Preface

I am StarkEVM99, a developer exploring the Web3 field.

This series will share my exploration experiences over the past two years, development experience summaries, and will continue to update the From Zero To Market product thinking and landing process.

I hope to gradually write a collaborative book that accompanies my Web3 entrepreneurship, and welcome friends with interest to join Web3Hacker.World to communicate and explore together.

Currently planned content:

• Some experiences and insights over the past two years: Hacker competitions drive research into new technologies, develop products, participate in competitions, win awards, and maintain product development
• Some products landed over the past two years: Web3Hacker.World, browser plugin, CreatorX, IXO, AO Snake, UNI-Bridge(Stake, unified NFT cross-chain protocol, $BST, Launchpad invitation code)
• Next thinking: Further GTM existing products, output Web3 full-stack development technical framework, and build a Web3 developer entrepreneurship ecosystem community

Opportunity

In 2021, I started to learn about Web3 in my spare time, and at the time I was puzzled by NFTs. I saw something like a picture being sold for millions and thought it was ridiculous.

I felt instinctively that there was something wrong, and after researching the technical details, I found that it was essentially a game of pass the hat, just changing the form of the previous ERC20 token ICO to selling small pictures.

During the research process, there was also a side product, which was also researching how to write a discord bot, and then further, in the discord, users can send a wallet address, and then the bot can automatically generate an NFT and help mint it on the blockchain, which should be interesting.

After writing it, I saw several competitions around October, and I submitted my project to three regions at the same time: China, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

I won the third prize in China (about 2k USD), the NFT track prize in Europe (7500 USD, just recorded a video and submitted it), and the first prize and another track prize in the Asia-Pacific region (however, the final prize in the Asia-Pacific region was canceled because the judges believed that I had repeatedly submitted my project, and it was indeed in violation of the rules, but in fact, the project code of the submission in the Asia-Pacific region and the submission in the previous two regions were very different).

This gave me a lot of encouragement, and I decided to quit my job in late 2021, but due to special circumstances, I delayed for a few months to deal with things at home, and then returned to work and resigned. By then, I had missed the best window for the discord bot automatic mint nft SaaS.

In May 2022, I started to all in Web3 and participated in many Web3 hacker competitions, developed 10+ PoCs, and won many unexpected awards due to luck, while researching many different technical solutions.

By now, I have won 20+ hacker competition track awards, and have landed the Web3Hacker.World and RWA-Wallet.com product lines.

Participating in competitions was purely for fun, and I won awards by accident, which encouraged me to continue to participate in more competitions.

The prize money I have won allows me to continue to explore the Web3 field at a low cost.

Hackathon Competition

The core is to encourage you to explore new technologies in a limited time

When I first started participating in the competition, it was purely out of my yearning for the word "hacker" as a programmer.

The earliest hackathon competition can be traced back to 2015, the first Web2 hackathon I participated in, and at that time, I just went to the venue on Friday night, then started to randomly form teams, and then continued to work until early Sunday morning, even to save time, directly躺在会场地板上睡觉, and finally got a 0 result!

Yes, I didn't get any awards. But I met a group of people at that time.

A few months later, I participated in another competition, and I met some of the people I knew before, so I joined the team. This time, I was very relaxed, just playing around, and I wrote some css code to debug the style. I had very low belief in winning the award for this project, and even before the award ceremony, I left.

However, I unexpectedly won an award.

Then, I started participating in various competitions around 22, and I also won some awards by accident, and some ideas I spent months writing didn't get any awards.

In summary, the core points of my participation in competitions are:

1. Encourage you to explore new technologies: Because the time is very limited, you only have 3-5 days to explore a technical direction and then land a product prototype.
2. Encourage you to meet more people in the circle: Because competitions are usually team-based, you need to find like-minded friends within a short period of time and cooperate together.
3. Encourage you to land your idea: Because competitions are usually driven by deadlines, you need to land your idea within a short period of time and present it to the judges.
4. Whether the award is like "Schrödinger's cat", you never know the result until the last moment, of course, some competitions do have some tricks to increase the probability of winning, but it is still a matter of luck.
5. There may also be subjective judgment bias in the competition, of course, your subjective judgment that your project is very good is also a kind of bias. The rules are in the hands of the organizers, so you can only do your best and leave the rest to fate.

The flash hackathon competition is very suitable for stimulating inspiration, quickly meeting people, and landing a PoC of a product in 1-2 days, but sometimes it feels less hacker, because it is impossible in 1-2 days to write complete code for a team, and the idea is often just an idea concept.

Another type of hackathon competition is really "marathon", it may last for a month or even longer, and the contestants can slowly polish their projects.

The MVPs landed in the past two years

The competitions over the past two years have allowed me to maintain the exploration of the Web3Hacker.World and RWA-Wallet.com product lines without external investment.

The first is the Web3Hacker.World product, the goal is to create an industry alliance organization based on technology product development in Web3.

By summarizing the experience of predecessors, output a developer toolkit, so that developers can avoid repeating the same mistakes after joining. The ultimate goal is to allow developers to obtain inspiration, meet people, and finally land practical Web3 products here依托一整套的生态体系。

The second is the RWA-Wallet.com product, the goal is to create a Web3 wallet mapped to real assets (RWA).

