Coding under pressure.

Last Weekend, Matryx sponsored SDHacks, a relatively new MLH hackathon based in our hometown of San Diego. As a team, Matryx has always been deeply invested in the San Diego community, as it is home to our friends, partners, and clients in nascent technology. This year at SDHacks was special because of our increased involvement. Each year has reaffirmed our commitment to the San Diego community and made us strive to be more involved the following year.

The team and I were extremely impressed by the groups developing in our project category- the intersection of VR and blockchain. There were three groups that ended up submitting projects in the end. We’re stoked to share their creations with the Matryx community.

Blockchain at Berkley, the only group with prior experience developing in Solidity, went with a security-focused approach and implemented a withdraw function to avoid reentrance attacks as well as other features like double-vote checking.

Another group focused primarily on the scalability of a Matryx-like economy in implementing a working multi-contract system, which separated problems and submissions into independent contracts.

Neither of these two groups, however, was able to put together a front end web portal to interact with their contracts. This is what made our third group so impressive. Not to mention it only consisted of one person, Omar Ozgur. He kept everything as one contract and omitted some of the problem-submissions structure we’d hoped to see, but he had quite an impressive JSON-RPC-inducing front end through the use of Web3.js. We ended up choosing his hack in the end because despite the lack of features, the system was the most complete and usable. I should note he had never before written a line of Solidity in his life: Omar was more than deserving of his 2ETH of MTX and Oculus Rift prize package.

Keita (COO), winner Omar Ozgur, and I.

I learned quite a bit myself just by helping these teams out. The determinism to learn something extraordinary was strong among everyone, myself included. It was so much fun that I actually ended up staying at the event until around 2 AM to work with the groups developing for our project category. SDHacks was an absolute blast and I hope that everyone who worked on the blockchain category recognizes the sheer amount of technical growth and problem-solving they underwent.

When SDHacks first started a couple of years ago, our CEO Steve McCloskey was one of two developers with an early Oculus DK2. But the times have changed. This year, the Matryx tent alone had four Oculus Rifts, alongside a handful of other VR projects across the event. If this explosion of VR interest and devs at SDHacks is any way comparable, we can’t wait to see what sort of blockchain projects SDHacks’ future holds. We are very much looking forward to next year!