Homebase

When you look at exorbitant take rates from companies like Apple, repeated controversies by platforms like Patreon where users are at the direct expense of major decisions like payment policy changes, and stats about how only 1% of creators earn a living from their content, it’s no wonder that there’s a growing interest and demand in web3, which promises to bring power back to users.

Protocols like Lens and Zora provide toolkits to do just that. With these building blocks, people can create novel experiences on top of existing composable and decentralized networks. When backends are open and owned by no one, users are finally put at the forefront of product development.

The creator economy market size is currently over $100 billion, and more than 50 million people around the world consider themselves creators. There’s a huge opportunity here that is unique to web3 thanks to blockchain tech - which is to truly enable creators to fully own their audience and livelihood.

For this hackathon, we built Homebase, a platform for creators to build deeper relationships with their loyal fans. By building on top of Lens Protocol, we are tapping into an existing social network and leveraging the relationships represented in the open social graph. Users can create or use their existing Lens profile, post public or gated Lens posts, and set up free or paid memberships to unlock gated Lens posts.

This is the first iteration of Homebase. Homebase is and should be continuously built with web3 principles in mind - decentralization, composability, and financial inclusion.

We hope to fully decentralized the Homebase stack by using decentralized encryption services to encrypt private data and storing that private data on decentralized storage providers. We also want to create a subgraph that combines Unlock and Lens data to help creators understand who is purchasing memberships, which gated content is popular, and more. Lastly, we plan on integrating with other protocols like Zora and Sound.xyz to provide creators with both holistic and detailed understanding of their fans.

Our ultimate vision is to help creators navigate the decentralized web confidently and safely by equipping them with tools they need to reach their fans, better understand their audience, and easily onboard them into web3. By helping creators make sense of on-chain data and the moving pieces in the ever growing web3 ecosystem and co-building decentralized platforms with them, the creator economy will be more accessible, fair, and sustainable for creators.

To build this project we used Next.js, Lens Protocol, Unlock Protocol, The Graph, IPFS, and Google Firebase.

We used the Lens API and contracts to allow users to create a new profile, publish posts, fetch posts and profile details, and follow profiles. We used IPFS to store the metadata for Lens posts.

We also used Unlock Protocol and the existing Unlock subgraph to allow users to create and manage locks, purchase keys, and view locks created by a lens profile.

We allowed users to create gated Lens posts by saving references to Unlock lock addresses and Firebase data within the attributes of a Lens post. Only users who are logged in to a wallet that owns a key to at least 1 lock associated with that post with be able to view the content and images.

We are proud that we were able to integrate multiple protocols with one another to create a seamless user experience for token-gated social media content.