Blobnouns

Before Blobnouns, sending a blob required extensive and niche web3 knowledge. Our simple UI allows anyone to generate a random Noun image and send it in a blob transaction.

In our MVP, you can press a button that fetches a Noun from the noun API and then creates a blob transaction containing that Noun. You can also see different Nouns in the homepage that were confirmed to be part of blob transactions.

We also uploaded a whole video on different blob transactions as well and the rebuilt it from the validated blob transactions and exposed it through a service.

This proof of concept aims to show how blobs and blob data can be used for file sharing, social media, message boards and much more!

The possibilities of blobs are endless! Our goal with Blobnouns is to expand to allow the user to write any text or add any image, video or file to a blob transaction. Once this is created, anyone will be able to expand on the idea, using this as a basis for new on-chain social media platforms, file sharing, or more.

In the beginning we wanted to develop a Metamask Snap for easily sending blob transactions. However this is not possible in the current version of Snap because it is read-only for Ethereum transactions. This is why we focused on building an easy to use command line tool and allowing uploading and downloading files.

Blobs are limited to 128KB and one transaction can include a maximum of 6 blobs. In the case where the file is bigger than that, the CLI tool will automatically split the data in many different blobs amongst multiple transactions if needed. The tool can then retrieve the file from the blobs, understanding how many blobs it takes and merging them back into a single file, hence recovering the original file.

The frontend is used to showcase the media files (Nouns!) that have been uploaded as blobs. Besides images, videos can also be uploaded and played back thanks to the CLI tool because it provides a http gateway to retrieve the multiple pieces of a file from the beacon chain and stream it directly to the user browser.

For design, we focused on making in nounish and fun, with the goal of making blobs more approachable! Our primary colors were official Nouns colors FF1AD2 (pink) and FFEF16 (yellow). We used official Nouns fonts (Londrina Solid) and “sharp” icons from the Nouns resource library. Our logo was generated with midjourney and fitted with snazzy pink-purple-multi Nouns glasses. For our MVP we ran a script that randomly generated 25 Nouns and sent them in blob transactions.

Due to lack of time and focusing on sponsor technologies we haven’t been able to use, we have not managed to integrate other technologies.