State of the Ledger 2018

Blockchain at Berkeley recently celebrated its 2nd anniversary, and we would like to look back at what we have done over the past year. Thanks to the endless effort from our members and the support from our community, Blockchain at Berkeley has quickly evolved into the largest and most impactful collegiate blockchain organization in the world.

Through the passion and dedication of team members from Blockchain at Berkeley, the organization has gone a long way in defining a new industry standard for blockchain education, research, and consulting.

This article is an overview of Blockchain at Berkeley, the highlights from the past year, and our vision for 2019. To see how much we’ve grown, take a look at our State of the Ledger from 2017.

Who Are We?

Blockchain at Berkeley (B@B) is a student-run organization at UC Berkeley dedicated to serving the crypto and blockchain communities. Our members are comprised of 100+ undergraduate and graduate students from Berkeley Engineering, Haas, and Boalt Law, and a wealth of advisors from both industry and academia.

Table of Contents

Below are some of B@B’s highlights from 2018. — Continue reading below for more details about each of these categories:

• UC Berkeley Courses and Online Educational Offerings
• Berkeley Bitcoin Meetup
• Research & Development
• Consulting
• Design
• Offshoot Organizations
• Conferences and Hackathons
• Jobs and Career Development

UC Berkeley Courses and Online Educational Offerings

In 2018, B@B designed and taught for-credit courses about blockchain and cryptocurrencies at UC Berkeley. Our courses are some of the most in-demand student-run offerings on campus. They are completely free and open source with a goal to educate the public about blockchain:

• Blockchain Technology and Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies on edX: these courses are developed by Blockchain at Berkeley and faculty from UC Berkeley’s Computer Science department. With 58,000 students attending online from 192 countries, these courses, which can also be found on YouTube, teach students about the basic properties, intents, and mechanisms of blockchain, distributed consensus, and various enterprise-level blockchain implementations. Course produced by Rustie Lin and others.
• Blockchain Fundamentals: A comprehensive survey course of interdisciplinary topics bridging the technical and non-technical spheres of the industry. Topics range from game theory, economics, and finance to cryptography and distributed systems. The course has been translated into Korean, Chinese, and Spanish by various organizations. Lectured by Gloria Zhao, Gillian Chu, and Brian Ho. Course Staff includes Alan Lai, Tim Huang, Roshni Rwal, Oscar Chaix, Justin Yu, and Faiz Moosa.
• Blockchain for Developers: A course targeted to students with a programming background. It focuses on getting individuals up to speed with developing technical solutions; ramping up from prototyping to the testing and deployment stages at a break-neck pace. Lectures by Akash Khosla and Nick Zoghb.

Berkeley Bitcoin Meetup

Organized by Anthony DiPrinzio and Ronen Kirsh, the Meetup program is a place for B@B members and the community to engage in hands-on technical workshops and openly discuss advanced topics relating to blockchain technology and decentralized systems. These insightful and comprehensive technical workshops are primarily geared toward developers.

Past guest speakers include Stefan Thomas and Ben Sharafian from Coil, Alex Skidanov from Near Protocol, Dawn Song from Oasis Labs, Elaine Shi from Thunder Token, and many more. Join our Meetup page for more information on past and future events.

Our Research & Development department hosted a total of 30 community meetups in 2018, revolving around innovative topics in crypto and blockchain.

Research & Development

Besides our initiatives in education, we have also put in a lot of effort in conducting original academic research on various topics in the field. Here are some of the highlights of our accomplishments of the past year:

• FourthState: A company working on Plasma, a layer two solution to reduce transaction fees and increase scalability of blockchains. The implementation of Plasma promises the necessary speed for mass blockchain adoption with the flexibility for multitudes of applications.
• Drect.ly: A new infrastructure for sending roaming records without relying on third parties. Drect.ly was started by Christian Keil, Saroj Chintakrindi, and Ravi Jotwani last winter. This project won the ConsenSys MBA Venture competition, the Top Tech award, and the Frontier Innovation award.
• Partial f: A startup that is building tokenized derivatives on how to hedge against Bitcoin price risk. Research conducted by Sebastian Isaacs, Joseph Plaza, Kochise Bennett, Luke Strgar, and Andrew Tu.
• Research and Development with Berkeley professors: Our top developers conduct research work with UC Berkeley professors, Alessandro Chiesa (co-founder of ZCash) and Dawn Song (a MacArthur Fellow involved with the IC3, Initiative For Cryptocurrencies & Contracts).
• Blockchain and Energy: Scott Moura helped develop a proposal for “Blockchain for Smart Energy” with UC Berkeley PhD candidates Jonathan Mather and Eric Munsing. This project was awarded for Excellence in Power Access & Exchange by the Chinese manufacturing giant, Wanxiang Group Corporation.
• Zexe: A ledger-based system where users can execute offline computations and subsequently produce transactions, attesting to the correctness of these computations, that satisfy two main properties. Research conducted by Howard Wu, Alessandro Chiesa and more.
• Interledger Protocol: Akash Khosla, Nicolas Zoghb, Nishaad Navkal, Wesley Graham, and Anthony DiPrinzio are working to improve the existing implementation of the Interledger Protocol. With it, they will be designing projects related to onion routing, fee markets, optimizing packet routing, and network effects.
• MOBI: Co-founded by B@B member Ashley Lannquist, MOBI is a nonprofit organization working with forward-thinking companies, governments, and NGOs to make mobility services more efficient, more affordable, greener, safer, and less congested by setting standards and accelerating adoption of blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies.

