Hi, I'm Anku — one of the creators of Waverly, a Chrome Extension built on the DeSo blockchain. I'm 20 years old, and this is the story of how my friends and I built it from scratch during Q1 2023.
How It All Started
It began with a hackathon. My friends Aryog and AlexCommoner — both high-school classmates — and I had been working with DeSo APIs for a while, so when I heard about the competition, I texted Aryog asking if we should participate. After some back and forth, we submitted our application and got in.
Finding the right idea was the hardest part. I'd been following Paul Burke for a long time — his work on BitcloutPlus, Seed Recovery, and Focalize on the DeSo blockchain was genuinely inspiring. That's where the spark came from: build a Chrome Extension that makes creating content on DeSo frictionless. Extensions are more accessible than websites, and having a simple, focused frontend just for content creation made a lot of sense.
Building Waverly
Being complete newbies to browser extensions, the three of us hit walls constantly over those three months. We used create-react-app and went with a Neumorphism UI style — new territory for us, but not as hard as we expected. We pushed our first build to the Chrome Web Store (shoutout to my brother for covering the $5 developer fee, and to @mossified for helping us lock in the name and domain).
Paul Burke became our unofficial mentor throughout the process. He suggested adding an uninstalled login HTML page so users didn't have to log in through the popup itself — a UX detail that made a huge difference. He also pointed us toward GitHub Releases, which we hadn't used commercially before.
On the technical side, Aryog carried a lot of the hard work — fixing Crypto Polyfills and Browserify issues with the deso-protocol SDK was no joke. I handled the frontend with Alex, while Aryog tackled the API layer.
Once the core was done, we added Diamond Shower — a feature that let users reward creators directly from the extension — which made marketing significantly easier heading into the final stretch of the hackathon.
The Hackathon Result
We finished as Second Runner Up in the DeSoLabs Hackathon, winning $800. It was a genuinely exciting moment. The hackathon introduced so many great projects to the community — BundleDAO, CircleIt, SurfSwap, and more. Huge thanks to the organizers @kanshi, @SLAVA, and @mashelenn, and to judges like @paulburke.
Going Deeper
After the hackathon, we didn't stop. Feedback from @nathanwells and @darian_parrish pushed us to make Diamond Shower run in the background — which meant Service Workers. That led to one of my hardest technical challenges: you can't use ES modules in Chrome extension service workers, so I couldn't pull in parts of the deso-protocol SDK I needed.
The fix? Webpack. I had to completely reconfigure the project — new loaders, HTML plugins, custom build pipeline — starting over from the ground up. It was brutal, but it worked. Background Diamond Shower shipped, along with DeSo username suggestions, Derived Keys Login (thanks to docs from @ItsAditya and help from @JacksonDean), and a much smoother MINT section. I also built a better onboarding flow using Chrome's chrome.tabs.create API.
What I Learned
This journey taught me more than I expected: Webpack, DeSo APIs, Chrome APIs, Service Workers and Message Passing, Chrome Actions, Chrome Storage, and how to actually ship and maintain a real product. The fact that it's open-source and community-driven made every shipped feature feel meaningful.
Looking Ahead
Continuously pushing an open-source project without incentives is genuinely tough. We have a full todo list — feed sections, Desktop Notifications, Portable Messages, more Diamond Shower features, cross-posting from Twitter/Facebook — but we need some breathing room to execute on it. We're looking forward to DeSo Developer Incentives and hope to keep building.
Q1 2023 has been one of the most exciting quarters of my life. Grateful to everyone who helped make Waverly real.