Initially, a browser plugin was developed (currently not further maintained), the reason is that when developing builders.space before, an operation required 4-5 times of metamask authorization signature, which greatly affected the experience, so I thought about developing a wallet plugin, and later, indeed, in January 2024, it was launched. Later, some airdrop activities were also carried out, and some users who were milking were encountered, and the number of accounts surged to 15,000 instantaneously, but for me, the meaning was not very large, because I needed real users who paid for the product functionality value, rather than free airdrop users who made up fake data.

Later, some new technologies were researched, and it was found that users can also use Web3 without a wallet, so Web3Auth technology was used to develop a browser wallet that can be automatically generated after users log in with X, so that users can use Web3 just like using Web2 products, without downloading any wallets, and without learning any technology. When developing Creatorx (https://rwa-wallet.com/creatorx) , the Friend.Tech product came out, relying on the support of the base chain, making a big splash at the beginning, and its product experience is that users can use its product functions without really doing a wallet login. This side shows that users don't really care whether you are completely decentralized or not. The core point is that you need to develop interesting, fun, or other factors that can attract users to play.

Summarize the products landed and launched in the past two years:

Overall architecture product:

• https://Web3Hacker.World is more defined as an organization or alliance, and there need to be multiple product lines, various different roles
• https://RWA-Wallet.com is the Web3 direction route that I will continue to develop in the Web3 field for the next 10 years, around the original point of RWA, building a series of peripheral ecosystem products

The subdivisions will be:

• Web3Hacker.World
  • World: The membership system architecture of this organization: hacker members, seed user members, VC investor members
  • Buidlers.Space(closed, and will continue to develop in the RWA-Wallet.com system): This is actually the predecessor of RWA-Wallet, users can create their own Token Gating products here and sell them, but now it has been recreated in RWA-Wallet without the need for a wallet login (X login).
  • News：Start from scratch to create a Web3 version of HackerNews, but at that time, only the homepage was made, reading HackerNews data was displayed, and later, I will find an opportunity to continue to promote it.
  • Craft：Through summarizing development experience, a set of Web3 full-stack development frameworks were formed, now replaced with Web3-FullStack: https://github.com/Web3-FullStack
• RWA-Wallet.com
  • Browser plugin: At that time, the Buidlers.Space product function was moved to the plugin, and after it was launched, it instantly attracted 15,000 users, but they were not paid users, which was meaningless to me, because they were probably milking.
  • Creatorx: Users can post without a wallet, after logging in with X, they can post like X, the difference is that each account defaults to issuing a "stock", and all posts you can set Token Gating, shareholders can unlock and view for free, while ordinary users need to purchase a one-time paid NFT to unlock and view, these income will be shared with "stock" holders.
  • IXO: Users can issue 10K NFTs or 10k * 10k FTs, and each NFT can be exchanged for 10k FTs at any time, and FTs can be exchanged for NFTs at any time, so an NFT and FT liquidity market is formed. Solving the liquidity problem of NFTs, while NFTs also赋予了类似此前百万格子网页的功能。
  • AO Snake: A blockchain game based on the open source snake game and added AO logic,
  • UNI-Bridge: Initially only a page of RWA-Wallet.com, to allow users to easily use USDC to purchase the payment token $BST of the platform, later, when participating in some cross-chain bridge related competitions, the idea was萌发了把这个作为子产品来开发，现在则是在 https://ub.rwa-wallet.com 了。
    • SwapKit SDK integration: After integrating this technology, users can freely exchange various different tokens on different chains, including BTC/ETH/BNB, etc. Later, I accidentally met an OKX cross-chain bridge related developer online, and found that they were also using this technology solution.
    • Stake: Integrated Biforst technology, users can create their own staking income pools, and their fans can obtain the corresponding equity tokens by staking. Later, I will further promote this module with them.
    • Bridge: Used Wormhole technology, and I also designed an NFT cross-chain protocol, so that NFTs can be freely cross-linked on different chains in a unified manner. Of course, the function of the previous uni-birdge page was also combined in, users can freely exchange $BST on different chains. This is actually the core point of the RWA-Wallet platform, unifying all product payment channels, so as to form an ecosystem.
    • Launchpad: Developed an invitation code SaaS, users can create their own invitation codes, and then users can obtain corresponding rewards after registering with the invitation code. This module was also developed to allow the AO Snake game to have more users to play, so it was developed. And if he becomes a SaaS, then the subsequent more new products or the previous old products can also be combined to use this platform to help do the early user cold start.

What's next

Above is basically all developed and landed by myself, from interface to logic to backend to smart contracts.

But a person’s energy is always limited, and each sub-product still lacks some final GTM status.

The reason is that I was driven by hackathons before, and there are too many hackathons, and researching new technologies will also cause energy dispersion.

So, I will spend more time and energy on the further GTM of the existing products, and at the same time, I will also start to try to recruit more members for Web3Hacker.World to join in the further development of the products.

The other is to re-examine the technical experience accumulated in the past two years, precipitate a complete Web3 full-stack development framework, and open source it so that more developers can develop their own products based on this framework.

Web3 Developer Entrepreneurship Community

Welcome all students interested in new technologies and ideas to join Web3Hacker.World to communicate and explore together.

Our community now has early seed users, developers, entrepreneurs, and investors with different roles, if you are also interested, welcome to contact me.

Smart you should know how to find me.

I am StarkEVM99, a developer exploring the Web3 field.