Chain of Waves

What is this?

This is a fun project that I’m working on to ramp up on Web3 development. It’s essentially a website where people can “wave” at me and have these waves recorded on the blockchain (specifically the Rinkeby Eth testnet). This is based on a project from Buildspace.

As this was my first Web3 project, there were a lot of learnings along the way — here’s a rough order of how things got to the way they are:

1. Set up Ethereum development environment with Hardhat and then ran a contract to make sure it worked.
2. Created a smart contract that will store who has waved at me, and how many times they’ve done so — this information is pulled directly from the blockchain and displayed on the site.
3. Afterwards, the contract was deployed to the Rinkeby testnet here.
4. Then, I made the frontend in React which uses some libraries to connect to Metamask (s/o window.ethereum) and call the deployed contract.
5. Hosting is done on Replit for ease of development and so that we can spin up a web server on the fly that points to the output, which is done with the lightweight vite library.
6. …

Technology

• React for frontend
• Replit for webserver & hosting
• Web3.js for connecting webapp to blockchain
• Alchemy for deploying the smart contract
• Solidity for smart contract development
• Hardhat for eth dev environment

How it Works

Well, a video would probably explain that pretty well wouldn’t it?

If you want to interact with the live site, you can do the following:

1. Set up Metamask (plenty of online tutorials)
2. Switch to the Rinkeby testnet
3. Get some Rinkeby ETH (not real $) from a faucet
4. Wave at me!

TODO

I’ve still got a few more things I want to add before I finish up this project:

• Fund a contract to randomly send a waver some Eth
• Explore defensive mechanisms to prevent spam