thirdweb Explore: A Fancy Tool or the Next Dev Meta?

thirdweb has recently just launched thirdweb Explore and it has started to become the talk of the town lately.

While some feel it's yet another fancy developer tool in the space, others see it as a powerful tool capable of doing wonders.

To shed light on this conversation, I decided to try it out myself test it out and in this blog post, I'll be sharing:

• My experience using the thirdweb Explore toolkit,
• How to find and deploy pre-built contracts from the Explore Page, and
• My opinion about the thirdweb Explore Page and possible suggestions.

N.B: You can find the contract in this demonstration here link: thirdweb.com/mumbai/0x8718739d7472f837673c1..

My Experience

Since I first heard about thirdweb (about 3 months ago), I have been intrigued by how it makes complex development processes/tasks very easy and user-friendly.

My first encounter with thirdweb was using it to deploy a Voting dApp without any .env file or uploading my private key anywhere.

I was able to deploy my contract directly using thirdweb's dashboard.

thirdweb also afforded me the opportunity to verify my contract live on the Mumbai test net, without requiring any Polygonscan API key and I was able to interact with my contract from the dashboard.

Fast forward to this day, I recently learnt about the new explore page feature and the conversations around it, so I gave it a try.

Right off the bat, I'd say that the explore page is a great development.

Unlike GitHub and the likes, most of the pre-built contracts you'd find there (on the explore page) have been audited and vetted by the thirdweb community, so one can guarantee a higher degree of security while using the codes.

No need to worry about malicious parties hiding malicious bugs.

For a bit of context, the thirdweb Explore page is the front page for web3 developers to explore secure smart contracts from world-class web3 protocols & engineers — all deployable with one click to Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, and other EVM-compatible blockchains. ……

thirdweb's explore page works simultaneously with thirdweb release, which gives developers the opportunity to release (i.e push) their codes to the explore page and keep track of their contributions in a profile.

Also, for the sake of due diligence, you can directly checkout function parameters and a list of writable and readable functions which you can immediately interact with upon deployment.

Having understood what the thirdweb explore page is, I decided to test-run this toolkit by selecting a pre-built contract from the explore page and deploying it using the thirdweb dashboard.

For this test run, I decided to go with the NFT Drop pre-built contract which is an ideal contract for releasing a collection of unique NFTs using the ERC721 standard.

I chose the contract because it allows you to define a set of conditions called claim phases which defines when and how users can claim an NFT from the drop including allowlists, release dates, claim limits and delayed reveals.

You can use this NFT Drop contract to:

• Release the PFP collection where each NFT has a different combination of traits;
• Release NFTs of your artwork, and have your community mint them for a price;
• Create a restricted-access NFT drop, where only a specified list of wallets can claim NFTs.

Now it's time to deploy 🚀

Deploying the NFT Drop Contract Directly from thirdweb

After selecting a contract and understanding what it does, I proceeded into deploying the contract directly from thirdweb's dashboard.

On the contract's page, I connected my wallet and clicked deploy Now.

It prompted me to this page. I filled in the fields (pun intended) and verified the transaction using Metamask.

And in those few steps, I had my NFT Drop contract live and ready on the Polygon Mumbai testnet 🥳🥳

N.B: You can find my deployed contract here link: thirdweb.com/mumbai/0x8718739d7472f837673c1..

My Opinions and Suggestions

For sure, I had an amazing time using the explore page toolkit and I believe there is a lot of room for improvement.

To this end, I hereby suggest:

Contract Categorizing And A Search Bar

This is to aid the ease of finding contracts because the more the platform grows the more contracts, and the more difficult it will become to manually navigate through these contracts

Better descriptions

Some of the contracts need better descriptions to help developers understand them better.

A Readme File

This is suggested to solve the problem of description. A readme file may be embedded into the pre-built contract's tab to enable developers to explain their projects better and make it easier for other developers to build upon them.

Finally...

I will say that the Explore Page when utilized alongside other thirdweb features is a great experience for developers.

#Wagmi

Mide Sofek