The problem Talk.Online solves

The web2 incentive problem has plagued social networks since they emerged to widespead prominence in the mid-2000's. Advertising based monetization creates an adversarial environment between users of the social network, who drive the value of the network, and the owners of the network who exploit their power to generate enourmous profits from ad revenue at the expense of social cohesion and mental health of users. Additionally, platforms can de-platform users arbitrarily on a whim.

Talk.Online is built on a tri-contract smart contract architecture that prioritizes user ownership and governance. Have you ever been told to join a DAO, but the DAO was really just a Discord full of bots? Web3 communities cannot overcome the network effects of web2 without developing on-chain solutions. Talk.Online integrates with NFT's such as ENS, and as users post from their wallets, other members of the forum can view on chain activity such as token ownerships. This has the potential to be a boon for traders who can verify other participants of the community "have their money where their mouth is".

For the purpose of the hackathon, I chose to demonstrate the capability of the platform to integrate with generative AI platforms to create a collaborative art. We used Runway ML's infinite image tool to show how content can be generated and iterated upon based on the curation decisions of DAO members.

Challenges I ran into

Base network does not support reading event logs the same way that other chains do. We adjusted the Solidity code for our platform to accommodate this. This change made information retrieval faster, and will be useful for the future development of our platform. However, this change also induces a number of bugs that emerged in testing, so continuous testing was commenced to mitigate the consequences of this change.

While Runway ML is a good tool, newer AI technologies emerge seemingly every day. Open AI's Sora astonished the world with its text to video feature, and while it isn't publically available now, we expect to see much improved art generation capabilities for which our platform could utilize to generate movies and games.

Hedera hash scan contract verification asked me to upload a JSON in addition to the Solidity code. I had no idea what this was as etherscan/polygonscan do not require this, and so I was unable to verify the contracts.

Zircuit testnet was slower than the other testnets, this made for a slower UX/UI experience but I was able to wait.