Aether, Earth, and Art

Demo

About

The problem it solves We often build solutions that are looking for problems, rather than the other way around. In this project, we have been approached by good friends who went through an educational program with us (Kernel). They have an incredible group of musicians already working with them and have been running reforestation projects in East Africa for the last twenty years. The problem is twofold. Firstly, Lamu is a fragile coastal dune ecosystem that is very exposed to climate change (as all islands are). Our friends need to explore every avenue they can in order to foster climate change resilience, and the ability to thrive in a changing world. Technology can play a role in this, particularly in terms of giving them the financial tools required to determine their own future. However, it needs to be technology they can understand, use, and adapt to their local community. This leads to the second problem. We can't just build something custom and cutting edge: we need to use tools that we can readily learn with them, and which they will feel comfortable with re-applying wherever they'd like to program the flow of value in their local environments. The tech we've used is therefore very simple. It is a straightforward ERC721A contract, generated via Mintplex, and sold on a website made with Bonfire. We have spent time this weekend, and will continue over the next months, showing the Earth Love and Collective Sovereignty teams what we've done and how to do it themselves. Funds from the NFT go towards planting trees in the exposed dunes, with a smaller split (and the royalties) going back to the musicians, who are happy to receive crypto. Due to the OSS and educational nature of our work, we also hacked the Mintplex contracts, put them in Scaffold ETH 2, stripped the fees, and made it such that - if anyone on the ground in Kenya wants to continue learning more than no-code tools - have a place to go where they can further enhance their skills.

How it's made

Challenges we ran into When adapting the MintPlex contract for local use, we struggled to make it easy to deploy from hardhat, because the contract is so large. We worked to understand solc, and then it turned out we can just include an optimizer block in the hardhat config to make sure we could deploy the ERC721A code fully. It was also a challenge to split the single file verified on Etherscan into its component parts and strip out the subtle Provider Fee and other parts irrelevant to our context. Understanding everything such that we knew what we could take out without ompromising anything took some time. This included things like removing the proxy initialize pattern and moving all that logic into the constructor. For the website itself, we consciously chose no-code tools so that we can show our less technical friends in Kenya how to run these kinds of projects themselves. These tools are great - and getting better every day - but they do have a lot of limitations when it comes to the kind of customisation you can achieve when using your own tools and framework. We have actively been in contact with the Bonfire team, filing issues and helping them discover UI bugs that they are now fixing. In particular, the "Rewards" component once you have claimed an NFT is pretty clunky and almost totally unusable on mobile: something the Bonfire team is now looking into.