Timestone

TimeStone enables easy to capture, verified screenshots of web-based content that are contextualized by metadata and user-created tags.

With TimeStone, any user can become an archivist, researcher, or curator of the public internet. Anyone can benefit from the archives of others.

The network‘s nominal minting fees both reduce spam to the network and fund future product improvements and community grants.

The User enters the url to be archived. TimeStone loads and captures the target. User creates a preview thumbnail and transforms the screenshot with contextualizing tags. TimeStone helps the user mint the screenshot as an NFT. All users have the ability to explore all NFTs minted with the tool.

TimeStone is an extremely "full-stack" undertaking with a lot of moving and interconnected parts that required careful planning to coordinate.

The frontend for user interactions with the underlying system is a react (next.js) application with material-ui components (with custom theming by the designers on our team) using rainbowkit/wagmi integrating WalletConnect for wallet functions. The cropping interactions of the full-size webpage screenshot was notably tricky to design in a way where the experience felt magical.

This frontend interfaces via API calls to our backend, which relied on puppeteer instances for rendering web pages for screenshotting, as well as a way to lock in screen captures for minting as an NFT. We used NFTStorage to upload to IPFS for decentralized persistence of the crucial image and contextual metadata (e.g. capture date/time) that Timestone generates. We also experimented with mina to allow verifiers to check the integrity of snapshot provider output and potentially preserve the privacy of Timestone users via ZKP.

Our NFT contracts deployed on Polygon ensures that all Timestone snapshots can be freely traded across the ecosystem, powered by the Polygon network. As most of our target user personas are non crypto-savvy, low fees and frictionless onboarding were the primary factors in our decision on a chain to launch Timestone to - criteria that made Polygon the perfect choice.

We believe that we made significant inroads in solving a number of the trickiest design challenges of a product like this - whether it be creating a magical experience for users, or setting up the right guardrails and systems for a sustainable, public good product and ecosystem. We're incredibly proud of what we've built, and are very excited to share Timestone with a broader audience!