Journey
Journey is a Gnosis Chain quests platform built to onboard the next billion users into crypto.
Project Description
Journey is a Gnosis-native quests platform built to onboard the next billion users into Web3 through the Gnosis blockchain. This project was built for the Scaling Ethereum 2023 Gnosis Chain bounty.
Live Deployment
https://tryjourney.net/
Github Repo
Main repo: https://github.com/web3buildorr/journey
Deployed Contracts
JourneyRewarder.sol: 0x39925222C45466767F047d6e1A86d733f48D5B4D
JourneyNFT.sol: 0xC40b8804CEbD92EE3eB39AC197CeCE53C537a8a1
How you can test the project
- Connect to the platform via Metamask
- Try a quest (e.g. Honeyswap quest)
- Complete and verify each on-chain task for the given quest
- Claim the token reward associated with the quest
- View your badges on “My Profile”
- View the community leaderboard
- Share any feedback or thoughts in the comments here
Inspiration
One of the largest barriers to entry that newcomers face to decentralized finance is not knowing where to start their journey on-chain. We all have that friend who might own some crypto on a centralized exchange or read a few articles about yield farming or automated market makers, but all know too well that very few have actually gotten any hands-on experience engaging with on-chain protocols.
What if there’s a platform that helps onboard new crypto users by rewarding them for engaging in on-chain activities with protocols in a sustainable manner that both benefits the users and the protocols themselves?
What it does
This is why we’ve built Journey. Journey is an on-chain quests platform built for the Gnosis Chain where users can engage in on-chain tasks called “quests” and be rewarded for doing so in token rewards, NFT completion badges, and experience points on the platform.
Our business model is that we partner with protocols in the Gnosis ecosystem who will fund and launch quests on our platform and help incentivize user engagement on their protocols (where we take a small fee for offering the service). By doing so not only do projects benefit from increase in engagement on their protocols, but this gamified learn-to-earn platform will help user seamlessly onboard into web3 - increasing the overall user base of the Gnosis ecosystem.
We believe Journey will help: (1) onboard new users into web3, (2) increase user engagement during current market conditions from existing users, (3) help educate anyone about the Gnosis ecosystem through hands-on on-chain experiences.
What we learned
When doing user research, we learned that there is a huge market demand for platforms that incentivize user participation in crypto - both from the user's side and the protocol side. Not only can an on-chain quests platform truly excite users to learn more about web3 in a hands-on manner, but provides a sustainable business model that allows the platform to generate revenue from protocol partners while providing real value to the partners by increasing engagement of their platforms. It's a win-win model that increases the pie for the entire Gnosis ecosystem. We are very excited to continue building this service out and onboarding more engineers to help us build the vision.
What's next for Journey
This was a proof of concept built in the span of a month. But we are interested in continuing to pursue this project. Our next steps are as follows:
- Implement a user verification system via BrightID or WorldCoin to prevent sybil resistance on quests that offer limited token rewards from partners
- Find a launch partner protocol from the Gnosis ecosystem to help beta test the service on Gnosis mainnet
- Add more gamification and social features to increase engagement and stickiness in the platform
- Build a partner onboarding service to streamline the quest launch flow
- Better responsive UI support
- Testing and monitoring of service
We're really excited to see a future where all new applications launching on the Gnosis blockchain issue their own quests on Journey in order to increase engagement on their platform and educate users about what value their protocols offer.
Disclaimer
The projects showcased in our demo video and slides (e.g. HoneySwap, etc.) have no affiliation with this hackathon project. They are simply shown to help share our vision for the Journey platform as a proof-of-concept. Although we would be more than happy to follow-up with any of the projects when we launch on Mainnet:)
How it's Made
How we built it
The main app was built with NextJS, Chakra UI, Express, Firebase, IPFS (Web3.Storage) and wagmi (wallet aggregator). The contracts are deployed on Gnosis Testnet using Hardhat and Gnosis Scan API.
Verification Service
We built a server that uses the Gnosis Scan transaction API to verify Journey's user transactions for quest completion by using the unique method hash of the on-chain transaction performed on a particular protocol contract.
Rewards Payout
In order to programmatically distribute rewards to quest completed users, we built a server running on Hardhat that utilizes a custom built ERC721 NFT contract to mint NFT badges and send tokens to the users who completed quests.
NFT Badges (Stable Diffusion)
We used Stable Diffusion in order to create the generative artwork used in the NFT completion badges distributed to users who completed the on-chain quests.
Challenges we ran into
Quest Verification
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was building out an architecture that allows us to verify user completion of quests on the Gnosis blockchain. After finding the Gnosis Scan transaction API, we were able to build out a flexible server that was able to programmatically detect whether or not a user engaged with a particular protocol at a specified timestamp, which was a core breakthrough that enabled the platform.
Lack of Testing
With the limited time of this hackathon, we had to pour our efforts into ideation, design, building UX/UI + backend, and creating demo. This forced us to forgo other integral parts of the software development cycle such as writing tests. Had we had another couple weeks, having the space to write reliable tests would have helped mitigate a lot of challenges that ensued. But again, this is a hackathon submission so hopefully the judges will understand.
Time and Role Management
There's a huge leap from building a proof of concept geared towards a single demo video and building a prototype that actually works. By pursuing the latter as a small team, we learned the challenges of prioritization and effort estimation (frequently being too optimistic about our own deadlines), while juggling the roles of product manager, designer, fullstack engineer, solidity engineer, and sales. It was truly a taxing project that challenged our team in all directions but we learned a lot through the journey.
