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Somewhere between one weekend and a couple of years later, I learned Solidity.
It didn’t start as a big goal. Not even like a 30-day challenge. It started small, with a tiny square. A 4×4 puzzle matrix, to be precise. I just wanted to pick a new weekend project — something playful. Something that felt like a game but also opened the opportunity to learn something new. I didn’t know I’d end up with something called Proof of Attention.
All I thought was: let’s do something really simple. Like — what if you could flip some tiles, remember their colors, and slowly uncover a pattern? How can I do this?
That was the beginning of Flippando.
Curiosity Was the Way Forward
I had built apps before. I’m not new to code, nor to launching stuff. But smart contracts? Solidity? EVM?
They were… foreign. Abstract. Like trying to speak Latin at a party where everyone’s speaking Klingon.
So I started small. First, I built a local game board in JavaScript. It had all the features, and it was visual enough to keep me hooked — weekend after weekend. Then I built a very simple backend in Solidity. Just one smart contract. Extremely basic. The MVP of an MVP.
Then — curiosity kicked in. And I started to brainstorm:
What if this board could be minted as an on-chain NFT?
Whoa. That sounded cool.
What if every solved puzzle held a token, somehow locked inside?
And that token — unlocked by putting together those boards into a living artifact.
Built with Proof of Attention.
And all this… in Solidity.
I dived in.
Hackathon 1: The Confirmation
The first hackathon I won with Flippando was absolutely amazing. At that time, I was visiting South Korea, part of a bigger plan to understand Asia — and maybe move there (which eventually happened, though not in South Korea).
While in Seoul, I joined a few local crypto meetups and learned there was a hackathon coming up. I registered. To my surprise, I realized I was the only foreigner among 100 local Korean hackers. We grinded together for 48 hours in a superb facility called Hana Financial Town, in Incheon.
I didn’t expect to win.
But I did.
Flippando won the Polygon track. That whole experience probably deserves its own blog post (but that’s, again, for another story).
Hackathon 2: Deeper Into the Rabbit Hole
Winning the first hackathon gave me confidence. So I joined another one — in a new, emerging ecosystem called Saga. I won a small prize, but the real reward was direction.
I refined the contracts.
I abstracted logic.
I made a ton of improvements to the visuals.
People liked it.
More importantly — I liked it.
Every new Solidity pattern I learned wasn’t just a technical upgrade. It was a metaphor.
Interfaces felt like unspoken contracts between people.
Modifiers reminded me of personal boundaries.
And events — the way blockchain sends back rich information — reminded me of how our actions ripple outward.
The Grant and the Multichain Leap
At some point, the game stopped being just mine.
I received a grant.
Flippando became the first beneficiary of the Gno.land grant program.
And I ported the entire game to Gno.
That changed the tempo a bit. For a while, it felt like a detour. I hadn’t launched the game on EVM yet. But here I was — building it in another language.
And it paid off.
I could now clearly observe different coding patterns.
It’s one thing to build on a very limited virtual machine like the EVM.
And it’s something else entirely to build a realm in Gno — where everything feels incredibly more fluid.
That experience only amplified my craving for prime time.
A couple of months later, I refined (for the sixth time, at least) and audited the Solidity code — and deployed.
To make things spicier, I went multichain:
Base. Polygon. Saga. Sonic. Berachain.
Each chain had its quirks — different RPCs, gas limits, deployment scripts.
I wrote wrappers, orchestrated deployments, and built fallback logic.
Suddenly, Solidity was no longer a barrier.
It was just the playground.
Lessons from the Flipping Journey
Learning Solidity wasn’t just about learning a language. It was about unlearning rigidity.
You don’t need to understand everything to build something meaningful.
You just need to start — to flip that first tile.
Flippando is still evolving.
What began as a weekend project is now a cross-chain memory machine, a tokenized art engine, and a growing community playground.
And I —
I’m still flipping.
Still remembering.
Still learning.
If you’re curious about the game — or if you want to feel what it’s like to flip tiles on a blockchain — check out Flippando on your favorite chain.
And leave some feedback. I read all of it.
Seriously, I do.
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dragos@dragosroua.com (Dragos Roua)
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