By Matus Rajsky

Following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between NEM Europe and Blockchain Slovakia, NEM’s technology continues to gain interest throughout Slovak blockchain community.

NEM caught the attention of Slovak developers initially due to the simplicity of development as a protocol looking from the outside in. This led to the first NEM workshop for developers in Bratislava. It took place on December 12th at Progressbar Hackerspace, an innovative networking platform and free gathering space with resources for those devoted to hacking, 3D printing, Blockchain, and other areas.

The event featured special guest, István Deák, a NEM Europe Solutions Architect made the trip to run the workshop from his home base in Vienna.

So, how long would it take to learn to code on Blockchain you might ask? Well, under István’s guidance, a team of 7 programmers managed to use advanced NEM Catapult features in under 4 hours! Yes, 4 hours! Cool huh?! :)

Hands on: a NEM Developer crash course

First of all, why even use blockchain? During the intro, István presented a strong use-case surrounding the ways in which blockchain can improve transparency, and minimize bad practices when selling concert tickets.

The bad practice involving concert tickets is, of course, scalping: buying the majority of tickets in the first second of a sale — using bots — and then selling the tickets at a higher price.

How can NEM solve the issue of scalping? With decentralized swaps. The process is fairly simple:

Create a Namespace and a Mosaic, e.g. a token representing a concert ticket. Set up business rules to enable the reselling of tickets only when certain conditions are met. The off-chain contract will automatically accept only valid requests according to the business rules.

During the 4 hours, the programmers learned the following:

Set up the environment and connect to NEM Catapult server

Create their own crypto-asset

Send their crypto assets between each other

Create an on-chain pull transaction. In this example, a seller was asking for a XEM payment for his crypto-asset. The buyer was notified with the offer. If he accepted, both transactions — sending the token and receiving a XEM payment — happened at the same time- “atomically”.

Of course, every good event needs some great refreshments to renew energy and discuss important blockchain use cases, and that we did! 🙂

Was this event successful? Actions speak louder than words. One of the trainees, Matej Šima has already published his first part of the series of blogs on how to “catapult” a blockchain project using NEM and ReasonML.

https://medium.com/@matej.sima/reasonml-and-nem-blockchain-crashcourse-8c8b540ed522

Give this guy an applause, or 50!

Are you interested in other exciting events? Follow BlockchainSlovakia’s and NEM’s twitter to stay up to date!

https://twitter.com/BlockchainSK

https://twitter.com/NEMofficial