According to CoinDesk, many software developers attending mtnDAO in Salt Lake City are working on projects to support their venture capital-backed crypto companies. However, T.J. Littlejohn, a longtime attendee of this hacker house, is building for himself. T.J. developed a new product called 'Blurt' through collaborative coding and countless ZYN packets, two hallmarks of the event. Blurt offers a crypto-powered alternative for live streamers to collect donations from their viewers. Its development signifies progress for a Solana innovation introduced earlier this year called blinks, which simplifies interacting with crypto to a click on a tweet.
Blurts was barely an idea before mtnDAO's August edition. Now, with only a few days left before dozens of Solana blockchain-focused developers leave this WeWork in downtown Salt Lake City until February, it is fully functional. Blurts embody the staying power of a hacker house that encourages attendees to show up and build without a specific agenda. Hosts Barrett and Edgar Pavlovsky provide free lunches, desks, and swag for an entire month and sometimes invest seed capital in the most promising projects.
Whether Blurts will receive that investment is uncertain. In an interview, T.J. was noncommittal about making Blurts his full-time gig. He describes himself as a one-man 'product studio' that 'ships fast' and pivots often. During the last mtnDAO six months ago, he was building animation programs for Apple VR headsets.
Blurts are built on blinks, a standard for accessing and executing blockchain programs directly from X (formerly Twitter). A properly-coded blinks program populates a mini-app for trading cryptocurrencies within the social media webpage, saving the trader from moving to another website. For Blurts, this means a donor can send crypto dollars to a streamer directly from the window where they are watching the stream. 'That's a big thing with blinks: It keeps the viewer in the content of the stream while they donate,' said T.J., who is also a streamer.
Currently, Blurts only work on X, but T.J. said blinks' creator company Dialect has committed to expanding blinks to Twitch, where millions of live streamers play video games for profit. T.J. mentioned that he probably wouldn't have shipped Blurts if he was working from home, citing the 'builder energy' of a bustling WeWork with 70-odd developers. Representatives of Dialect and TipLink, another crypto payments startup, were on hand to help T.J. through the intricacies of deploying on blinks. 'Being able to shoot the sh*t with people and bounce ideas off of everyone and show prototypes every step of the way' helped get things done faster, T.J. said.
Brian
Alex
Miyuki
Weiliang
Catherine
Weatherly
Kikyo