Podcha

Screenshots

Problem Statement

With Podcha, you are in control of your data: the social graph is on the blockchain, and your audio or video is stored and hosted in a peer to peer platform. For the social graph, we use Lens, an interoperable standard for creating social media platforms and applications in web3. Both profiles and follows are NFTs on the Polygon network. Regarding the data: The audio and video is stored on Livepeer, a decentralized service for storing, transcoding and serving video content. Metadata (e.g. descriptions, avatars, posts etc.) are stored in IPFS, a peer to peer service for hosting content on the internet. So you as a creator, your listeners and any third party IPFS 'pinning' service or Livepeer node you use or pay all help with hosting the content! Video: https://youtu.be/eznKsDiK4RE

Solution

The application is able to use both Lenster profiles made in other applications (e.g. Lenster) as well as profiles that are created through Podcha. These profiles are considered to be podcasts, and the episodes of the podcast are Lens Posts from this podcast profile. The posts are saved on IPFS and the actual audio and video content is uploaded to Livepeer, which allows for both decentralized storage (media server) and transcoding of the videos to different formats. The various queries on Lens (e.g. find all podcasts, find all episodes for a podcast etc.) are made using GraphQL.Podcast creators can set their own monetization strategy at 2 levels: either as Follow logic (e.g. free to follow, one time follow fee, or a Superfluid stream) and also at the level of individual episodes, by setting a Collect logic for the post (with the same options).Podcast listeners / consumers can follow podcast creators (mint a Follow NFT), and also collect individual episodes, which yields an NFT that provides you with the bragging rights of having supported this episode.In addition to Lens Protocol, Livepeer, Superfluid, IPFS and of course the Polygon chain (Mumbai testnet), we have added a wallet connection via WalletConnect and proof of humanity via Worldcoin at the time of podcast profile creation.N.B. Unfortunately, the Lens Protocol testnet API went down around 2 AM, right when we were ready to test our application, generate some nice example content, and record the demo. Because of that, we could only show a few technical test profiles that we already created before, and several parts of our demo are broken :-( However, we try to explain the functionality as best as possible in our demo video. Once the API comes back up, the application at https://podcha.appshouldallow for testing of the full functionality (with the caveat that we haven’t been able to fully test this ourselves).