Tableland second Pilot Program launchpad wrapped up, with 10 total teams and a ton of cool use cases shipped as MVPs.

By @Dan Buchholz

Pilot Program 2 is in the books! We recently announced the Pilot Program 3 launch date, and as we get ready for the next builder cohort, it’s important to look back on the awesome projects that were built.

We kicked off the second Pilot Program (”PP”) cohort back at the end of September 2022, and it ran through mid-November. If you’re not familiar with the program, feel free to read up on its evolution as well as the announcement for PP3, which both contain details on the overall program structure. Also, check out the first cohort’s projects, back where it all started!

To summarize, the core Tableland team invites a group of promising teams and solo hackers to build out their projects. Projects are funded with microgrants, weekly calls are held, dedicated support is provided in Notion & Discord, and there are two Snapshot votes where winners get an additional bounty.

There were some awesome projects that crossed the finish line during the 8 week launchpad. At its core, Tableland is a relational database with a web3 spin. It’s a safe bet that every production grade application requires at least some form of database usage, so there is a quite a broad spectrum of possible places and use cases where Tableland can be used.

There were teams building mutable NFTs, on-chain notification systems, dynamic NFT tooling, and games. For reference, the first Snapshot was for most exciting project, and the second was for best project during the program; each had two winners.

Pixel art has become a staple in the NFT industry. Its origins can be traced back to the early days of computing in the 1970s, where it was later coined by Xerox in the early 1980s. Interestingly, a common web3 design pattern emulates computing interfaces of the 1990s (e.g., Curve’s old interface, Seed Club). Gem Spirits followed suit with a new age spin that takes from games like Tamagotchi and Pokémon.

Imagine a web3 NFT game where owners can care for, evolve, and battle their pets; this, is Gem Spirits. Built by Tansan and Soyjoy, it’s in its very early stages of development. In fact, the concepts, lore, technology, Spirit pixel designs, and the overall illustrations were either incepted or further polished during the program. Varying pet types were created (different colors, shapes, etc.), along with the Azuki-inspired mascot for the project / website. Plus, they were the winners of both Snapshot votes, including the most votes in final Best Project vote. It was quite an impressive feat in just under a couple of months of work!

The premise: an owner (individuals or a community) takes care of a pet (NFT), such as feeding it or letting it sleep. As it grows, the traits change. It can also battle other pets to earn some form of reward.

This foundation offered a clear path for leveraging Tableland in the Gem Spirits development stack. Namely, on-chain actions needed to dynamically change the value of certain traits; the Spirit had to have the ability to evolve. Using Tableland allowed the Gem Spirits team to write to tables that store the NFT’s attributes and change them based on the Spirit’s evolution. A “Decentralized Evolutions” concept enables collaboration with other communities and individual artists to create customizable Spirits. For context, the following highlight the schema used, and some of the code itself was open sourced:

A final note: the Gem Spirits team also participated in a livestreamed panel, moderated by the Tableland team. The theme was all about web3 gaming and included the founder of KittyKart / 9VRSE (@_axtina) and Game7 DAO (@kostaszrk). One of the goals of the Pilot Program is to help amplify projects and expand their reach with more exposure, so it was a great opportunity for the Gem Spirits team to get on stage with other builders in the space.

Check out the Gem Spirits project:

Modern technology is flooded with notifications. Crypto-native tech is nearly absent of them. The Cue project started down the path of trying to solve this major gap, with the goal to be the notification OS of web3. It’s still rather early in the development phase, having started back at ETHOnline 2022; the team was one of the winners of Tableland’s bounties there!

The idea originated from one of the founder’s inability to get notified of price changes while trading on 1inch. Built by team members Suporno and Sankha, Cue set out to offer a notification service that helps users and developers set alerts for on-chain events, including token fluctations and NFT floor prices, which can be accessed via UI or webhooks.

Cue went from a very basic proof-of-concept built during a hackathon to a much more polished and working prototype (on Goerli testnet) with a much smoother design. The first Snapshot vote definitely noticed this hard work and voted Cue as the most promising project of PP2. The team is still working through their overall product strategy as they continue to build out more features, so stay tuned for what Cue has in store! (Maybe there’s a notification for that 😉.) Some of the tables that are used by the app and deployed on Tableland included the following:

Check out the Cue project:

Dynamic NFTs are a perfect use case for Tableland. Opal is a platform created to produce and manage a dynamic NFT collection using a very slick interface for adding and changing various attributes. Built by Silika Studio, their vision was clear:

Opal app offers a no-code static and dynamic NFT deployment. It automates the pipeline from data intake to metadata update with database-agnostic updates and generation / updates of NFT image files. This consists of an art engine that allowed users to define local layers (or on IPFS/Arweave) and generate them.

In the final Snapshot vote for best project, Opal won the bounty (second most votes)! It was a testament to the progress they made over the course of the program. Their application was very well thought out, had a great user experience, and was very well designed. Check out the full experience at their site or demo below, and also read their documentation: here.

