From the very beginning, BasePaint was designed to be a fully onchain project. Pixels, brushes, themes, palettes — everything needed to reconstruct every piece of artwork lives onchain. What you see on the BasePaint.xyz website is just a representation of the onchain state.

Since August 2023, we've built out a lot of useful and convinient tools on BasePaint.xyz website. Things like live cursors, chat, advanced painting tools, voting, history, gallery, secondary listings, cross-chain minting, referral rewards, smart accounts, Farcaster frames, Instagram and X bots, etc. The complexity of this cluster of software only keeps growing. And for a good reason — we want BasePaint's website to be a great user experience!

BasePaint Mini

Despite our backend getting complex, the core of BasePaint has always been simple and trustless.

Today we are introducing BasePaint Mini — a minimalistic, open-source implementation of BasePaint frontend dApp with zero external dependencies.

• BasePaint Mini supports the core set of BasePaint's features: painting, minting and withdrawing artist profits.

• BasePaint Mini only depends on a user's Ethereum wallet. It doesn't need custom RPC nodes, API keys or any 3rd party services. It makes zero network requests and only relies on wallet's RPC to talk to the blockchain.

• BasePaint Mini compiles down to a single, ~200KB HTML file that can be hosted anywhere.

BasePaint Mini is an important step in making the protocol more resiliant. Even if our website and backend become unavailable for whatever reason, the protocol still continues running. Here's just a few ways you can access the BasePaint Mini dApp (open it from a browser with a wallet extension, or a mobile wallet app):

• Using ENS-powered eth.limo gateway

• Directly via IPFS or your favorite gateway

• Hosted on GitHub static pages

• Build from source and run on your own computer

Please Fork

Many people asked if we could build a fork for another chain or protocol. With BasePaint Mini, anyone can deploy a minimal functional version of BasePaint app to their favorite chain. The smart contracts and the frontend are open sourced under permissive MIT license.

Under the hood, BasePaint Mini is a small JavaScript app built with Preact and Viem. We've optimized it to be small and lightweight. BasePaint Mini has some basic features, but it's easy to extend it into whatever you want.

What about the rest of BasePaint backend? Things like live cursors, chat, gallery, leaderboards, streaks, videos, etc. We are moving in the direction of open sourcing it all, it just takes a lot of time and effort. For example, recently we have migrated BasePaint from Vercel to to reduce dependency on this proprietary hosting provider. Even when we open source the rest of the systems, operating full BasePaint backend is going to be tricky. Much harder than hosting a single 200KB HTML file.

We hope BasePaint Mini will inspire you to build more fun things onchain!

dApps Graveyard

This Halloween 2024, I'm opening the "dApps" I used in 2021. And it is really scary: Domain expired. Deployment suspended. Page not found. Service unavailable.

https://paragraph.xyz