State of the Ledger 2020
Letter from the Presidents
The past year has been difficult for almost everyone in the world, and as a globally distributed team, we certainly have not been immune to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these impacts, Blockchain at Berkeley has continued to push on and grow tremendously, upholding our members’ commitment to making an impact. From donating over $12,000 to COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter related causes, doubling the size of our Community Node Initiative, and building amazing projects within the community, our members have been busy.
Continue reading below to see how current and past Blockchain at Berkeley (B@B) members have contributed to the development of the blockchain ecosystem, and leveraged the technology to fix issues that are most pressing in our global society.
Best regards,
Liam DiGregorio (‘21) and Ayush Aggarwal (‘22)
Table of Contents
- New Members in 2020
- Consulting Department
- Design Department
- Education Department
- B@B Labs
- Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator
- Community Initiatives
- Offshoot Organizations
- Meetups
- Conferences and Hackathons
- Blockchain at Berkeley Alumni Association
- Jobs and Career Development
- Blockchain at Berkeley in the Media
- Want to Stay Connected?
New Members in 2020
B@B is proud to have 35 new members join in 2020, 16 in the spring and 19 in the fall. These new members, or B@Bies as we like to call them, have shown passion and a desire to learn and grow in their blockchain knowledge, and we cannot wait to see how they grow during their time in B@B and beyond.
Despite the majority of the spring semester being online and both recruitment and the fall semester being completely virtual, our more senior members, alumni, and new recruits all went above and beyond to make sure this did not prevent learning, growing, and bonds from being cemented.
Consulting Department
B@B’s consulting division provides consulting services to Fortune 500 organizations, established blockchain projects, and global non-profit organizations. Offerings range from developing technical proof of concepts (PoCs), advisory and consultation, to developing production ready applications. 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. Since March 2020, we have successfully transitioned to an online format, with all of our consultants operating remotely with no impact on final deliverables and client interaction. In Fall 2020, our consultants were able to kick off two external projects completely remote, and are currently in the midst of final deliverables and client handoffs.
Spring 2020 Internal Projects
CoinStart: CoinStart mirrors the functionality of crowdfunding platforms such as KickStarter while trying to solve the problem of accountability and high fees. Funds raised by donors are held in smart contracts and released conditionally based on whether funding goals and milestones are met. Half of the funds are immediately released upon reaching the funding goal while the rest are locked until a predetermined midpoint and released by a vote from the donors, where votes are weighted based on the amount donated. Thus, the donors have a safety net in case the founder is fraudulent or fails to deliver on their promises while the founder gains more credibility and funding due to the voting mechanism and elimination of high fees from third party payment providers.
MicroGrid: MicroGrid is a service that enables P2P energy sharing. Users are able to sell excess energy they produce to neighbors on the grid by managing rights and transactions on the Energy Web Chain.
Spring 2020 External Projects
Oasis Labs: Blockchain at Berkeley has been long-time fans and supporters of Oasis Labs and jumped at the opportunity to work together. The OasisxB@B team, consisting of business consultants, developers, and designers, was able to test-drive the Oasis Parcel API and Oasis Steward user interface by designing a data marketplace and rewards system in order to give users full control over their data.
Fall 2020 Internal Projects
COVID-19 Supply Chain: Currently, the vaccine supply chain is poorly monitored, with potential for theft and fraudulent vaccines in every step of the distribution. We developed a blockchain based solution that verifies vaccines and records distribution history, which can be accessed by the public. Our solution allows for the rapid and robust distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to the general public.
Factorization: We have created an on-demand blockchain-based payout system for accrued but unpaid wages. This project is focused on addressing the financial burden that employees living paycheck to paycheck must face. It is a factorization platform addressing the issues of employee turnover, expensive loans, and disorganized payouts through the application of ethereum smart contracts.
Fall 2020 External Projects
OKCoin: The OKCoin team, consisting of business consultants, developers, and a designer, are working with OKCoin to create a DEX Aggregator. The goal of this DEX (decentralized exchange) Aggregator is to be extremely clear and easy to use no matter one’s background knowledge of cryptocurrencies, to facilitate the swaps of selected tokens, and to become the preferred fiat on and off ramp of DeFi traders. By conducting market research, carefully choosing the initial incentive mechanisms and planning a go-to-market strategy, this DEX aggregator will be able to be launched as a product endorsed and supported by OKCoin.
