SALT LAKE CITY — Many of the software devs attending mtnDAO are building projects to support their venture capital-backed crypto companies.
T.J. Littlejohn, a longtime attendee of this self-described “notorious” hacker house, says he’s building for himself.
T.J. hacked his new product together with a few weeks of collaborative coding and countless ZYN packets – two hallmarks of the event. Called “Blurt,” the latest creation from the mtnDAO trenches offers a crypto-powered alternative for live streamers to collect donations from their viewers – in crypto, of course. Its development is a sign of progress for a Solana innovation introduced earlier this year – called blinks – that makes interacting with crypto as easy as a click on a tweet.
Blurts was hardly an idea before mtnDAO opened its August edition. Now, with only a few days left before dozens of Solana blockchain-focused developers clear out of this WeWork in downtown Salt Lake City until February, it’s fully functional.
In a slapdash kind of way, Blurts embody the staying power of a hacker house that doesn’t have an agenda beyond show up and build. Hosts Barrett and Edgar Pavlovsky don’t seem to care what the attendees of mtnDAO do while they eat the free lunches, sit at free desks and pile up free swag for an entire month – though they do sometimes invest seed capital in the most promising projects made here.
Whether Blurts gets that infusion feels almost beside the point. In an interview, T.J. was noncommittal about making Blurts his full-time gig. He’s more like a one-man “product studio” that “ships fast” and pivots often. During the last mtnDAO six months ago, he was building animation programs for the Apple VR headsets everyone was wearing.
Blurts are built on blinks, a months-old standard for accessing and executing blockchain programs directly from X (formerly Twitter). A properly-coded blinks program populates a mini-app for, perhaps, trading cryptocurrencies, within the social media webpage, saving the would-be trader from having to move to another website to place their bid.
For Blurts, this means a would-be donor to a streamer can send crypto dollars to their favorite Fortnite-playing tweenager directly from the window where they’re 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., himself a streamer. (He said he “generally beats the five-year-olds” in Fortnite. “But the 12-year-olds are where I struggle.”
Right now 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.
“I probably wouldn’t have shipped this if I was just home,” T.J. said, citing the “builder energy of a sometimes bustling WeWork that at peak had 70-odd developers typing away in front of monitors.
There’s practical upside for building in a collaborative workspace, too. Representatives of Dialect were on hand to help T.J. through some of the intricacies of deploying on blinks. So, too, were employees of TipLink, another crypto payments startup that streamlines the wallet onboarding process with users’ Google accounts.
“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.
