The problem Silverbacks Social Lounge solves

Our initiative confronts the fundamental issues inherent in traditional social media through the innovative application of blockchain, NFTs, and a token-based engagement system, transforming the landscape of content ownership, monetization, and community engagement.

Decentralization & True Ownership
Problem: Centralization on existing platforms compromises user privacy and deprives creators of rightful content ownership.
Solution: Leveraging ERC-721 NFTs within a decentralized framework, we empower users with absolute control and ownership, enabling them to freely monetize and manage their creations.

Equitable Monetization
Problem: Conventional platforms' monetization mechanisms disproportionately favor the platforms and those with extensive reach, sidelining smaller creators.
Solution: We democratize earning potential, allowing creators to benefit from their content immediately through direct NFT sales and participation in REACT token-enhanced liquidity pools.
Meaningful Engagement & Community Strength
Problem: Prevailing platforms often foster superficial interactions, overshadowing genuine community engagement.
Solution: Introducing REACT tokens for content voting cultivates deep, meaningful interactions and a community ethos of "apes together strong," ensuring quality content and robust community bonds.
Ethical AI & Transparent Operations
Problem: The opaque use of AI and data in content curation and development raises ethical questions.
Solution: Our transparent approach in marking AI-generated NFTs, combined with blockchain's immutable ledger, ensures ethical AI advancements and fair content curation.
Empowered Governance
Problem: Users feel alienated from platform governance, lacking a voice in its direction and policies.
Solution: By embodying the principle of "apes together strong," our decentralized governance model invites users to stake, vote, and directly influence platform evolution, reinforcing community unity and empowerment.

Challenges we ran into

CORS... Is the bane of my existence.
We switched over to Dalle3 via OpenAI's api and CORS was blocking it.
I had to make a nodejs relay to overcome the barrier. The server gets a request for an image. It sends a request to openAI's api, it gets an image link back, server saves it and hosts it and includes the url in the return of the api call to the webpage.

Getting testnet tokens...
We are putting this on 4 different testnets and getting tokens for all of these testnets was difficult. Even when I was finally able to get tokens from a faucet, if it wasn't empty or broken, I didn't get enough to launch 5 smart contracts. 3 different networks I had to go to their discord and ask for tokens. Their comunities and moderators were super helpful and helped me get tokens.