colloquium

Colloquium is a Web3 content publishing platform where authors can easily draft and publish their content. Users can also claim authorship and ownership of the published content.

Articles published using Colloquium are stored in IPFS (via Web3.Storage). The CID corresponding with the published content can then be used to mint an NFT (via the Colloquium smart contract on Polygon). This NFT serves as proof of authorship.

On the Colloquium website, the token owner of the NFT corresponding with the article CID is the recipient of any tips or other means of monetization. Since the Colloquium NFT is transferable there is an opportunity for speculators to estimate the future revenue potential of an article, and buy or sell accordingly.

Colloquium's vision for the future is one where content author's can earn the fair market value of their work by creating a market where anyone, not just large corporate publishers, can buy, sell, and distribute written content.

Colloquium was built using Web3.Storage for reading and writing article data to/from IPFS. A React context provider and custom hooks (useStorageRead/useStorageWrite) were created for interaction with the Web3Storage client.

The Colloquium smart contract is a very simple ERC-721 NFT that attempts to store very little information on-chain. As such, the frontend application depends heavily on logged event data. The wagmi and ethers libraries were used to query mint data (i.e. address, cid, tokenId).

The "Top Token Holders" section found on the homepage and the "Provenance" section on the article page were both made possible by the Covalent API. It offered exactly what was needed for both of these features thanks to the nft_transactions and token_holders endpoints for contract tokens. In the future, the NFT mint event log retrieval on the Colloquium frontend will be rewritten using Covalent's contract address events endpoint.

The NextJS frontend application of this project was deployed within minutes (including setup) on Spheron.

Finally, the Colloquium smart contract was deployed to the Polygon Mumbai test network. The lower cost transaction fees on Polygon is crucial for authors that might be authoring a lot of content on Colloquium.