Buildship – Blockchain is EASY

First week of August Development update

Together with Daniel Dhawan, we have been working on a Buildship, a no-code blockchain apps builder.

What’s wrong with the world?

Today, if you want to build a blockchain app (decentralized app), you need two things:

• smart-contract

• website (aka frontend)

Smart-contract describes the logic of how funds and tokens will interact, and the website gives an ability for everyone to use the smart-contract via simple interface.

Building a smart-contract is hard. But you can make use of existing templates (e.g. OpenZeppelin), and you can connect to existing smart-contracts (Uniswap). Even if you need custom logic, usually it's a time well-spent – you're venturing into the territory of untested economies.

On the other hand, all the frontend work is pointless. It's repetitive, boring and doesn't give value except for letting someone to use your smart-contract.

How to fix this?

Great question! My big vision behind Buildship is to remove the need to hire a React+web3 developer at all, and focus only on smart-contract and on your UI!

Buildship would be able to connect:

• to your custom smart-contract,

• deploy smart-contract from a set of templates: ERC20 tokensales, NFTs

• to external smart-contracts like Uniswap or Compound

Building a visual interface frontend, would be as easy as drag-n-dropping elements, like in Webflow, Tilda or Wordpress.

Progress this week

We have found our first initial client, and we have made some simple products that can be used later as building blocks for what we aim to accomplish.

Gate to Blockchain

https://gate.buildship.dev allows your users to interact with your smart-contract methods without any additional configuration from your side. Everything you need is just open the popup and provide parameters for the call:

const method = 'mint'
const params = [1]
const value = 0.08 // ether

const url = `https://gate.buildship.dev/send/CryptoWordsNFT/?method=${method}&params=${JSON.stringify(params)}&value=${value}`

window.open(url,'payment','width=500, height=800')

You can even use it as a link on your website or in social media:

https://gate.buildship.dev/send/CryptoWordsNFT?method=mint&params=%5B1%5D&value=0.08

Payment page

Anyone can create and share his own payment page. Use https://pay.buildship.dev/to/:address to receive payment from your users.

Blockchain access

API for easy blockchain calls. is a HTTP request that can directly fetch data from blockchain smart-contract. Use this in your React app instead of loading heavy web3.js

https://metadata.buildship.dev/api/call/contractname/method?params=[1,2,3]

Example: https://metadata.buildship.dev/api/call/CryptoWordsNFT/totalSupply

CryptoWords demo

We have launched our own demo NFT collection: https://testnets.opensea.io/collection/cryptowords-v2. Only 914 words will ever be minted!

You can mint on Rinkeby here (don’t use Mainnet!): https://cryptowords.webflow.io/

Automated Recurring Subscriptions

Working on a PoC implementation for crypto-subscriptions.

In a nutshell, you approve contract to spend your USDC, and contract is allowed to bill you once in a time period. The gas is on the recipient, but you can include this into subscription price.

This would work best in Polygon, BSC or zksync/optimism, where gas is cheap. If you’re interested, we can roll out a production-ready soon.

Developer Tools

Started working on a framework codenamed web3-ui. This is a collection of UI elements and smart-contract connector helpers. Similar to https://www.trufflesuite.com/drizzle, but oriented more towards React developer, not Solidity developer.

What lies ahead?

Initially, I was pumped up seeing a lot of potential clients, but later it turned out they are not so quick to jump into unknown new builder. Many envision hiring their own dev is much better in the long run, and it’s worth the hassle. Also, in crypto frontend job isn’t the hardest one anyway. You need a lot of communication and marketing to get the project going.

However, I am still optimistic. Removing each barrier to entry into the new industry can be a massive level-up for each new project. Each crazy demo that starts out as a simple experiment has the potential to grow into something big. Not only developers have great ideas, and there’s absolutely no need to have this starting friction.

Imagine the world where launching your own bank would be as easy as drafting a landing page in Figma?

P.S. I am working on a secret NFT project that will use buildship as its backend. Are you interested? Please comment and reply to this email!