Hacking a Tiny Decentralised App with OpenFormat

Appmilla wins at Web 3 hack night at OpenFormat

Appmilla wins at OpenFormat hack night

The Appmilla team recently attended a Web3 hack night, ‘Learn, Share, Make’, hosted by OpenFormat; the theme for the night was ‘Tiny Apps’ – and we won in the “Most Complete App” category 🙌! A hack night is an informal software development event where programmers and technology enthusiasts alike gather to collaborate, conceptualise apps, code, and network. It provides a platform to explore new technologies, and learn from one another, with an emphasis on fostering creativity, experimentation and enjoyment.

OpenFormat has created an SDK and tools, which helps developers to create Web3 apps on Polygon and Aurora. Two SDKS are available, one for Typescript and another building on top of this to provide React hooks. A developer tool enables creating a new app using NextJS from a template which offers boiler-plate code and UX for admin, auth, profile & leaderboard. These features leverage the OpenFormat Smart Contracts, which implement the ERC20 and ERC721A standards and enable the minting of tokens and NFTs.

The SDK, tools and documentation available from Open Format are great and really easy to follow to create Web3 apps” – Rich Woollcott, CTO of Appmilla.

The hack was 3 hours, so it was a challenge to implement something working for real in that time; however, by using the template app tool, the teams could start with a working app with many features ready to use, such as minting tokens and NFTs. Somewhat surprisingly, three teams built apps for the music industry, which were complementary and captured the idea of tiny apps that could form a larger ecosystem (ticketing system, fan bounty app, artist tips); the remaining apps were quiz orientated.

The Tipsy Artist

Just for fun we called our app ‘Tipsy Artist’, with the core idea being to allow fans to tip artists in crypto or fiat and receive NFT rewards in return.

The team considered many great features should this app be created as a production product – only the first two were developed for the hack.

Different ‘levels’ of NFT ‘badges’ were delivered to fans based on the size of their donation, providing future access to events and offers – no prizes for design here, so emojis all the way 😂

A giant QR code would be displayed on stage so that scanning allows fans to open the app.

We created a quick and dirty (again, emoji based 😂) UI design for the app, but demonstrating the functional capabilities and simple usability we had planned.

By the end of the hack, we had implemented a button for each of the tip levels, bronze, silver and gold, which then generated a corresponding token (think of this as an ‘XP’ experience token) and an NFT’ badge’.

We then imported this into the Metamask wallet. Unfortunately, the images for the NFT badges had not been processed by NFT Storage in time for the demo, so the visual impact of the badges displayed in the Metamask wallet was lost a little.

Being able to build on top of the framework app template allowed us to implement the core feature of our tiny app in an amazingly short space of time

“The Open Format Smart Contracts and SDK make creating Web3 apps a breeze, with the core functional needs built-in allowing the team to focus on the product. A great way to accelerate a Web3 business!” – James Guest, CEO of Appmilla

You can read the official Open Format write up of the hack night at IRL: Hack Night for Tiny Apps

Tipsy Artist Demo

This video is a run-through of the slide show and a demo of the ‘Tipsy Artist’ app – hope you like it!

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