The problem Rituals solves

Today, social media encourages consumption over active participation for the simple reason that it aligns better with the web2 business model of advertising. The more time spent consuming content equals more ad viewership and more dollars for internet giants. With Rituals, we want to rethink social media engagement as an addictive habit, and create spaces for true online social participation through gamification.

Social media is powered by influencers and creators of all kinds that provide knowledge, entertainment and aspiration to their audience. We suspect this won’t be different in the next era of the internet with web3. While some insist that the issue with social media incumbents is the deprioritization of interactions with close friends, we believe that oftentimes a stranger on the internet is just a friend yet to be made. We offer a countertheory, that this feeling of deprioritization of community and friendship is a symptom of endless consumption and influencers aren’t actually the cause. In fact, we believe that influencers are a feature, not a bug in social media. They are directly responsible for much of the learning, mobilizing and community that is fostered on social media.

Here at Rituals, we are embracing influencers and empowering them with better tools to mobilize, engage and build with their community. With rituals, we can bring existing web2 communities onchain seamlessly, led by the influencers and creators they already recognize. We are giving creators a platform to create rituals and allows their audience to partake in them, fostering interest-based communities and providing direction and accountability without the need for endless scrolling and consumption.

Challenges I ran into

The project consisted of 3 main areas - the contracts, the SDK, the mobile app.

The contracts needed some creativity to keep the system extensible while adhering to contract sizes and security. I decided on a system architecture inspired by ethereum attestation service. The architecture consists of a ritual registry indexing rituals by creator and membership, a resolver contract that serves as the sole point for validating all attestations across all rituals, a factory for creating new rituals and lastly the ritual contracts themselves which can be built upon to make new ritual formats.

The SDK was the area with the most challenges mainly due to time spent figuring out consistent interoperability between various web3 libraries. Because we rely on EAS for schema generation and attestations and then need interaction with our own ritual contracts which also needed to be interoperable on browser, in a server environment or in a mobile app, we faced issues working across various tools that are not exactly cohesive and up to date. I worked across ethers 5 and 6, viem + privy's custom wallet types which was time consuming to wrestle with.

The mobile app was the last part and given that we care a LOT about making this product web2 friendly, we put a lot of care into the design so for the purpose of the buildathon, we have a very basic demo while the rest of the UI is being built out with more care.