I participated in ETHIndia, the Asia’s biggest Ethereum hackathon. It was one heck of a buidlful weekend from August 10–12, 2018. It was my first hackathon ever and turned out to be a truly fulfilling experience. We also emerged as one of the 7 winning teams. Yay!

Talks and workshops

The opening ceremony started with the sponsors giving quick intros of the cool products that they are building. Following that, the day witnessed a mix of awesome workshops and talks. The audience warmed up with an Introduction to Solidity workshop. It was followed by a talk by the founder of Dharma. The team at Dharma are building borderless and tokenized lending services. Subsequently there were some super interesting talks including a talk by MakerDao who are building a decentralized stable coin; NuCypher — proxy re-encryption for sharing private data in decentralized applications and a hands-on workshop by Andy Tudhope from status.im, where he led the attendants to make a decentralized twitter using the embark framework. The second half of the day was more inclined towards the research topics in Ethereum space. I personally liked the talks on virtual state channels by Matic and the meta-analysis of the various consensus protocols by Mechanism Labs.

During the entire event, folks at gitcoin and bounties network kept the participants engaged with simple and fun tasks and awarded bounties. Checkout the gitcoin photo contest or the ETHIndia event specific Moksha coin bounties to encourage participants to ask questions or ponder about open ended questions like this one.

The hackathon was to begin the next day. I had formed a team with a couple fellow hackers on the ETHIndia slack. After the talks we spent some time deliberating on our hackathon idea.

Team High Speed Wifi — Arpit, Meet and Angela

ArQuest

Some time back I had read about the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAO) and found them to be truly sci-fi. I had also stumbled upon the Aragon project — a framework for building upgradable DAOs. Thanks to my friend Naveen, I knew about the good work that the Request Network team has been doing — a decentralized network for payment requests. With these in my mind, it occurred to me that it would be pretty cool to have DAOs that would able to request payments from their clients on the blockchain. After some intense brainstorming, we decided that we will build a Smart Invoicing app for DAOs. Our teammate — Meet, very creatively named our project ArQuest.

The Hackathon

The hackathon kicked off at 10 AM on the Saturday morning and about 60–70 teams set out to buidl. All the teams were hard at work. It was a weekend with lots of solidity coding interspersed with food/coffee breaks and well, no sleep. For our team there were several instances when we we would remain stuck on an issue for hours and then eventually end up either solving it or finding a workaround. There were moments of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and we were anxious about whether we would be able to get our project ready. Some things that we really struggled with during the hackathon were 1. Making our smart contract to be able to call functions in smart contracts that are already deployed on the blockchain. 2. Listening to events emitted from the smart contracts in the UI and 3. Debugging VM exception: revert solidity errors. However, slowly and gradually, we pushed through. Moreover, there is nothing that a quick nap during the hackathon can’t solve.

Though we were nowhere close to building everything that we had in mind, however we were lucky to have completed a working demo that very well illustrated what our vision for the project was. The judges loved our demo! We emerged as winners alongside 6 more really funky projects. You can look at the complete list of submissions here.

It was an enriching experience and I would jump at the next opportunity to participate in similar hack events. You can read the ArQuest in-depth proposal, checkout the demo video or head to the github repo. I would love to hear your thoughts on the demo, project idea or the ETHIndia hackathon in general. Head to the comments section!