Dapper Labs: Our Dapper Labs project team built a DEX on Dapper’s Flow Blockchain, their new Layer 1. For new blockchain like Flow, a DEX is absolutely essential in fostering a token ecosystem. We built an AMM (Automated Market Maker) DEX on Flow that was modeled off of Uniswap’s core principles. By the end of the project, developers had built a prototype that supported liquidity provision and swapping, business consultants created a product design and strategy for the DEX’s growth based off of interviews with industry figures (from the likes of Uniswapand Sushiswap among others), and our designer created complete product mockups and a brand image for the DEX — we chose to brand as peacock.exchange!
Design Department
The Design department has been working closely with other departments and strengthening its own in terms of design principles and curriculum. Alongside work on B@B’s external consulting projects and educational initiatives, the department has been working on an internal, design-specific curriculum that focuses on designing blockchain applications for mass adoption. Some underlying UX goals we’ve defined and actively strive to communicate are trust, security, reliability, and optional anonymity. Ideally, a user-friendly, accessible blockchain application will signal these items to users without requiring technical knowledge surrounding blockchain or even knowing that the backbone of their application relies on blockchain. We’re hoping to release this curriculum publicly once it’s refined and polished during the spring of 2021!
Education Department
The education department serves the blockchain community through teaching accessible, open-source, world-class blockchain education courses, free of charge, both in-person and online. Education members seek to grow and contribute to the growth of others through their research, projects, and teaching of classes on blockchain fundamentals and development, all of which have been recognized by many organizations for their quality and value.
Education Department Projects
Blockchain Fundamentals Webinar: Due to the circumstances of COVID-19 and its virtual nature, the Education department offered a free, public webinar on Blockchain Fundamentals, over the course of 10 weeks. The course engaged more than 800 students from across the globe, and brought in more than 15 certified lecturers from Blockchain at Berkeley. In addition, the webinar was enhanced by correlated guest industry speakers, including: Catherine Coley (CEO of Binance.US), Austin Griffith (Founder of eth.build) and more. After attending the webinar series, many students have given positive feedback on how the course gave them more confidence to start their career in blockchain. We are ecstatic to have made a difference in our students’ journeys in blockchain through sharing our educational resources. We will be offering our Blockchain Fundamentals Course to UC Berkeley students in Spring 2021. Find our recordings of the lecture and industry talks here. Course staff include: Janice Ng (‘21), Andrew Kirillov (‘22), Sehyun Chung (‘23), and Erika Badalyan (‘22).
EdX: Blockchain Technology and Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies on edX: Our two courses on edX developed by Blockchain at Berkeley and faculty from UC Berkeley’s Computer Science department have reached over 160,000 students from over 193 countries. Our courses are aimed to teach students about basic properties, mechanisms of blockchain, distributed consensus, and various enterprise-level blockchain implementations. Course staff include: Rustie Lin (‘19), Gloria Wang (‘20), Nadir Akhtar (‘20), Janice Ng (‘21), Jennifer Hu (‘21).
Stablesims project: On March 12th, 2020, the Maker Protocol experienced what has since been referred to as its “Black Thursday” event. On this day, the price of ETH dropped by ~50%, leading to widespread liquidation of ETH-collateralized vaults. As DAI liquidity was siphoned from the market to place bids on the ensuing auctions, a couple of Auction Keepers managed to place multiple uncontested zero-bids and walk away with ~$8.32M in ETH for free.
Our response, like that of many others, was “what could Maker have done differently?” However, no matter what idea we came up with, we had no way to test it, and compare results to other hypotheses. To tackle this, we created StableSims: an off-chain, agent-based simulation of the Maker Protocol, running on top of the Maker source code itself (rewritten in Python). We’ve successfully replicated the events of Black Thursday using historical price data and our own Keeper models, serving as a strong proof-of-concept for agent-based simulation as a means of experimentation. We’ve since moved on to testing our own hypotheses: using Dutch auctions rather than English auctions, allowing constant MKR minting/burning instead of only through debt/surplus auctions, and native support for vault recollateralization using flash loans, to name a few.
