Belly.io is a project idea we had over a year ago, but it took the #HelloNFTWorld hackathon to get us to finally make time to work on it.
As content creators, we wanted to come up with a way to reward our loyal fans. As techies, we wanted to do something fun and creative for it. And since so much of our content in the past has had to do with food, a collectible, craftable NFT experience seemed like the perfect way to do all of that!
We reward your loyalty and engagement with ingredient NFTs.
(Ultimately, we want to give out randomized card packs, as rewards for doing things like watching our YouTube videos, hanging out in our Twitch stream, following us on Twitter, etc...
...but for the purpose of the hackathon, all you have to do is go to the Faucet page and mint some on the Polygon Mumbai Testnet for free!)
Once you collect enough Ingredient NFTs, you can craft them into Recipe NFTs.
(Click on a recipe to find out what you need to craft it!)
Keep on collecting and crafting - all your NFTs can be found in your Pantry!
For the curious, here's all the technology we used for the Belly project thus far!
The blockchain
Belly is currently on the Mumbai Polygon testnet for the hackathon, but will be deployed to the Polygon mainnet when the final production version is ready to go.
Since this is a project where we want people to feel free to play and submit lots of transactions, we knew Polygon was going to be a better option for Belly than ETH mainnet - both due to cost and efficiency. Most of our development experience up until now has been in Solidity on EVM chains, so sticking to something EVM-compatible (especially for a 1-week development deadline) seemed like the best choice for this project! And since we want this to be a project where we can send out NFTs to people who are not yet familiar with the NFT or crypto space, Polygon is the most user-friendly sidechain available at this time - so the decision was easy for us!
The contracts
For the hackathon version of Belly, we have three different smart contracts, to make it modular enough that functionality can be switched out when we do additional development in the future (or if we messed something up!)
These are the three contracts we created for the hackathon: BellyNFT, BellyNftCrafting, and BellyRecipes.
The website
Since we have a ton of previous experience with these technologies, we chose to develop the website using React, Next.js, and Tailwind CSS for the frontend.
Our web3 integrations were done using the wagmi React Hooks Library. We've tried out other libraries in the past, and found that wagmi was super easy to integrate and use with different blockchains, especially since we have a lot of experience working with React Hooks.
We used MongoDB for our database.
The cards
Most of the photos for the cards were photographed using a Sony A7C camera with a 90mm lens (although some of the sushi photos are from our old cooking streaming or food blogging days, so who knows which camera we used for those!).
We used Remotion to design and create both the static and animated versions of the cards. We've used Remotion in the past for our CryptoOx NFT project, and we're huge fans!
We built this in a week for the #HelloNFTWorld hackathon, and we're so proud of what we got done!
But there's so, SO much more we want to do for Belly.
Son and Allison are a dynamic developer duo who have been cooking, coding, and creating content together since they met all the way back in 2005.
Both are experienced web2 developers who have spent the last year immersing themselves in all things blockchain and web3.
Together they make up NFToyz, where they create videos, write blog posts, produce a podcast, and stream a weekly show on Twitch - all with the goal of educating the world about the technical side of NFTs and blockchain technology.