_intro for context_

buildspace’s nights & weekends season 5 has just begun! i will be working on “houses onchain”.

buildspace has 4 houses, a bit like hogwarts in harry potter: spectreseek, alterok, gaudmire and erevald.

They each have their unique traits and vibe:

• spectreseek is for the passionate. the bold. the pioneers

• alterok is for the reflective. the profound. the philosophers

• gaudmire is for the ambitious. the imaginative. the dreamers

• and erevald is for the harmonious. the rooted. the caretakers

my goal for s5 is to enhance the ‘houses’ experience within buildspace!

_idea_

• the basic idea is: students own an nft representing their house.

• specific actions award or remove votes to the overall house score and to the students' individual score.

• the individual points awarded have a weighting based on house size. this mechanism ensures that house sizes don't become unbalanced - i.e. new students are incentivised to pick smaller houses to get more points. unother method to address this would be to have sage act as a sorting hat, but i fear that ship has sailed since people have already been picking their houses.

• at the end of s5 (or of the year) there are prizes (tbd) awarded to the top house (e.g. everything temporarily branded like that house) and to the top students (e.g. cash award? or special buildspace swag)

• students are incentivised to join (i.e. get the nft, which is free) because then all of their hard work will be reflected in the houses and individuals' leaderboards, adding points to their houses

• students don't need to have a web3 wallet to do this, they can just login with google/fb... using web3 social login

_implementation_

user identifier:

• i'd create an erc1155 smart contract that mints 4 nft types (one for each house)

• or could store user wallet addresses or even e.g. emails on a db or onchain (need to weigh pros & cons)

ux:

• to remove friction from the ux, i'd use web3 social login using thirdweb tooling, meaning that users can just login with google / fb / apple... and that spins up a wallet for them. the only caveat is that those wallets won't have funds, so we'd have to send them the nft ourselves, which costs on the order of 10p per user.

• thirdweb offers react components to let users buy crypto (do i want this friction?), or also offers account abstraction functionality to let users mint with my money (hmm, worth it?)

I have to run now. wish me luck