The problem Tip Of The Hat (TOTH) solves

The problem is that whilst tips (and the tipping meta) are fantastic on an ad hoc basis with respect to recognising quality activity; this can often be sporadic, stochastic and lacking in sufficient size to attract or retain the level of talent, activity or impact possible. A deadweight loss i.e. talented individuals mightn't receive adequate recognition for their contributions, leading to potential underinvestment in their efforts.

TOTH seeks to rectify this by aggregating tips and setting clear standards for how these collective awards are earned. The idea is that each season there is a focus on a key theme. Season one will be creating guides for dapps powered by farcaster and/or degen and/or base. The season two theme will be determined the community.

So for season one, each day there is a featured dapp that users make guides for across platforms including tik tok, youtube, twitter, farcaster, lens etc. This activity is submitted to the TOTH infrastructure that has been developed by leovido.eth, for adjudication by the community who rewards the top guide cast with the collective tip amount.

Through the automated tipping tool users are able to ensure allocation towards builders or creators progressing and proliferating the onchain movement. Through the nomination and voting mechanism we are able to inject governance into a process that was historically organised by a small band of individuals (0xen began the tradition - https://paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth/funding-the-future-on-farcaster-and-beyond-with-dollardegen)

For version one the idea is to focus on degen and concentrate the usability within the TOTH channel. For version two, in future, the idea is to decentralise the ability to aggregate tips on a channel by channel basis. With the capacity for each channel to set themes that matter, and integrate the infrastructure to undertake governance by frames to autotip and reward/incentivise those forwarding that channels goals.

Challenges we ran into

Scope: requirements were set for v1.0.0 in a doc where @papa, @markcarey and @cterio collaborated together to shape the direction of development. We followed the: given, when, then approach for settling on features.

Challenges

• Focusing on a scalable solution for v1.0.0 before moving onchain with v2.0.0
• Vercel offers free databases, but with limited storage. We wanted something that would give us enough storage and ease of implementation and maintenance. We decided to choose MongoDB along with Node.js.
• We currently deploy the BE on Heroku; different from where we deploy our frame (Vercel)
• Eventually, we'll use Next.js to offer a web version too with all the web front end, backend and frame in one repo and infra.
• Linting and TypeScript setup issues. This only happened on the Backend, as the frame code was all setup nicely.
• Technical refinement with gray areas, such as signers.

Next.js

• The build script posed some challenges with server rendering.
• *Jest tests setup (unit and integration tests) are essential to verify that your code is working as it should. However, sometimes it can delay your feature development, specially at initial stages.
• I took a hybrid approach on TDD (test driven development), where not everything is fully tested, as there are things that were difficult to test, such as the signers flow onchain e.g. the nomination/voting flows have their own timings for when it's possible to take an action.

UI improvements

• Fitting in info in a 1.91:1 frame is challenging, and having a designer at hand would have been fantastic, instead we had a focus group of previous TOTH winners and supporters for regular feedback: https://t.me/+4Rbq7xHqFXQ5ZjM0

Signers

• the synchronisation between Neynar and our database posed a challenge
• @neynar provide awesome documentation on how to create your own managed signers plus rish & the team are communicative
• Making sure that the cannon fires to the right casts, only from approved signers