We’ll be releasing a report with our findings soon, but for now you can keep up with our progress (and contribute!) on our Github repo. Project team: Sehyun Chung (‘23), Andrew Kirillov (‘22), Kentaro Vadney (‘23), Nathan Zhang (‘22), Solomon Joseph (‘21), James Dai (‘23).
Decentralized Index of Knowledge: The Decentralized Index of Knowledge (DIoK) is an open-source project focused on sharing knowledge and increasing structure in the learning process. We represent collections of learning resources as a graph, grouped by topic and ordered by pedagogical dependency. These graphs can either be parsed from GitHub awesome lists or downloaded from a decentralized storage like IPFS. Most recently, we’ve redesigned the user interface, to both streamline the user experience and allow users to simultaneously interact with multiple graphs. We’ve also been working on letting users track their learning progress; currently they can do so by interacting with code deployed on GitHub Actions, but we plan to move this logic to a smart contract.
Crash course project: Due to its grassroots origins, information about blockchain has been made relatively more available to developers and other technical-minded users dedicated to improving blockchain as a technology. However, as blockchain is relatively niche at the moment, not much outreach has been done to blockchain’s eventual audience — the mainstream public. If blockchains aim for mainstream usage, then people outside the industry must know what blockchains are and why they are worth using. Our team at Blockchain at Berkeley aims to try and fill in this gap a little by producing a series of articles that are specifically written to hopefully make blockchain more understandable and appealing to those who will eventually be the ones using the technology. We anticipate that our articles will be released around early January; please look forward to them!
Whitepaper Deep Dives: Over the summer, B@B’s YouTube page absolutely exploded as we brought back the highly popular Whitepaper Deep Dives of years past. 15 B@Bers teamed up and selected a cool whitepaper, researched deep into it, and delivered a 2 hour presentation to the others on Sundays. Topics ranged from IPFS and Filecoin to Augur and NEAR Protocol’s Sharding Design. You can view all of our published deep dives in this YouTube playlist.
DeFi Discussions: In the Fall 2020 semester, we took our famous whitepaper circles on a slightly different route. With the hype of DeFi summer, many B@Bers were looking for a way to cut through the hype and understand what DeFi was all about! Thus, we created Defi Discussions: a series of reading circles about DeFi where we brought friends from across the industry to chat with us about a new topic each week!
We started with core building blocks like stablecoins, DEXes, and lending, building in friends like Calvin Liu from Compound, Marc Zeller from Aave, and Bette Chen from Acala Network. As the semester progressed, we turned to more complex topics like elastic supply currency and options, where we were joined by friends like Clinton Bembry and Will Price of Yam and Alexis Gauba of Opyn. DeFi Discussions were a smashing success in giving B@Bers a primer of DeFi — stay tuned as we plan to make all resources open to all in our very own “DeFi Onboarding Guide”!
Dev DeCal Revamp: This semester we have worked to give our Blockchain for Developers DeCal course a facelift. We are adding a full-stack development project to teach students how to make DApps using industry standard tooling, and even plan to bring in guests who work on these resources. The course will be more compact, hands-on, and more enjoyable for students at Cal and online.
Chaincode Labs: Chaincode Labs is a Bitcoin research and development center, passionate about development progress of the Bitcoin network and providing resources for independent innovators in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Since 2016, Chaincode has hosted its residency program for engineers to develop experience with Bitcoin and Lightning Network protocol development. For the first time this year, they collaborated with university blockchain and Bitcoin organizations to expand educational outreach. Students from UC Berkeley, Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon University, and more, gathered for 5 weeks to deep dive into the technical details of Bitcoin through readings and discussions with Bitcoin core developers from Chaincode.
B@B Labs
At B@B, we largely work on semester long projects. For consulting engagements, this bounds our scope to about 14 weeks. While we deliver excellent code to our clients within this time frame, students within the club have expressed interest in working on semester-long exploratory projects, as opposed to the longer term research our Education department conducts. For this reason, we’ve started B@B Labs: a high speed prototyping lab within Blockchain at Berkeley. We’ve expanded this program to include collaboration with external clients for short term research.
