Anky

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or been working on in Web3. This is going to be an awesome project you've been working on, unit testing, best practices, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Today I am ecstatic to have on JP, who is a relatively new member of Developer DAO, but he is one of the most passionate builders I have met. Welcome, JP.

Thank you, Narb. Thank you for that presentation. It's an honor to be here.

Awesome. Yeah, and it's an honor to have you, my friend. Do you want to give the crowd a brief introduction about yourself before we get into the meat of the presentation?

Yeah, my name is JP. I live in the south of Chile, South America. I studied mechanical and industrial engineering, but I always felt as if that was a round hole and I was a very not round peg. I never fitted that system. Three years ago when the pandemic started, I started teaching myself how to code. Since that, I have evolved in that journey of teaching myself and now using every tool that I find to build. I love building and I'm very passionate about two things: one is meditation and the other one is building. Right now I'm trying to bring both of them into what I'm going to show you.

Awesome. That's an interesting combination, but I mean, meditation yields quite the clear focused brain, so I can dig that. Do we want to just get right into the meat of the presentation?

Yeah, of course. When I started teaching myself how to code, I realized I needed like a framework to push through the hard times and develop that inner fire that makes you want to show up in spite of it being very hard. I discovered open source and I was like wow, I really want to build open source. So I created a framework that I called 'The Open Source Factory' and that framework, the mission of it, was to ship a new project every new moon. So every new moon I shipped the project and the next day I started creating something new from scratch. It was like an antidote to a problem that we tend to have, which is tutorial hell. So I realized that I needed to learn how to build practically like tools that people wanted to use. And because of that I created this framework that I called the Open Source Factory, which now evolved into Anky. And Anky is a framework, it's an invitation for people to create, and I have narrowed that focus and given it like a longer time, which is now 96 days.

Oh, sorry JP. Are you sharing slides? Because I don't see the share screen.

Yeah, thank you for letting me know that. Yeah, this is what I was showing you. Anky is a framework to gamify inner work. Anky is a story, your story, told through games, built in community. These characters that you see on the background are like the starting point of this story. Because in order to gamify this journey, I created an NFT collection with Midjourney and ChatGPT and it consists of 8,888 different characters.

If you mint one of those NFTs, which are in Ethereum, you will own one of these Ankies. It's crazy because they all look different but they all look as if they were part of this world, this story. The first game I will show it to you here, it's live. It's all about writing. So it asks you, 'Are you ready to be a writer? Start journey.' You have to login with an email, whatever email you want. My mission is to onboard people to Web3 without them knowing that they are using the blockchain. The mission of Anky is to make the blockchain invisible.

Now I'm logged in so I can go to the notebooks. You can add a new notebook template. Think of it as a journal; on each page of the journal there is a prompt. You can add prompts to that. So what I did here was to ask ChatGPT to create a list of 12 questions and I will bulk import it. You can set a mint price for people to come and buy this notebook. These notebooks are ERC-1155 or ERC-721 tokens so they can be transferred between people. This creates a market for these notebooks. Now you confirm the transaction, which is a very cheap transaction, but you need to pay because this is being recorded on the blockchain.

Now we enter the interesting part of this system that I have created, that is the mechanism for writing. For example, here you see: 'Describe the moment you found out you were going to be a mother.' I will start writing and you can see this bar on the top. If you stop writing for more than three seconds, you lose. See? And if you lose, like the mission of this is to trigger your subconscious to write a stream of consciousness without thinking. Now you save what you wrote and it will be stored in this notebook forever on the blockchain. What is happening on the background is that your writing is being sent to Arweave. Arweave is a decentralized storage system that is designed to last forever.

We have the notebooks on one side and we have the 'Eulogias' on the other side. What is an Eulogia? It is a notebook that is written for the community. For example, Narb creates an Eulogia for Developer DAO, and each person that comes to write on that one has a page in that notebook. The goal for that is, for example, when someone has her birthday. So you can send that notebook to people and they write on that notebook and it will be stored forever as an NFT. When you sign up for this system, you are airdropped an ERC-6551 NFT, which is your Anky. Your Anky is the keeper of all your notebook NFTs.

That's a very interesting concept. I actually met JP in real life when we were both at the Buildspace IRL event a few months back. Back then he was just starting with Anky but he had a decent prototype going and I actually went through the process of focused writing and it's harder than you think because your mind is always trying to stop and make you think about life. It's actually quite challenging to just write whatever as a free flow stream.

What was your inspiration behind the name Anky and the actual NFT images? Was there something that inspired you to go that direction or was it just a spur of the moment kind of thing where you developed one and thought it was really cool?

The name Anky is because before this specific prototype, I had the mission of creating an app for tracking your capacity for being consistent. I submitted the idea in the Apecoin DAO and the only person that answered to my idea, his name was Anky in there. That's why the name is Anky. And like these characters, I realized I needed an interface to talk to people so that they could come and be consistent. If I speak as the app, there is no internal driver for the user to come back, but if I create a character that is called Anky, whose mission is to create a bond with the user, it makes the user want to come back to speak to his Anky. It's a representation of the inner child of people.

Interesting. And do these Ankies stay the same or as your end users go through their journeys through Anky, will their characters kind of evolve as they evolve?

What I would love to do is each one of these characters has its unique lore. The Ankyverse is the world on which this story unfolds. What I dream about is that each time that you come to write, your writing is processed using AI to transform the story of your Anky inside the Ankyverse. I have a person targeted as the CTO of who will build that system for using AI to process the writing of people. But right now it's impossible for me alone. This project is all open source. If I had to say which is the biggest challenge I have right now, it is to cease to be the only person that is in charge of it and put it in the hands of a community. I really want this to take life of its own.

100%. And for the crowd, I've dropped that GitHub link in the chat but I'll also add it to the YouTube description as well. If folks who are watching today want to help you build this Anky universe and continue iterating, how can they best reach out to you?

The most straightforward way is github.com/ankylat. I'm most active on Twitter, I'm @kithkul there. And now I'm exploring in Farcaster also, which is an open protocol and I love what is happening there. Twitter and Farcaster are the places where I explore the internet.

Excellent. We do have one question in the chat around licensing with Midjourney. What are you doing about the license thing?

The Midjourney licensing terms are that if you create an image with your account, it's yours for you to do anything that you want with that image. I spent 10 days prompting Midjourney as crazy using this system, but everything was under Midjourney's terms because it was done through my account. I was not cheating the system. I was using a tool for prompting Midjourney under their terms. And once I create an image, it's mine for me to do anything that I want with it.

Gotcha. Just want to say thank you so much JP for coming on and showing your project. It looks very interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing it continue to develop out. And just before everybody leaves, I want to share with you the QR code to scan for claiming your attendee NFT today for coming on DevNTell. These NFTs are on the Base protocol. Scan this QR code, you'll land on a form; if you fill out that form within an hour and a half's time, you will be airdropped an NFT. JP, you are free to fill this one out as well. With that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday and happy weekend. All the best. Cheers.