Snap, Mint, Engage: Building Your Own Web3 Photo Booth with Minsta 📸
Tags: web3, tutorial, opensource, webdev
Published: 2024-03-27 01:00:18

Imagine an app that empowers people to capture life's special moments and mint them as NFTs with just a snap - no blockchain experience required. That's the magic of Minsta, an open source photo minting dapp powered by Mintbase.

With Minsta, you can create a custom branded experience for any event or community, letting users snap photos and share meaningful memories on-chain in seconds. From conferences to cultural festivals, Minsta lets you gamify and tokenize participation in a way that's fun and accessible to everyone.

To engage users, Minsta features customizable leaderboards that rank participants by total mints. You can also define raffle prizes that are awarded to the top minters and randomly-selected participants. Devs can easily tweak the thresholds and rewards to craft a super engaging experience.

![Screenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ramz6hprfzlj3p1actwa.jpg)

Deploying your own Minsta instance is a breeze too. The repo is designed to be easily forked and customized by developers, so you can have your own personalized version up and running in no time.

Some inspiring examples of Minsta in action:

- [Rakhi India](https://rakhi.mintbase.xyz/) - Special NFTs for the cherished festival of Raksha Bandhan
- [NEARCon](https://nearcon.mintbase.xyz/) - Collectible moments from NEAR's annual gathering
- [NEAR APAC](https://nearapac.mintbase.xyz/) - Celebrating an Unlimited Future in Vietnam
- [ETHDenver](https://ethdenver2023.minsta.me/) - Minting memories at the world's largest Web3 #BUIDLathon

Ready to deploy your own custom Minsta and start capturing memories on-chain? Let's dive in and see how it's done!

## Walkthrough

At its core, Minsta is a slick React app that interacts with several key Web3 technologies to enable seamless, decentralized photo minting. Here's a quick overview of the main components:

- **NEAR Wallet Integration:** Minsta leverages Mintbase Wallet, a non-custodial, meta transaction-based wallet built on the NEAR protocol. This allows for gasless onboarding and a silky-smooth UX. New users can create an account and start minting in seconds, no crypto or coding skills required.
- **Minting via Proxy Contract:** To enable permissionless minting, Minsta uses a proxy minter contract deployed by Mintbase. This contract is authorized as a minter on your NFT contract, so any Minsta user can mint without needing their own minter permissions. Super clean and decentralized.
- **Arweave Storage:** When a user snaps a photo, it's uploaded to the Arweave decentralized storage network and the metadata is saved immutably on-chain. This ensures photos remain accessible forever, with no central point of failure.
- **AI-Powered Metadata:** Optionally, you can use the Replicate API to analyze uploaded images and automatically generate titles and descriptions for the NFT metadata. A nifty way to streamline the minting flow and add some AI magic.

Under the hood, the app is built with battle-tested tools like Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, making it a breeze to customize and extend. The repo is designed to be hacker-friendly, with detailed docs and inline comments to help you grok the codebase quickly.

## Setup

Ready to deploy your own custom version of Minsta? Let's walk through it step-by-step:

### Fork the Repo

![Screenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/repjoqny2tr3v1xxni3u.png)

Head over to the Minsta repo on GitHub and smash that "Deploy" button to create your own copy of the codebase. 

### Deploy a Mintbase Contract

![Screenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tcv751ul0bcsiu50xt32.png)

If it's your first time deploying a smart contract you may want to switch over to testnet (3) so you can get the hang of things without paying any fees. 

Log in to your Mintbase profile and deploy a new contract (1, 2) or choose an existing one. This will be the NFT contract that your Minsta instance mints to. 

![Screenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gtzajk6lmths8vvo583e.png)

Grab the contract address, you'll need it later.

### Add a Proxy Minter

In your Mintbase contract settings, navigate to the "Minters" tab and add the `0.drop.proxy.mintbase.near` contract as a new minter. This lets your Minsta app mint on behalf of users.

### Set Up Environment Variables

![Screenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tbuh12piysogn3rfhhju.png)

If you used the "Deploy" button you can jump right into configuration. Otherwise, clone your forked repo and create a .env file in the root directory. 

![Screenshot](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ur2ifaegfbmf55b3f7mo.png)

Here you'll define config options like your app name, NFT contract address, network (mainnet/testnet), and more. Check [.env.example](https://github.com/Mintbase/minsta/blob/main/.env.example) for a full list of available env vars.

### Customize Your App

Time to make it yours! Update the app name, colors, logo and other UI elements by tweaking the env vars and code. Maybe add some custom leaderboard logic or new share hooks. Go wild!

### Deploy Your Changes

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2hwlqbece3lxq68jlkuz.png)

If you used the "Deploy" button then all you need to do is "Redeploy" in Vercel. Otherwise, create a new project in Vercel, connect your forked repo, and hit deploy. In a few short minutes, your custom Minsta will be live on the interwebs!

## Next Steps

Congrats, you've got a shiny new Minsta app that's ready to be customized and extended in all sorts of fun ways! Here are a few ideas to get your gears turning:

- **Custom Leaderboard Logic:** Tweak the leaderboard rules and rewards to fit your specific use case. Maybe top minters get a special NFT badge, or unlock tiered rewards based on their rank. The possibilities are endless!
- **Social Sharing Hooks:** Make it easy for users to share their freshly-minted photos on Twitter, Discord, or other social platforms. You could even generate custom share images with the user's photo and stats overlaid.
- **Themed Challenges:** Spice up the minting experience with daily or weekly photo challenges. Prompt users to snap pics around a certain theme, and reward bonus points for the most creative entries.
- **AR Face Filters:** Tap into the power of AR by integrating face filters or effects that users can apply to their photos before minting. Maybe even tie the filters to specific NFTs or achievements!
- **Decentralized Judging:** Let the community vote on their favorite mints, and use quadratic voting or other sybil-resistant mechanisms to determine the winners. Power to the people!
- **Physical Rewards:** Bridge the digital and physical realms by offering exclusive merch or other IRL rewards to your top minters. Stickers, enamel pins, you name it!

The beauty of Minsta being open source is that you have the freedom to remix and extend it in whatever wild directions you can imagine. So don't be afraid to experiment, iterate, and put your own unique spin on it.

If you build something rad with Minsta, we'd love to see it! Share your creations with us on Twitter or hop in our Discord to geek out with other builders. And if you have any questions or feedback along the way, don't hesitate to open an issue on the repo.

Happy building, and happy minting! 🚀