B@B Labs Projects
B@BCoin: B@Bcoin is an internal cryptocurrency and incentive structure built on Ethereum with the ultimate goal of increasing member engagement in the organization. It has now been fully integrated into the B@B Member Portal and is actively being used to track and reward attendance for major club events.
Member Portal: We’ve built an internal portal to take attendance in a virtual environment. Our member portal is a one stop shop to see who is working on what in our organization, and it was built from scratch by our own members! We plan to integrate this portal with B@Bcoin and a public facing tracker to document our open source contributions.
DFINITY: We are working with DFINITY to create an image and video sharing application similar to YouTube or Instagram. We explored several unique features of the Internet Computer from using inter-canister calls, to recommend videos from friends on LinkedUp (an open-sourced LinkedIn), to using the BigMap and BigSearch canisters to store and search through videos. We are using these services to implement transparent recommendation algorithms for our application.
UNICEF: Satchel is a mobile-optimized web application that we are building as volunteers for UNICEF. Satchel aims to bank underbanked communities that may lack access to stable financial climates, but have access to the internet by interacting with Compound, an Ethereum lending protocol to provide bank-like functionality. Satchel leverages a crowdfunding framework to combat hyperinflation and economic distrust by giving users banking functionality with the use of DAI. Satchel allows users to invest in both themselves and their local school, which operates as an economic hub for each community.
Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator
The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator is UC Berkeley’s blockchain startup accelerator that supports teams from around the world. We’ve taken 45 teams across three batches to great success — over 75% of our first batch raised follow-on-funding for a total of around $16M!
It’s been a busy year over at the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator. We hosted our largest and longest batch yet, providing world-class, non-dilutive support to 18 teams for over 8 months.
The Xcelerator is directed by UC Berkeley staff as well as Blockchain at Berkeley members. B@B members plan the operations, fundraising, and programming of the Xcelerator.
In addition, B@B members are paired with startups in the cohort through our fellowship program, who assist founders through the duration of the program. Not only does this help all companies in the cohort take full advantage of all the resources the Xcelerator has to offer, but it also gives the fellows a clearer understanding of the blockchain startup landscape and the journey of building a successful company in the blockchain space. Our founders have consistently ranked their interactions with B@B fellows as their favorite part of the program!
We are also thankful for B@B alums, who have generously offered their time to mentor companies by holding office hours and hosting pitch practice sessions.
To learn more about the Xcelerator’s year and what’s next for us, check out our 2020 Cohort Summary! And, if you are a blockchain startup interested in our Xcelerator and non-dilutive support & connections through B@B & the UC Berkeley ecosystem, apply to our next cohort offering in 2021 by the January 24, 2021.
Community Initiatives
A value of highest importance to Blockchain at Berkeley is that of giving back and contributing to the blockchain community. Contributing what one can is, after all, how the blockchain industry has advanced and continues to advance day after day. Here are two initiatives B@B started this year to do our part:
Community Node Initiative: The Community Node Initiative, which we launched over the summer, added three new names to the list of supported protocols: Oasis Labs, NuCypher, and Flow. Oasis Labs has always held a special place in our heart as the Co-Founder, Dawn Song, is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a strong supporter of Blockchain at Berkeley since day one. We believe in their mission to enhance privacy and are excited to be running an Oasis Validator since the recent launch of the mainnet in November 2020. We are also running a worker and staker node for the NuCypher network which is also trying to tackle privacy for the blockchain industry, which we have been big fans of since we first had the founder, MacLane Wilkison, join us for the Crypto Economics Security Conference. And last but certainly not least, we added Flow, by Dapper Labs to our program as we want to support a future where NFTs can easily be created, traded, and implemented into unique user experiences.
The Community Node Initiative was created in order to further support up-and-coming networks by participating in governance decisions and returning validator rewards back to the community in the form of grants. Our grants program will launch next year as our tokens mature with more information to come in the first half of next year. If you would like to know more about this program, please reach out to external@blockchain.berkeley.edu.
