What I’m not a believer in is using AI to outsource the hard parts.
The thinking.
The taste.
The point of view.

There’s a difference between using these tools to help build your vision and using them to skip the work of forming a vision.

My hope for the future is that we start to see more work that’s made with intention and visibly human. Less polished. More real.

That belief is a big reason why I’m building Giftr. And why I’m working to onboarding makers and merchants who create with intention.

So if you’re making things that mean something, Giftr is designed to help you reach a community that values your work and one that will engage with you to help you improve your business.

We help create & cultivate:

• Story-driven drops

• Simple fulfillment

• Real people buying real objects to show real recognition

You get paid instantly. We handle the rest. HMU if this sparks something for you. I'd love to chat about helping you launch a collection on @giftr.

Day to day, it didn’t feel dramatic. It was just showing up, trying to make things work, and trying to deliver the experience I wanted. But looking back, I can’t believe how far I’ve come. I’m capable of things today I never thought possible. And I still feel like I’m just getting started.

Thinking ahead, my goal for Giftr isn’t to build the best mini app or the best crypto commerce solution. It’s to build a great app with a beautiful experience for both consumers and merchants, where crypto is invisible.

An app that’s respectful of the community built around it. Thoughtful about what is sold and how it’s presented. Intentional across every aspect.

Today, the Giftr mini app is the first step toward that vision.

Mini apps inherit social context and leverage key crypto primitives: identity, payments, and coordination. These primitives are the quiet infrastructure that makes an experience feel simple, delightful, and human.

As the app layer evolves and gets stronger, crypto will really shine. Not because it gets louder, but because it gets quieter. Giftr is my bet on that future.

Building in public on Farcaster and Base has been the highlight of my year. Possibly even my career. I’m pulling everything I’ve learned about brand, product, and culture into Giftr.

Seeing people post about the gifts they received, and the gratitude they feel as both sender and recipient, is the ultimate ROI.

So here’s to building more things people love in 2026.
Not because they explore a new crypto primitive, but because they’re simply better experiences for all of us.

That’s it.

If you want the full details, they’re always at www.heygiftr.com/faqs

I set out to prove that care and generosity could be a growth engine for community, and that crypto could be warm, magical, and capable of connecting our digital and physical worlds.

Giftr started as a side hustle experiment. It was an excuse to play with new AI tools people joked their dog could code with.

It was a bumpy start.
The current Giftr repo is my third attempt.

Twice I gave it everything and walked away thinking, “This just isn’t possible for me.”

But I kept coming back. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I started reading dev docs, asking AI to explain them back to me, and slowly connecting the dots. The day I got wallet transactions to work, I knew I could do this.

I use AI daily now. Claude, Cursor, Codex, Canva, Perplexity. They accelerate my output, but they don’t decide what feels true or magical.

They aren’t doing demos.
They aren’t asking for feedback.
They aren’t packing boxes or walking to the post office.

My judgment, empathy, taste, and lived experience are the moat.

So yes, it’s true. I’m not a dev.

I’m a builder with conviction, creativity, curiosity, and patience disguised as obsession.

Vibe coding is staying calm, creative, and resourceful when everything breaks. It’s trusting that you’ll figure it out. It’s knowing that success isn’t just how it works, but how it feels.

It’s staying at your desk until what you push to prod finally feels right. 💜

The Girl Scout Cookie Drop Went Live

• Used a familiar, real-world use case to push Giftr beyond single-item gifting into true multi-product commerce.

• Built and shipped a full multi-SKU order flow with real constraints like minimums, tiered shipping, and self-purchase.

• Implemented batched USDC payments so users confirm once, even when ordering multiple items.

Laying Groundwork for Public Participation

• Started scaffolding a public-facing cookie sales page.

• Began shaping how community drops can be shared and followed more visibly.

• Pointing toward making IRL impact legible beyond the checkout flow.

Strengthening the Admin and Merchant Operations Layer

• Added admin views and CSV exports to support real fulfillment and tracking.

• Cleaned up dashboards so operators only see what actually matters.

• Treated ops as a first-class part of the product, not an afterthought.

