We wanted to create connections with other people in web3, so we built a simple contract to give both parties an NFT for connecting
Web3 is about people and we wanted to demonstrate that in a really simple way. By having two people submit the other's address to the same smart contract, both of them receive a non-fungible token, which essentially just verifies that the two of them agreed to connect. This is a dead-simple way to implement "social media" into a blockchain and requires basically no metadata at all in the associated NFTs to be useful, because infrastructure built on top of these transactions can simply note that the transaction occurred and when. We would like to include more metadata and the ability to "commemorate" the meeting by submitting a photo or creating a bespoke NFT featuring something like wallet avatars, but we did not have time to implement.
None of our team members have a strong technical background but I really wanted to spend this hackathon trying to learn. We spent the time hashing out ideas for things we thought would be meaningful and simple, wrote up a stepwise architecture design, and connecting with others at the hackathon. We then deployed a single proof-of-concept smart contract to SKALE, in large part to minimize costs, and uploaded photos of our meetings to NFT-Storage IPFS to have reference-able data available for the tokens our contract would give out. While our project did not end up being very technically elaborate we're nevertheless very proud of the concept, the work we put in, and the amount we learned. Deploying a real contract to a real chain was a very gratifying experience!