From a technical standpoint, the app was deployed on Polygon and included customer ERC721 contracts, Next.js, Chakra UI, Chainlink VRF, and Vercel. The final Opal prototype included a number of nifty features:

Check out the Opal project:

Mobile is the most popular gaming device when it comes to frequency. In the crypto space, the primary mobile applications seem to be more social related, such as Farcaster, whereas many games are primarily web-based (e.g., Axie Infinity, but to be fair, Axie does have a mobile app available in APK / TestFlight.) Web3-native mobile games are inevitable; it’s a necessary progression to compete with traditional games that are following the mobile-first trend.

CryptoQuest is a mobile app powering web3 real-world exploration games. It rewards both the user and the experience creator in a fair, transparent manner. Creators tailor a new experience which Explorers can join and compete in, such as adding various checkpoints (e.g., solving a riddle). On the flip side, Explorers can join a new experience in their area, register for a challenge, and start playing! Creators are rewarded for the quality of their games and the number of people that join them, and Explorers for their in-game results.

The CryptoQuest app (written in Kotlin) started back in ETHOnline; they were the winner of Tableland grand prize. They were then invited to continue building out their project, with features like geotracking, GPS spoofing prevention, and (of course) a Tableland integration. Basically, a “database operations” contract would get called a “state management” contract whenever challenge-specific data was altered

Check out the CryptoQuest project:

Traditional physical art is moving into the digital realm with web3 as a springboard. The explosion of NFT collectible popularity over the past couple of years validated that creators should be expanding their footprint with crypto-native solutions. Augmented reality (”AR”) is also an emerging technology that can help creators offer new experiences to their community.

Arthaus is a web2 art platform that is moving into the web3 space, including the formation of the arthaus DAO. Its Easel platform is yet to launch but will enable web3-native and AR capabilities as an extension of the physical art itself. The platform will offer an augmented reality “handshake” methodology with personal “AR Gifts” (where a customer can create and embed a special message, digitally) as well as physical prints of NFTs. For example, users can scan a piece of art, which gets recognized and then overlays a digital AR piece:

From a development perspective, arthaus set out to implement an ERC1155 contract tokenizing physical art, hidden metadata watermarks, and image Identification via web-based AR portal. All of these were delivered in a prototype during the program and helped set the Easel platform up for success, as it gets ready to launch and later expand with Tableland in its art metadata stack!

Check out the arthaus project:

As privacy regulations continue to restrict 3rd party data, brands are looking for alternatives. Old methodologies must be replaced to provide ways for brands to learn about their customers and target them across various channels.

Brandinate set out to reimagine what the direct relationship between a brand and a consumer could look like. It’s a web3-native custom engagement tool that enables direct interactions between brands and consumers through dynamic NFTs. For example, this includes:

With Brandinate, brands can mint NFTs where metadata has either brand- or user-controlled attributes (e.g., membership, points, status, etc.) that can be updated at any time. Imagine only setting your size or color preference once, where each brand you interact with can read and customize an experience for your using this information. Pretty powerful! For example, an online store could add a minting experience to the order workflow and insert Bradinate’s proof of purchase:

The team leveraged Tableland for the dynamic metadata aspects. Their web app interacted with various contracts (ERC721, ERC1155) that helped mint the dNFTs, and “brand” and “product” tables helped tracked this associated metadata. Access controller contracts were also implemented to help ensure only the proper party could update the metadata.

Check out the Brandinate project:

Web3 is built for creators, and music is a prime space for disruption. There are quiet a number of major players in the space, looking to disrupt how musicians can create and earn from their music; the old school way is riddled with middlemen that take substantial cuts from the artists.

In creating MojoMusic, the goal was to hack together a project that offers an audio / media streaming platform to empower artists, musicians, and content creators with web3-native tech. There were a number of cool features inlcuded in the platform, such as the ability to mint a music NFT with metadata hosted a Tableland table. A couple of key components:

One key design goal was to enable an open, composable, and interoperable way for creators to launch their own music collections; hence, Tableland offered a clear path toward achieving this. This required a series of tables to be deployed and queried in a fronted UI:

Overall, the project provided a clear way to utilize technologies like IPFS, Polygon, and Tableland together. There are quite a number of potential features being added, like greater search / discovery capabilities and music collection pages, so be sure to keep up with the project!

Check out the MojoMusic project:

A final note — the teams above were part of the Pilot Program’s “Hacker” and “Launch” tracks. These teams interacted with each other throughout their time building; it’s a very inclusive experience! There was also a “Growth” track that operated a little more independently. The Growth track teams were all returning projects from Pilot Program 1:

While the Hacker and Launch tracks focused on building, the Growth track was thinking about the go-to-market strategy, continuity funding, and launching their actual products. The core Tableland team supported these folks with ideation and connections to accelerators / grant funding where needed. We even hosted a Twitter panel for Rebel, along with Nader Dabit and LabDAO, to talk all about web3 community.

Overall, it was, yet again, a please working with all of the great people that built some cool tech in a short 8 weeks. All of the team members have a dedicated program alumni channel to continue sharing thoughts and progress after the program ends. With PP3 coming up shortly, the Tableland team is excited to bring in another cohort of developers to test out buliding web3 with SQL!