Lion Blau
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Designing for Emotional Permanence
Modern apps trivialize memory — endless posts, fleeting stories, no true ownership. The challenge was to craft a digital experience that treats memories as emotional objects, and those deserve structure, ownership, and permanence, preserving human moments with authenticity.
We wanted to achieve three interconnected goals:
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Design a lightweight mobile-first product experience centered around memory creation.
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Design and vibecode a backend that can reliably take a captured photo plus some basic context and turn it into a clean, versioned “moment” object ready to be stored both off‑chain and on Base.
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Vibecode the frontend so the entire flow — capture, confirm, mint, share — feels like a normal photo app, with the blockchain complexity hidden behind clear, minimal UI.
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Deploy immutable, user-owned “moments” to the Base blockchain — ensuring transparency, permanence, and user sovereignty
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Deploy smart contracts simple enough to maintain and quick to ship, but robust enough to become the foundation of an on-chain social product later.
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Research & Insight
While NFTs exploded in 2021–22, most of that activity was speculative trading of 10k collections and profile pictures, not simple, everyday tools people actually use. Trading volumes have fallen sharply and a large share of NFT collections are now effectively “dead,” with little activity or obvious utility. What is still missing is a direct‑to‑blockchain photo app that feels as simple as taking a picture on your phone, but writes that moment on‑chain by default and can evolve into a social layer on top.
Onchain social and NFT photo products exist, but they’re mostly marketplaces bolted onto Web2 feeds or heavy decentralized networks that feel like infrastructure, not apps. Crypto‑native users still lack a simple way to “just post a photo to chain” in something that feels like a normal product, especially now that pure NFT trading hype has cooled and attention is shifting toward social, utility‑driven use cases.
Base and the upcoming Base App are leaning into exactly this space, combining onchain apps, social, payments, and Farcaster primitives (like Frames) into a consumer‑friendly surface. That’s why Moment ships on Base first: it’s a direct‑to‑Base photo experience that can start as a personal archive and later plug into Base App, Farcaster, and other onchain social surfaces, while keeping the architecture open enough to expand to other chains or even web2.5 entry points like Telegram or LINE in the future.
The process
Moment wasn’t hand‑coded from scratch; it was built by vibecoding the stack together in Lovable, then tightening everything with GitHub, Vercel, and a lot of AI‑assisted debugging. The goal from day one was clear: a AI-built direct‑to‑Base photo app where a user takes a picture, hits mint, and an NFT is created automatically without them needing to understand the plumbing.
Backend and blockchain flow
The core of the work went into getting the backend and blockchain pieces to behave like a single, predictable system. Using Lovable, the mint flow evolved into: the frontend sends a “mint moment” request to an edge function, that function uploads the image and metadata to storage, talks to the Base smart contract (which was deployed via Manifold under a specifically created "MMNT mint" wallet) to mint the NFT, then writes a clean record into the database so the app can show it instantly. A lot of the iteration here was about making sure the contract calls, IPFS / file storage, and Supabase writes stayed in sync and failed gracefully instead of silently breaking.
Vibecoding the full stack
Because the app was vibecoded end‑to‑end, the process was less “big spec then build” and more “ship, break, fix, repeat” in full speed. Lovable generated the initial React/Next.js frontend and API routes, GitHub kept version history and branches for experiments, and Vercel handled instant deploy previews so every change could be tested live. When things broke — wallet connection edge cases, Base RPC errors, type mismatches, or deployment issues — AI tools were used heavily to inspect stack traces, explain unfamiliar errors, and propose concrete fixes until the whole mint pipeline ran reliably.
PerplexityAI Assistant live, clicking on GitHub for debugging
Vercel Deployments manual through GitHub and vibecoded with Lovable
BE and FE Vibecoding on Lovable, here debugging React issue
Product Strategy
Marketing surface: OG images and shareability
Making Moments Shareable (On & Off-chain)
As an integral part of the product itself, Moment’s (social) marketing layer was designed to feel cohesive and instantly recognizable. OG images, social preview cards, and landing visuals all echo the in-app experience, making every link to Moment feel like a doorway into the same universe.
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Dynamic OG templates: Auto-generated visuals that pull in
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Consistent branding: The same gradients, typography, and iconography appear from social previews to the app shell.
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Clear messaging: Copy emphasizes ownership, moments, and base deployment without overwhelming non-technical users.
Web3 share surfaces: base.app, Farcaster, OpenSea
Moment also includes dedicated share buttons for the main Web3 surfaces users actually care about: Base App, Farcaster, and OpenSea. Each button pre-fills deep links or post text so a user can go from minting a moment to sharing it onchain‑native platforms with one tap.
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base.app / Farcaster: The plan is to have each minted moment resolve to a stable on-chain URL that can be dropped into Base App or Farcaster posts, and eventually surfaced via Frames so people can view or interact with a moment directly inside the feed.
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Live OGs from etched moments: The next iteration is to wire the minted image and metadata so the same “etched” photo that exists on Base can drive the OG image and caption for social shares in real time, making every share card a live window into the onchain artifact.
On the NFT marketplace side, each moment is a real NFT on Base, which means it can show up naturally on OpenSea or other Base‑compatible marketplaces. Even if the primary use case is personal archiving or social sharing, having those tokens visible on marketplaces keeps the door open for collections, curated galleries, or secondary experiences built on top of Moment’s NFTs later.
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Learnings and next steps
What Bui(dl)ing Moment Taught
Building Moment showed what it actually takes to vibecode a real product on Base: a small, focused “mini‑app” that is platform‑specific (built for Base first) but still interoperable with the wider onchain ecosystem. Moment now behaves like a compact, opinionated app that can live inside Base‑centric contexts (Base App, Farcaster, marketplaces) while still exposing standard NFT primitives that other tools can plug into.
The main learnings were clear. Vibecoding with tools like Lovable, Vercel, GitHub, and AI support makes it possible for a single builder to own the full stack, but only if the architecture stays simple and observable. Building directly on base reduces infra choices and lets more energy go into product decisions instead of multi‑chain complexity, while still leaving room to expand later. And finally, the story gets much stronger when infrastructure, UX, and marketing (OG images, share flows, listings on places like OpenSea) are all treated as one product, not separate tracks.
Coming up next...
Next steps now focus on depth rather than breadth. On the product side, the priority is a tighter visual redesign, stronger UI patterns, and more deliberate motion so Moment feels as polished as a modern social app. On the technical side, the goal is to wire in real‑time blockchain data so new mints, ownership changes, and activity show up instantly in the interface instead of relying on manual refreshes.
Moment will also move from a purely personal archive toward real social presence, with in‑app feeds, social views of etched moments, and ways to discover what others are minting on Base. Customization will expand with configurable time marks on photos, optional sound layers, and support for short video moments, all using the same on-chain format. In parallel, a desktop experience will make it easier to connect wallets, use in‑app browsers, and, over time, open the door to additional chains and wallet providers while keeping Base as the primary home. Together, these steps turn Moment into a Base‑native mini‑app that feels instant, social, and extensible across devices and ecosystems.