Blurt' Developer Thinks Crypto Makes for Better Donations to Twitch Streamers #cryptupdates

Inside life at the mtnDAO hacker house.

SALT LAKE CITY — Many of the software devs attending mtnDAO are building projects to support their venture capital-backed crypto companies

T.J. Littlejohn, a longtime attendee of this self-described "notorious" hacker house, says he's building for himself #TJTakamaa

T.J. hacked his new product together with a few weeks of collaborative coding and countless ZYN packets – two hallmarks of the event. Called "Blurt," the latest creation from the mtnDAO trenches offers a crypto-powered alternative for live streamers to collect donations from their viewers – in crypto, of course. Its development is a sign of progress for a Solana innovation introduced earlier this year – called blinks – that makes interacting with crypto as easy as a click on a tweet

Blurts was hardly an idea before mtnDAO opened its August edition. Now, with only a few days left before dozens of Solana blockchain-focused developers clear out of this WeWork in downtown Salt Lake City until February, it's fully functional.

In a slapdash kind of way, Blurts embody the staying power of a hacker house that doesn't have an agenda beyond show up and build. Hosts Barrett and Edgar Pavlovsky don't seem to care what the attendees of mtnDAO do while they eat the free lunches, sit at free desks and pile up free swag for an entire month – though they do sometimes invest seed capital in the most promising projects made here

Whether Blurts gets that infusion feels almost beside the point. In an interview, T.J. was noncommittal about making Blurts his full-time gig. He's more like a one-man "product studio" that "ships fast" and pivots often. During the last mtnDAO six months ago, he was building animation programs for the Apple VR headsets everyone was wearing

What are Blurts #BlurTokenGrowth

Blurts are built on blinks, a months-old standard for accessing and executing blockchain programs directly from X (formerly Twitter)