The problem Sparkl solves

Sparkl takes a writer's favorite social media platform and turns it into something that can store your content forever on a decentralized database while allowing you to get paid seamlessly for being someone's favorite writer. Built on the Base blockchain (currently just deployed on Base Sepolia testnet), users can ask questions anonymously, write intriguing stories or share their knowledge via unique prompts, and propose bounties for any other user to answer a burning question.

This idea was inspired by Quora, which used to be one of my favorite social media platforms. I remember getting lost scrolling through the most interesting answers written by normal people who just happened to be brilliant storytellers. In high school, answering questions on Quora was one of the main ways I practiced writing, honing the very skill that eventually jumpstarted my crypto career. When I go on Quora now, I am inundated by hundreds of ads and Facebook-style posts. The beauty of niche prompting through questions is now a lost art...it's not about answering personal questions, it's about telling personal stories. As someone who loves writing, I often get overwhelmed by the pressure to keep a blog or newsletter consistently. I'd rather just craft in snippets, and I think many others feel the same. After all, it seems like people are constantly looking for something short and snarky to say on X these days.

I also think that the best way for any creator to get paid is via crypto and smart contracts that automate the process. If I wanted to get someone's attention who I admired on a specific topic, I would propose a bounty in exchange for their shared thoughts.

Finally, one of the challenges of creating any sort of onchain platform is onboarding people to the Web3 stack, with creating wallets and whatnot. To onboard those who aren't Web3 natives, I integrated the Privy login to allow users to create wallets by signing up with their email/social media accounts.

Challenges I ran into

Let's be real, there isn't a single thing about building this project that wasn't a major challenge. I don't know how to code or design anything, I just have caffeine and a chatGPT+ subscription. But, I love a good challenge, especially one that seems impossible at first.

When I first started building this, I had no idea what any of the tech stacks were. I started off trying to build a nice UI on Framer, and soon discovered after mountains of work that Framer was going to limit me to a static web page, and I couldn't even get a wallet hook setup. So, I decided to just use React/tailwind to build the frontend — I still barely know what that means. I created and broke and recreated my app several times. Persistence was key.

I also spent lots of time exploring decentralized storage on Arweave, Filecoin, Celo, and more but eventually realized the thing with the most noob-friendly resources was going to be IPFS via Pinata. I then had so much trouble just hooking up Privy that I almost lost hope, but I joined their developer Slack and got some help.

Building out the components (like profile pages, question details, answer boxes, all that good stuff) was ultimately the most frustrating part of this project since little changes would break the entire site and I'd end up spending hours trying to just get back to a state that loaded. When you rely on chatGPT for most of your code, you quickly realize that it messes up...a lot. That forced me to manually inspect and edit little components often.

In the beginning, I didn't even know how to organize my directories. I didn't even know what directories were. You would not believe how many hours I spent debugging stupid things. I do feel like I gained many new skills thanks to taking on this hackathon — I know the structure of my project inside and out. I'm comfortable staring at the code, I know my terminal commands, but I warn you this Github repo may be the messiest thing you've ever seen.