This past weekend Cryptonomic held a hackathon encouraging participants to build on Tezos using the products and libraries we have available.

First, some statistics beyond our liquid consumption. This was a virtual hackathon, we had nine teams sign up, spanning the globe. Of the total, five completed their stated projects, two teams made significant headway but were ultimately thwarted by current limitations of some tooling. The other teams are still working on their projects. On a personal note we had a visit from some friends, the result of which was an update to TezosJ. In the past we have contributed some wallet-oriented code to that library, we have expanded that functionality and added useful project plumbing for unit tests and code coverage. It’s great that this library is keeping pace with the platform.

The most exciting developments came from Cameroon. There was a lot of interest in this event from the attendees of the conference put together by Nzinghaa Lab and Tezos Commons last month where Cryptonomic hosted a technical workshop on blockchain development. Both teams built wallet software aimed at end-users. Both were able to demonstrate functional prototypes in interactive demos against alphanet.

The wallet from Cryptolions concentrated on digital-first use-cases. The team offered a breadth of functionality and visual statistics on transactions and chain participation. Their app works seamlessly on Android, which is very important for their cohort in West Africa.

In contrast, the team from 10000 Codeurs focused on a payments use case with their app attempting to cross the divide between the Tezos blockchain and last-mile payment providers like Western Union and money kiosks. With some additional effort, the team can focus on a smooth on-boarding process to make the app useful to ordinary Cameroonians.

We had two entrants from the Polish technology outfit — Scalac. We have been working with these fine people on more common software, RESTful services, ETL tools, etc. We’re glad to be part of their branching out into blockchain development. These teams were concentrating on visualization and analytics applications for blockchain data, both used ConseilJS.

Scalac1 created a translator between Micheline and Michelson and back using ConseilJS. This is a very useful debugging tool for smart contract developers as well as tooling providers. Michelson code has to be converted to Micheline format before it is deployed and Michelson converted back to Michelson when data is read from Tezos nodes. Any failures in these conversion processes can be diagnosed using the tool.

Scalac2 worked on a dashboard of multiple visualizations using Conseil / ConseilJS. These included the top transaction senders and receivers, transactions by day and transactions by time of the day. As these charts are tuned further, this dashboard could become a great summary report for Tezos users.

An internal group, Team Poggers, also worked on data visualizations using Conseil / ConseilJS. They hope to keep running with this project and create a full-fledged Tezos dashboard with multiple d3.js visualizations.

All completed projects either worked with Tezos blockchain data or made regular blockchain transactions. The other teams attempted to work directly on the blockchain with custom smart contracts to build decentralized apps. For example, Team Sixfortynine attempted to build a fantasy stock market for the 2020 U.S. presidential election while B.A.G. Labs attempted to create an economic layer to increase public node availability. Once smart contract languages for Tezos, especially SmartPy and the LIGO family, become more mature dApp creators will fare much better.

During the hackathon smart contract developers identified several small issues with ConseilJS and SmartPy. An updated beta of ConseilJS was released earlier in the week to address the findings. The is a new test release of SmartPy as well. This was an invaluable experience for us for the sort of feedback we received.

The work done by the two teams from Cameroon was especially inspiring. Having learnt about Tezos just a month before the hackathon, they were still able to build useful, stable and well-functioning projects over a weekend. Throughout the event, they asked incisive questions and keep the community abreast of their latest developments through Twitter.

We couldn’t agree more!

The whole weekend was a real rush for us. Both the Tezos platform and our tool stack have reached the point where regular developers can start feasibly working with them. With some improvements to the smart contract languages, we could soon start seeing a plethora of Tezos-based apps coming out. Suffice to say, we can’t wait to organize our next hackathon!