Internal research projects in progress by members of our education department:

• Cryptosystems: An investigation into the math behind various cryptographic protocols, and implementation — available on the Blockchain at Berkeley GitHub.
• Financial Instrumentation: Looking at the benefits of putting the bond derivatives market onto the blockchain, with a thorough analysis of current market research.
• Cosmos/Tendermint Course: Designing a course to help someone in the blockchain industry understand the building blocks of Cosmos and Tendermint and how to develop using the Cosmos SDK.

Consulting

B@B’s consulting division provides consulting services to Fortune 500 organizations and established blockchain projects. Offerings range from technical Proof of Concepts to advisory and consultation. We work closely with clients who are seeking to better understand and implement blockchain-based solutions, and provide clients with a full suite of resources, education, and access to our qualified consultant and developer pool.

Each semester, select members are presented with the opportunity to build internal consulting projects to be showcased to B@B’s greater community. Below is a snippet of present projects:

• Blockchain and Energy — LCFS issue and trade: Building on a previous B@B research project, this project focuses on the specific challenges of provenance and privacy facing the implementation of blockchain within the energy sector.
• Blockchain Interoperability and Finance: Focusing on trying to bridge the gap between the unbanked and crypto holders, this project is trying to provide a quick and easy way to send crypto to local social enterprise organizations.
• Blockchain for Social Impact — Digital Identity: This project is exploring ways in which Blockchain can be used to create a persistent digital identity for the homeless population, in order to create an easier path out of chronic homelessness.
• Blockchain for Housing Agreements: This project is designed to address the issue of task completions in housing situations, making it easier to keep track of task history and payment reliability.

Design team photo

Design

Noticing the need for graphic and UI/UX designers to push for further blockchain adaptation, we started our Design Department in Fall 2018. Tackling the question of what it means to be designing for blockchain, the team functions as an internal department and is projected to develop into a standalone consultancy.

For this semester, Design department has three main projects:

• Collaboration with B@B Education Department: The Design x Education team is working on revitalizing existing course material for the Blockchain Fundamentals DeCal. Apart from creating slide deck templates, the project aims to make blockchain education material accessible and easy-to-understand; the team is focusing on creating readable icons and illustrations to convey blockchain concepts to students with little background knowledge.
• UI/UX Research: The UI/UX team is working to prototype our own ideal version of what a software wallet should look like. Conducting extensive research and analyzing the pain points of current wallet designs, the project is focused on answering major design questions related to transparency and readability of the interface.
• Design Website: The Web Design team is designing and developing an online portfolio as a platform to showcase department projects. Comprised of 7 designers and programmers, the team is building its website from scratch using primarily ReactJS and custom animation libraries.

One of our many offshoot organizations

Offshoot Organizations

With the ceaseless effort to make an impact in the decentralized community, our members have founded various organizations this past year to offer additional blockchain and crypto-related services.

