an anon author has been posting a diary of sorts directly onchain. Currently the only way to read the messages has been to use etherscan.io directly. It seemed an opportunity to build a simple website UI that lists the messages chronologically so that they can be read with ease. firstbase.bot is a simple React frontend that consumes a Python API endpoint of messages. The messages are pulled directly from the blockchain and saved in a MySQL database for ease of feeding the Python API. I also added OnchainKit to enable easy buying of the $FIRSTBASE token, which was launched by the author alongside the first message. This allows readers to browse the text at their leisure and buy into the project if they desire, all on one website. Finally, some people were writing their own messages to the anon, but the website wasn't showing them. I decided to add a simple toggle that displays these messages intertwined with those from the author.

I've also been taking the messages from the author, picking various phrases that speak to me, and creating images that echo his words. These may become a part of the firstbase.bot website at some point.

Challenges I ran into

Not much, only my second React project, and first using Next.js. It was fairly straightforward to write a cron job to get the messages from the chain, store them, and expose them via an API. Then it was a matter of hooking up a simple React page to call the endpoint and display the messages. Adding OnchainKit took a little reading of the docs, but it was relatively easy. The swap capability is VERY nice.