Continuing to Raise the UX Bar

• Fixed layout issues, mobile edge cases, and navigation overlaps.

• Aligned new flows with existing Giftr patterns so nothing feels special-cased.

• Refined copy and transitions to keep the experience calm and human.

Real use cases make real products better. This one did exactly that.

• Refreshed the merchant portal so it feels clearer, calmer, and more intentional

• Improved how orders, brand info, and updates are presented so merchants spend less time figuring things out and more time selling/doing whatever else they want

Cleaned up notifications and the checkout experience

• Removed noisy or duplicate messages so people only get notified when it actually matters

• Focused on making the “did it work?” moment feel more confident and less stressful

Built Admin Credits v1

• Added a simple admin flow to issue and manage credits and track balances

• Laid the groundwork so credits can be used intentionally and transparently as Giftr scales

NY sales tax auto tracking

• Put automatic New York sales tax tracking in place

• Built the foundation so pricing and reporting stay accurate without manual work

Launched the Farcaster Pledge

• Shipped a simple community commitment and vibe check

• “I pledge to keep Farcaster fun. To show up with intention. To build, to contribute, and to make this a place where good work and good people thrive.”

• Nearly 2,000 people signed in under 24 hours

• Built entirely with the Neynar App Studio

1. Personal messages with gifts

   Senders can now include a note that appears on a handwritten card for select collections. This is the start of an exploration around physical gifts acting as the key to unlocking digital value, while keeping the experience intentional and human.

2. Merchant portal and ops improvements (unglamorous but very necessary work)

   • Simplified the order and fulfillment flow by reducing visual clutter

   • Updated the shipping flow to reduce both cost and decision fatigue

   • Improved collection creation with drag and drop image uploads, auto-saving reordering, and cleanup of some frustrating setup steps

3. Organized Comms

   Small, visible progress builds more trust than occasional big thing. So I set up Paragraph (obvs, you're here). The goal is steady, observable shipping velocity to keep everyone in the know.

   Also, Teased the next collection and drop. Yes, it’s cookie time.

   

What’s up ahead

• Story development and curation for another upcoming collection

• Continued merchant and maker onboarding

• Final testing of an updated smart contract that takes the @giftr credit system onchain making it auditable, trustless and scoped for specific merchants.

• Exploring Discord integrations and mini-app possibilities to connect with established communities

• Better time blocking to balance coding, thinking, writing, marketing, BD exploration, and parenting

• Early exploration of a web app experience

Always trying to to stay in the ambitious yet achievable bucket.

What I learned

Visual clarity matters. Spending ten minutes thinking about naming and color associations can save hours of operational overhead and significantly reduce cognitive load.

Also, connecting with new people gives me energy. I had the pleasure of meeting with Mac Budkowski and Naz to pressure test my direction, swap notes, and share where Giftr is headed.

Would love your help

• Merchants & brands ► If you’re interested in dropping a featured collection on @giftr, DM me @shira on Farcaster to learn more about upcoming pilots.

• Artists, tinkerers, and side hustlers ► If you’re making real things, @giftr is designed to help you reach a community that genuinely values your work. HMU if that sounds interesting.

• Digital & Token Communities ► If you’re exploring more meaningful ways to recognize, reward, or connect with people, I’m actively experimenting and would love to hear what you’re building.

Crypto is full of smart people doing brave things in public. Starting projects, shipping too soon, shutting them down, trying again.

And somehow, all they get is a like. Maybe a tip. Then the feed moves on.

We think those moments deserve more. More pause. More presence. More “hey, I saw that and it meant something.”

Giftr exists to celebrate the moments that matter. The ones in between “they deserve a little love” and “I guess a tip will have to do.”

We make it simple to show up for people in a way that makes their day.

When someone launches, lands funding, shuts something down, gets a puppy, ships their first smart contract, you tag @giftr and we turn it into something they can hold.

Not another token. Not another shoutout.

Just a thoughtful surprise they didn’t see coming. The kind that creates stories. The kind they’ll remember. The kind that makes them want to pass it on.

Because care builds trust. And trust builds community.

Let’s build a world where care is the new currency.