We wanted to see what all the fuss with Solana was about, so we decided to test it out! So we built Sauce Candy, a proof of concept Web3 Solana NFT storefront.

It's pretty simple, just a hot sauce logo turned into an NFT with some metadata about the Scoville Heat Units for the sauce. The point wasn't to create artwork, or to turn it into a voucher for a free bottle of sauce. The point was to test out the Solana network, and the Metaplex Protocol.

So yes, transactions on Solana are cheap. But what interested us more was Metaplex's smart-contracts-as-a-service and NFT Storefront offering. They have created a set of standardized tools and libraries to create NFTs and spin up your own NFT Storefront on their existing on-chain contracts. This means that you don't need to know Rust and write your own smart contracts!

In this case we wrote our own frontend in React.js and linked that up with their Solana smart contracts. If you don’t want to build a storefront from scratch, you can use their Metaplex branded storefront, kinda like say Shopify, although admittedly if you're not a dev you will still need a little dev help to get started.

One of the many cool features are that the NFTs are stored permanently on a decentralised file-store protocol called Arweave - and this is all handled by Metaplex!

To try the app you’ll need the Phantom wallet browser extension and some ‘fake SOL’ to connect (i.e. ‘authenticate’) with the contract on the Solana blockchain and then to mint an NFT. Also, as it's a proof of concept, it’s not on the 'mainnet' but a Solana test network, so remember to connect your wallet to the ‘devnet’.

Note: interacting with wallets on mobiles is challenging, so best to use a laptop or desktop if you want to try it out.