• Dekrypt Capital: Dekrypt Capital is a leading investment firm founded by former B@B members Jon Allen, Ronen Kirsh and Howard Wu. The firm is focused on blockchain infrastructure, privacy-preserving technologies, and early-stage ventures. They invest in, mentor, and accelerate teams developing novel solutions to address the core issues of scalability, privacy, and interoperability for decentralized protocols and applications.
• She(256): A nonprofit that is breaking down entry barriers and increasing diversity in the blockchain space. Started in February of 2018 by four B@B members (Alexis Gauba, Medha Kothari, Sara Reynolds, and Mashiat Mutmainnah), She(256) held their inaugural conference last Spring, recently launched a mentorship program (she256.io/mentorship) with 400+ people, started the #HowDoYouShape campaign, and lots more exciting initiatives coming soon!
• Mechanism Labs: A set of open source research experiments currently focused on distributed consensus and scaling founded by Alexis Gauba, Zubin Koticha, Maaz Uddin, and Aparna Krishnan.
• Autocomm I/O: Griffin Haskins and Eric Hou are building a secure IoT execution platform that allows companies to deploy their IoT applications directly to their edge devices instead of to the cloud. This platform ultimately saves companies with edge deployments up to 80% of their recurring costs per year in network, cloud, and infrastructure fees.
• The Blockchain Campus: A global academic network of blockchain organizations founded by Blockchain at Berkeley members, Annie Yi Chen and Anthony DiPrinzio. The initiative currently seeks to provide educational resources as well as professional advisory programs to entities ranging from student organizations to well-established blockchain labs. Ultimately, TBC aspires to gather the best university research institutions in blockchain and drive forth innovation in this cutting-edge industry.
• Argus: An ICO and Smart Contract Auditing service by developers Collin Chin, Ali Mousa, Raymond Chu, Howard Wu, and Pranav Gaddamadugu.

Conferences and Hackathons

We members helped organize major blockchain conferences, hosting speakers from cutting-edge blockchain and governmental organizations:

• SFBW: San Francisco Blockchain Week was a week-long event including ETHSF, Epicenter, and Cryptoeconomics Security Conference (CESC) that brought the world’s blockchain community together for educational events focused on consumer adoption, technical innovation, and insight from blockchain leaders in academics and industry.
• She256 at UC Berkeley: This conference highlights existing diversity and opportunity by breaking down the entry barriers in the blockchain space. It featured women at the forefront of blockchain academia, industry, ground-breaking research, protocols, and specific applications of blockchain, especially in projects that are led by women in the space.
• BuildETH: An Ethereum Developer Conference for Building Decentralized Applications. The goal of BuildETH is simple — inspire developers to build decentralized applications by bringing together the best speakers and sponsors for a single day of talks, introductory workshops, and expert sessions. Organized by Wesley Graham, Cliff Ahn, and Maggie Valentine.

In 2018, our members were invited to speak at blockchain conferences near and far, sharing the stage with industry figureheads like Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, and Brian Behlendorf:

• SFBW: B@B members Anthony DiPrinzio, Wesley Graham, Alexis Gauba, Akash Khosla, Aparna Krishnan, Howard Wu, Ronen Kirsh, Jon Allen, and Sunny Agarwal were speakers, panel moderators, and workshop presenters at San Francisco Blockchain Week.

Many of our members took their blockchain development skills to hackathons in the blockchain and general tech community.

• ETHDenver: The largest Ethereum based #buidlathon in the world for Ethereum enthusiasts and developers. Gillian Chu and Brian Ho built a chrome extension plugin that would allow people to submit bounties in cryptocurrency for answers to their Stack Overflow questions and posts.
• unBlock Hackathon: Alan Lai and Leland Lee built a smart contract that allows individuals with only DAI in their wallets to transact on the Ethereum network. The project, Pay-with-Dai, won third place at the hackathon.
• Consensys MBA Blockchain Ventures Hackathon: Some Blockchain at Berkeley members partnered with Berkeley Haas MBA candidates to compete and advance to the second round of this hackathon.
• Ethereal Summit and Ethereal SF: Two Blockchain at Berkeley projects placed in the top three at Ethereal Summit, and were invited to present at Ethereal SF in front of Joseph Lubin and Bryan Johnson.
• CalHacks: Many Blockchain at Berkeley members participated as hackers and mentors at the world’s largest collegiate hackathon held at UC Berkeley.
• EthWaterloo: Gillian Chu worked on a project called CitETHzen, a way for undocumented immigrants to commit their tax payments to an escrow smart contract account.

Jobs and Career Development

B@B provide lots of job opportunities and career guidance to its members. In 2018, B@B members are working at top companies!

Want to know more about Blockchain at Berkeley and connect with us?

Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

YouTube: Our YouTube Channel features notable videos from our conferences, meetups, whitepaper circles, deep dives, and lectures.

Discord: In an effort to further grow our community, we have decided to move forward with a switch to Discord. We hope to be a center of blockchain discussion for anyone and everyone! Expect resources on relevant topics, direct connection to Blockchain at Berkeley members, daily trivia questions, information on upcoming events, and more! Join here.

UC Berkeley Students: Our Spring 2019 recruitment cycle and course enrollment offerings are coming up soon! Stay updated about application deadlines for both on our Facebook page and Twitter.

Educational Inquiries: education@blockchain.berkeley.edu

Consulting Inquiries: consulting@blockchain.berkeley.edu

Research Inquiries: research@blockchain.berkeley.edu

News and Media Inquiries: marketing@blockchain.berkeley.edu