Are smart contracts trustless? 🤔

GM builders,

It's been an exciting week as we kicked off our Ready Player 3 Gaming Hackathon! If you missed the start date, it's not too late — sign up here.

In other news, welcome back to thirdweb weekly: where we highlight how web3 is disrupting everything from crowdfunding platforms to fashion. 🚀

Self-Verifying Smart Contracts (No Etherscan) 🪄

Smart contracts are designed to be "trustless", meaning users shouldn't have to trust third parties before interacting with the contract. As a requirement for safety, users & developers must be able to verify a smart contract's source code — assuring that the published contract code matches the code deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.

The traditional process of verifying smart contracts is difficult, and so developers typically opt for using a centralized service (like Etherscan), defeating the purpose of trustlessness. But did you know that smart contracts are auto-verifiable through the Solidity compiler (i.e. solc) & IPFS alone?

Learn more about how to create & deploy self-verifiable smart contracts, using the thirdweb CLI, in our founding engineer's technical deep dive:

🕹️ Ready Player 3 Gaming Hackathon: Now LIVE!!!

Calling all builders & game developers: we've partnered up with Coinbase to bring you Ready Player 3 — a 4-week hackathon for you to build the next generation of web3 games, and win $100k+ in rewards! Learn more & register today:

🗓️ Ready Player 3 Hackathon: Week #2 Events Schedule

Grow Your Web3 Game: Q&A with Spindl.xyz | Mon, Jan 23rd

Launch Your Web3 Game: Fireside Chat with Fractal | Tues, Jan 24th

thirdweb & Coinbase Code-Along: Build a Web3 Game | Wed, Jan 25th

Get the full events schedule here.

📹 YouTube Tutorial: How to Render NFT Metadata from IPFS in a React App or Website

In this video, we'll show you how to display NFTs with metadata from IPFS in your React app or site — so that you can showcase them in a gallery, marketplace, or website in any media format (image, video, & audio). We'll take you step-by-step through:

• Deploying an NFT Collection smart contract to the blockchain in 1 click

• Minting NFTs with metadata stored in IPFS, in any file format (image, video, audio)

• Displaying the NFTs in your app or website using thirdweb's React SDK and NFT media UI component

📚 Guide: How to Create NFTs You Can Rent to Other Users

In this guide, we'll show you how to create NFTs that can be rented out to other users temporarily using the ERC-4907 standard, for use cases like rentable land, art, and software licenses. We'll take you step-by-step through:

• Deploying an ERC-4907 smart contract to the blockchain in 1 click

• Minting an NFT to your wallet that can be rented out to other users

• Renting the NFT to another wallet for a specific amount of time

🔥 Web3 Innovation: Polygon Partners with thirdweb & Cope to Launch an Open-Source Toolkit for Web3 Apps

Have a great rest of your week shippin'! 🚢 🛠️

And if you're ever looking for 32,000+ other builders to learn from & share your web3 journey with, look no further than our Discord community 🤝