INDUSTRY:
Web3 / Decentralized Applications
YEAR:
2025
EXPERIENCE:
Product Design, Frontend Development, Smart Contracts
Onchain Aesthetic Archive
about.
The Onchain Aesthetic Archive is an experimental publishing tool disguised as a dApp. Each participant can mint a single memory — an image and caption, bound together as a soulbound NFT. These entries live permanently on IPFS and Base Sepolia, forming a collective, on-chain zine. The design challenge was to make a technical process — contract calls, event logs, decentralized storage — feel simple, poetic, and inevitable.
Decentralization often collapses under its own friction. In early builds, the app broke on malformed addresses, mismatched ABIs, and RPC providers timing out on log requests. Even uploading a file required threading between outdated APIs and missing tokens. The design problem was not only to resolve these failures, but to shape an interface that absorbed them — guiding the user through uncertainty with clarity and grace.
The rebuild began with RainbowKit + wagmi to stabilize wallet connectivity and contract interactions. A custom IPFS uploader handles both media and metadata, ensuring reliable previews. For the gallery, I implemented an event-based reader that listens for Transfer logs, paging requests across block ranges to avoid RPC timeouts. The UI stays deliberately minimal: a form for minting, an archive grid for browsing. Every technical layer was paired with UX language — transaction states read as narrative steps: “Uploading image… Uploading metadata… Sending transaction…” — reinforcing the sense of ritual instead of error.
The application is now stable in local testing. Users can connect, mint, and see their entry instantly reflected in the archive. The gallery loads reliably with fallbacks, error handling is transparent, and each transaction links out to BaseScan. The project is at mid-progress: the core mechanics are sound, the ritual of minting is intact. Next comes deployment, refinement of the archive’s design system, and first real users inscribing their memories on-chain.
