Last week I wrote a smart contract with Solidity and deployed it to the (Rinkeby) Ethereum network.

You can write ice cream reviews that will be saved forever to to the chain. Yes that’s right, because what better or more necessary use is there for a blockchain than to store ice cream reviews.

This was a directed project with buildspace. They’re great.

As I’ve written before, Bitcoin seems boring to me, while Ethereum and other programmable chains seem full of potential and seem to have great communities behind them.

This was a great chance to dive into some web3. My main takeaways were:

1. This community is so fun. The folks at buildspace are full of energy and the buildspace folk are hilarious like noting that you must watch this essential video. It was also fun to take part in the weird culture and message ‘gm’. The focus on shipping rather than learning is so motivating too. Is this a Silicon Valley thing?
2. It’s annoying to have to learn a new language (Solidity) for deploying contracts to the chain. Why do we need a new language? Solana uses Rust. Basic research I’ve done suggests it’s to stop injecting code onto the node that runs it, but I would love to hear more.
3. The potential of composability in web3 is so exciting. For example designing a game or community around a NFT that already exists that is independent of you.
4. Holy shit this is all still so early. I tried to work with Solana and found it incredibly hard to setup on my machine. Is the ~$100bn total market of Solana pricing in its ‘potential’? Or is this pure speculation?