Ethereal Virtual Hacking
Affogato Team Experience
The Ethereal Virtual Hackathon was a joint production between Gitcoin and Microsoft’s blockchain group, in advance of the Ethereal Summit. It was running from April 15 — April 30th where hackers could pick from the many bounties associated with sponsored products.
Affogato is a startup working to disrupt the coffee industry using Ethereum to empower farmers, and give them access to decentralized finance. This post narrates the experience we had hacking at Ethereal Virtual Hackathon.
The Planning
We are a small team (3 devs and 1 biz), so if we wanted to participate, we would need to focus. The first thing that we did as a Team was to make a bet. Stop working on non-critical stuff so we could land some bounties that could help us keep bootstrapping our startup and make some noise about Affogato.
Once we were 100% committed we did the following:
- Created a specific Slack channel where we could share links, ideas, and debates.
- Discussed and selected the top ideas (we like to hack on things related to our company).
- Analyzed the Sponsors and Bounties that would be a good fit for our mission.
- Committed to one idea.
We decided to build a Peer to Peer lending platform where the debt is backed by friends, family or people that trust in the borrower. The end goal was to use xDAI chain to provide fast transactions and stability. The project was a perfect match for coffee farmers and the bounties of POA and ConsenSys Labs.
The Hacking
For coding, we decided to implement the same system that we use for Affogato. A 15 min. daily, Trello boards, Github and basic Continuous Integration for the Frontend.
For hackathons we usually avoid doing Test Driven Development, but since we were building a lending platform we wanted to minimize bugs. We divided our roles as:
- Frontend Development
- Smart Contract Development
- Dual (Frontend & Smart Contract)
- Research, Presentations, and Submissions
The Submission
We made a few mistakes in this part. I’ve used Gitcoin a few times, so I assumed we just had to submit the bounty with a link to our repo. Just a few hours before the deadline, we noticed that each sponsor had different rules, so we had to rush to comply with their submission processes.
In the end, everything went well. We were able to submit our project and even win the best research on ConsenSys and best dApp on POA bounties.
You can see a resume of our hack and demo in the following slides:
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