We sat down with the devs at Basepaint, a crypto consumer app on Base that's been making waves. It’s a platform where every stroke of a digital brush is a step towards a vibrant, ever-evolving canvas. But here's the twist: it's not just about the art; it's about the artists.
In our interview, Winter and Zach from Basepaint shared their insights on what sets this platform apart. When people look at Basepaint what they see is a lot of really great loops, but what's the secret sauce behind these feedback loops? How do they decide which loops are worth building and which ones may not be?
The answer, it seems, lies in a simple yet profound design principle: "artist first." It's all about crafting an experience that puts the creative minds at the forefront. But, as we'll discover, it's not just about paying artists—it's about avoiding the pitfalls of over-financialization in the Web3 space.
Join us as we unpack the careful curation of Basepaint's ecosystem, the artistry that fuels its existence, and the daily rituals that make it feel like a cozy activity. Check it out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqjLJUBTSTs
Some highlights we loved:
On creating habitual loops
Winter: Yeah and one thing that Zach and I intentionally designed is that every day there is something on Basepaint you come back to. So like you come in day 1 you paint it and then you come in day 2 see the result painting and see if you made it to the end or not, and then maybe mint an artwork and then day 3, you come in to claim your earnings from that day from the day 1, but then since you're already there, you would participate and paint a few pixels and then look at the what has been done the previous day, and then now we have this voting mechanism where you can vote for the future theme.
So, every day you have at least 3 or 4 things you can come in and do, and those things are easy to make your habit. For the last almost 60 days, the first thing I open on my phone is not newsfeed or some hockey news or Twitter or Farcaster or whatever it's Basepaint.
I open it up and say what's new? What kind of discussions were happening? And then seeing if the theme I voted for is actually the top theme or not, and if I should rally more people to vote for my theme.
And it being replacing Twitter to be my first to go to thing a day is really substantial to me. It feels like a place now where something happening and you can come in and see what's new what's going on.
On motivation to build this in web3
Zach: I think it's like really easy to look back on hindsight 2020, you're like, Oh, it's this perfect balance. I think it was one of those things where when you do something long enough your intuition can end up being correct more often than it's wrong, hopefully sometimes. So going back to what winter said the power law distribution in terms of like the brushes 100 pixel 500, 1000, etc. The way in which they're kind of minted infrequently. It's not just a pile drive-in. I think there were lot of really small decisions that I don't think were intentional for me, it was more instinctive than anything else it's just like this just feels right versus feels wrong. And then I'll be honest. I think one of the other things that really led to it is that we've tended to because it started as an art project we tended to focus more on the art aspect than the financialization of it.*
It's one of those things where we could have made every brush an auction ala Nouns right we could have made all of these a one of one. I can't tell you how many DMs I get about like, you know, devs do something, right? Canvas is below floor mint. Devs do something or something like that.
But I think that there's a lot of truth to this idea that this only works if the artists are engaged and if there's like a populist sort of this is an art movement for everybody. Everybody can participate and everybody benefits. Keeping the canvases similarly accessible to where folks can buy that as well, like with a relatively small amount of money. I don't know. I think, to me, that's one of the key pieces of it. And then maybe, like, overriding, I would also say, a lot of the other art projects I've looked at you know, it was like, you get a plot, and you draw on your plot, and then you connect your plot with someone else's.
And while there is friction in this idea of people being able to overpay each other, it also creates a lot of happy accidents. And I think it just allows for like lightning in the bottle. Like there's just, I'm constantly amazed when one artist discovers a detail that someone else does and then innovates on that.
And so those are the three things that feel unique to Basepaint versus some of the projects that have come before.
On underpromising, overdelivering as a product principle
Winter: I just want to say one note is that I think I've been in crypto for only two years, so I've seen and observed the projects from inside and outside, how they start and how they end.
A lot of people look at the projects and think, what can this become? And then invest in their initial coin offering or, you know, NFT mint, sale, drop, whatever in with the idea of like, what can this become? But the truth is most of the stuff that we've seen in web3 has become nothing but you know, just the wasteland or a list of dead projects.
So I want to steer us away from over-promising and telling our future plans or committing to something because that creates that over-promising. And now you're like, well, I'm going to participate because I like the, you know, the potential of Basepaint becoming, you know, the next I don't know, Facebook or of all the things, right?
There are a bunch of things in that space that we're still thinking about. There are some ideas.
We definitely see a lot of international people. So looking at Google Analytics, for the website it's basically all over the world like the Basepaint canvas never sleeps. So if you scroll the chart, there is rarely more than one hour gap in the messages So, you know, we wake up we paint some stuff and then other people wake up and do this stuff and it's all a shared experience.
It's interesting to see if maybe there is an experience for more closed communities. Basepaint is for everyone for the whole globe, but we definitely see a demand for niche things where like I want this for my company or one of these for my people in Turkey, for example, right or more localized and more specialized things.
On unexpected user behavior
Winter: it's such a joy as a creator of a project to discover this. I can't even emphasize that we've made some money from the fees, and we've made some friends -- but to me, just seeing these emergent behaviors, things that I didn't code in the system. But as I said, we intuitively embraced some of the limitations, and then just seeing what people do with it is extremely rewarding.*
This is pure joy to me in building projects. One thing early on that Zach wanted, but he deprioritized it because typically it takes a lot of engineering power to do this was chat. He is like, it would be really awesome if there was a side chat at the canvas and I remember I took that as a challenge.
I was like, well, I can do it in less than two weeks. We're gonna have chat and I actually, the following night, I prototyped a bunch of things and we ended up using a discord, but I had a dev version of this with chat and Zach logged in and he's like, oh, this is great. It makes it feel like a place. We also added live cursors. So you can see the other people's cursors as they do. So suddenly from this dead canvas that infrequently updates, it became a place that you go to and it's alive. And what we're seeing there is just amazing.
Like people coming in, being confused about projects or something is not working, their wallet is not connecting or something else, other people onboarding them, helping them, debugging them, you know coordinating together complex artwork.
And then we try to embrace it sometimes. So on Saturdays, we try to do some challenges. So one day we did it such that the 100-pixel brushes, the lowest-pixel brushes had the ability to paint a color that other brushes didn't have. And they had to interact basically in the chat and coordinate it.
Zach: Someone was trying to collaborate. He's like, I'm gonna I'm going to erase this in a second. We're just trying something out and then they basically through the course of the day animated I think it was like an eyeball basically popping up and then like falling in another character's mouth or something like that and that was the first day It was it was the artist that did it, I believe was Dudley already doing like pixel animation.
So he had a background, not just in pixel art, but pixel art plus animation. And so as soon as he saw this time-lapse, he thought, I can do something there.
Check out Basepaint here:
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