How It Worked
You're at a show, a gallery, a pop-up. You open Graflr. The artist opens Graflr. Your phone detects theirs nearby via Bluetooth. You take a photo. They sign it. That signed photo gets uploaded to IPFS and minted as an ERC-721 NFT on Polygon — delivered to your crypto wallet, with on-chain proof that both of you were there.
No random JPEG drops. No airdrop speculation. Just a real moment, made permanent.
Artists set royalties that paid out automatically on every future resale. Fans got verifiable collector pieces tied to a real identity and a real encounter. The blockchain handled the rest.
What Was Built
Graflr was a full-stack production application — not a prototype, not a proof-of-concept. It was live on both the App Store and Google Play, serving real users minting real NFTs on mainnet.
Mobile
- Flutter (iOS + Android) — cross-platform, native performance
- Bluetooth + Google Nearby Messages for in-person proximity verification — ultrasonic handshake via microphone + BLE
- WalletConnect for crypto wallet integration across Rainbow, Trust Wallet, and others
- In-app purchases via StoreKit (iOS) and Google Play Billing (Android)
- Content moderation via Google Vision AI (SafeSearch), with manual review workflow
Blockchain
- Polygon mainnet — ERC-721 via Rarible lazy mint protocol
- EIP-712 typed data signing for NFT authorization
- Creator royalties enforced at the smart contract level
- Full testnet pipeline: Amoy (previously Mumbai and Rinkeby)
Backend
- Firebase: Firestore, Cloud Functions (TypeScript), Authentication, Storage, Remote Config
- GCP Secret Manager for private key and API credential management
- IPFS via Pinata for decentralized media and metadata storage
- Intercom for user support
Infrastructure & DevOps
- GitLab CI/CD with Fastlane for automated iOS and Android builds and App Store delivery
- Google Cloud Platform for all infrastructure
Community — ATX DAO Artist Residency
- Multi-session course for Austin-area artists on building sustainable NFT careers
- Curriculum: smart contracts, creator royalties, split contracts, token-gated content, IPFS, social engineering awareness
- Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans applied to music NFTs — Graflr as the hands-on platform
Timeline
What Happened
The NFT market collapsed between 2022 and 2024. Trading volumes on major platforms dropped over 95%. The infrastructure costs — cloud functions, IPFS storage, blockchain RPC nodes, app store fees — continued regardless.
Graflr's core mechanic also worked against the grain of how the market evolved: trading became anonymous, global, and speculative. Graflr required physical presence and genuine human connection. That's a feature. It turned out to be a feature for a market that didn't materialize at scale before the window closed.
No one's photos are gone. Every NFT minted through Graflr still exists on the Polygon blockchain. The contracts are public and verifiable. The art is still there.
For Technical Readers
If you're evaluating this as an engineering portfolio:
Graflr was built by a small team in Austin over five years — concept through production through shutdown. It ran on real infrastructure, processed real blockchain transactions, and required genuine technical depth across a wide surface area: mobile (Flutter, platform channels, BLE), Web3 (Polygon, EIP-712, ERC-721, IPFS), serverless backend (Firebase Cloud Functions, GCP), and a production CI/CD pipeline (GitLab + Fastlane + App Store Connect).
The NFT market was genuinely unpredictable. The engineering wasn't.