Show HN: Next Level Token-Gating – Serve Media Based on NFT Ownership

Hey HN community! I’m excited to showcase an app I helped build during the ETHDenver Hackathon last week. It’s called submarine.me and it lets anyone—technical or not—upload private, IPFS-backed content that they can lock behind an NFT with a simple share link. Anyone with the link can prove they own the NFT in question and unlock the media.

Full disclosure, this app was built under the Pinata (https://pinata.cloud) banner, but being able to bring it to life during a hackathon was an incredible experience. The idea stemmed from the original release of a feature Pinata calls Submarine. We rolled this feature out last year, and it let people upload media to private storage nodes, generate IPFS content identifiers for verifiability, and share that content with a selective audience. The problem was that individuals and communities wanted to have more complex mechanisms and automation for sharing the media. They didn’t want to have to manually generate a link to the content.

For developers, this was no problem. They could write code and implement their own solutions to programmatically generate access tokens for the locked content based on the criteria they set. For non-technical creators, this was a non-starter. We believe submarine.me solves that.

Creators simply have to choose how they’d like their media to be unlocked (currently submarine.me only supports NFT unlocking, but more mechanisms will be rolling out soon), provide preview data about the locked media, then upload the media that should be private. When they do so, a simple link is generated. These creators can then safely share that link on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, or anywhere else they want, knowing that unauthorized people will not be able to unlock the content.

For those that are trying to retrieve the media, the experience is dead simple. Go to the link, sign a message verifying control of the Ethereum wallet that holds the NFT, and if they do, in fact, have the NFT in their wallet, the private media is returned. If they don’t have the NFT, they are blocked.

Here is a demo video of submarine.me in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhT4Xqn1tYI

I know the Hacker News community prefers to be able to experiment with apps on Show HN without having to sign in or subscribe, but this app is directly linked to existing Pinata accounts. So to use it, you will have to have a Pinata Professional Plan account.

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts!