Access Protocol Enhances Social Engagement Through Tapestry Integration
Access Protocol's Lead Engineer: How Tapestry's Web3 Social Infrastructure Saved Our Team Months of Backend Development
The decision between building versus integrating functionality can significantly impact a project's development velocity and resource allocation. For Access Protocol, a platform focused on revolutionizing content monetization and creator incentives, this decision point came when they needed to add social features to their Access Hub. Rather than building these capabilities from scratch, they chose to integrate with Tapestry, for its web3 social infrastructure and onchain social graph. The partnership not only accelerated their development timeline but also demonstrated how strategic technical collaborations can help protocols stay focused on their core mission while expanding functionality.
In this interview, Access Labs’ Lead Engineer Salle Helevä shares how Access Protocol transformed their platform from a one-way content delivery system into an interactive community hub through Tapestry integration. His firsthand account offers valuable insights into the collaboration process, technical implementation, and the tangible benefits of choosing a specialized infrastructure partner over building social features in-house.
Access Protocol allows fans to directly support creators by staking the platform's native token, in exchange for exclusive content and rewards. They were looking to add more social features, including profile-level likes and comments.
Integration Journey
Goals & Strategy
When Access Protocol began exploring ways to enhance their platform with social features, they saw an opportunity to collaborate within the web3 ecosystem. "We wanted to add a social layer to Access Hub and found here the opportunity to collab with another web3 project," explains Salle. "Tapestry seemed to suit our needs and from fruitful discussions with your team mates building our social layer with Tapestry has been great."
Approach to Implementation
The decision to integrate rather than build proved immediately beneficial for the Access Protocol team. "Definitely some time," Salle notes regarding the time saved. "We have been able to leave, I would say, most of the backend implementation to Tapestry."
Technical Partnership
The collaboration process was marked by responsive support and efficient problem-solving. "It has been nice. The team has been super helpful and when we've had some requests, the response has always been fast," says Salle. This responsiveness proved particularly valuable, with Salle highlighting "the aforementioned quick response time and willingness to implement things that fit our use-case" as key strengths of the partnership.
Results
The partnership with Tapestry allowed Access Protocol to accelerate their development of advanced social features. "We have a lot to build with Access and Hub, the social layer was one aspect that we got a nice boost by using Tapestry instead of our own implementation," Salle explains. "By taking care of the basics, we were able to get to more advanced social layer implementation faster. Meaning things like email notifications to creators when their content gets commented on and so on."
In terms of technical implementation, Access Protocol took an innovative approach, developing their own SDK for the Go programming language. "We were only utilizing the API. We build our own SDK for working with Go (btw open source and available here)."
"Previously there was no way on our site for subscribers and creators to interact with each other. They had to go on other platforms. Now there is two-way communication available for users without having to leave our Hub."
Learning & Insights
While the integration process was smooth overall, Salle notes that there were no significant challenges that required fundamental changes to their approach. The most positive surprise came from "Responsiveness to our request from your side."
Business Impact
The integration has fundamentally transformed how users interact within the Access Protocol ecosystem. "We were able to add an important level of interactiveness to our platform," Salle shares. "Previously there was no way on our site for subscribers and creators to interact with each other. They had to go on other platforms. Now there is two-way communication available for users without having to leave our Hub."
Future Outlook
Looking ahead, there are opportunities to expand the partnership's scope. While Salle defers to CEO, Andreas Nicolos, for specific strategic direction, he notes interest in incorporating Tapestry's content suggestion features: "We had some interest in incorporating also content suggestions from Tapestry, as that is another interesting feature of the API."
Advice for Others
For projects considering a similar partnership, Salle offers practical advice: "Well, the API is being actively developed so tread with caution and keep in close communication with the Tapestry team and you'll do just fine :)”
Whether you're looking to integrate social features into your platform or build on an open social graph layer on Solana, Tapestry's infrastructure can help.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to nemo@primitives.xyz to discuss:
Adding social features to your platform
Building on the open social graph
Creating custom integrations