The problem FlameBase solves

Social apps today own your posts, your followers, and your money — the platform can delete your content, freeze your account, or take a cut of every tip. FlameBase puts all of it on-chain on Base: posts, likes, comments, and tips are real transactions, not database rows. Nobody can silently delete your history or seize your tips. On top of that, FlameBase ships a built-in AI agent (with x402 pay-per-use pricing and MCP support) that can post, like, tip, and trade on your behalf — the first social app agents can natively act inside.

Challenges we ran into

Vercel's serverless functions cap request bodies at 4.5MB, which silently broke media uploads above that size and surfaced as a confusing JSON parse error. We fixed it by moving uploads to a direct browser-to-IPFS flow with short-lived, scoped credentials, keeping our backend out of the data path entirely.

Wiring an AI agent into real on-chain actions (tipping, trading, posting) safely was the other hard part — the agent never holds a private key; it prepares unsigned calldata and the user approves and signs every transaction themselves via MCP.