DeFi Governance/Delegation: Blockchain at Berkeley has been delegated 2.5M UNI and 50k COMP from a16z, making us a top 10 and top 14 voter on each platform, respectively. We are the first university organization participating in governance on this large of a scale.
B@B is taking a very interesting approach to this, discussing and debating our organizations’ votes internally amongst members, and explaining the rationale behind our votes and proposals via our twitter (@CalBlockchain), so that we stay true to our value of creating learning opportunities for all, in all areas of blockchain.
Offshoot Organizations
Our members are never short of great ideas. Always wanting to help others in the blockchain industry and beyond, our members are founding new initiatives and truly making a difference:
Dreambound: Dreambound (formerly known as Ladder) creates upward mobility for American job seekers and simplifies hiring for employers. They are helping job seekers become certified nursing assistants (CNAs), financing their tuition and placing them with employers immediately upon completion.
Aleo: Aleo has created the ultimate toolkit for building private applications. It is based on ZEXE, a decentralized computation protocol by UC Berkeley, John Hopkins, Cornell Tech, and Zcash Foundation.
Meetups
Blockchain at Berkeley takes pride in our meetups. It is a way to bring the community together and hear from the best in the blockchain industry. Whether it be a technical talk or a business talk, a renowned company or a new startup, there is something for everyone:
Silvio Micali: In a joint partnership between Blockchain at Berkeley and the Berkeley Haas Blockchain Initiative, Dr. Micali spoke to B@B’s newest members about his work at Algorand, his research on zero-knowledge proofs, and his perspective on the blockchain industry.
Mina Protocol: Overview of the Mina blockchain and explanation of its token grant program Genesis.
Icon: Discussion and overview about ICON and the ICON Network, and applied blockchain in business.
Insight: An introduction to DevOps, DevOps in the blockchain and consensus spaces, and gaining hands-on experience with common DevOps tools.
Truffle Suite: An overview of Truffle Suite’s flavors and integrations, as well as of Truffle Teams. Learning how smart contract development can be applicable to many different industries.
Lastbit: An overview of their Lightning wallet and the Lightning Network, as well as learning about Lastbit’s most recent developments.
Prysmatic Labs and Blockchain Acceleration Foundation: B@B Member Katherine Plotz (’22) moderated a discussion with Preston Van Loon of Prysmatic Labs about ETH 2.0.
Flow: A discussion of Flow, from its architecture to its Client Library, as well as an introduction of the Dapper Labs Ecosystem.
double jump.tokyo: An overview of double jump. tokyo, as well as learning about the important aspects of blockchain games. Discussing how NFTs, scaling, and the Ethereum ecosystem play a part in blockchain games.
Women of B@B Panel: Discussion of the experiences and perspectives of six women in the blockchain space.
Conferences and Hackathons
Oasis ROSE Hackathon: We were a community partner in Oasis’ ROSE Hackathon, where attendees build apps with the Parcel SDK or Oasis Ethereum ParaTime.
Unitize: Blockchain at Berkeley was a community partner of the Unitize Blockchain Conference, the largest online conference and partnership between San Francisco Blockchain Week and Blockshow.
Cal Hacks: Organized by UC Berkeley students, Cal Hacks is the world’s largest collegiate hackathon. A workshop on blockchain development was taught by our members Simon Guo (‘23), Grace Kull (‘22), and Ryan Adolf (‘23).
Behind the Chain: The Behind the Chain conference, organized by Sperax, consists of panels representing many different topics of importance in the blockchain industry, from stablecoins and decentralization to DeFi insecurities and scaling layer one. Blockchain at Berkeley members Katherine Plotz (‘22), Jacob Libenson (‘21), and Nishan D’Souza (’22) moderated panels on blockchain at universities, scaling layer-1, and interoperability, respectively.
UBRI Connect: UBRI (University Blockchain Research Initiative) Connect brings together and shares the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and fintech research and innovation conducted by the global network of leading universities. Blockchain at Berkeley members Sehyun Chun (’23) and Andrew Kirillov (’22) presented their StableSims project to over 3000 attendees.
Diplomado Professional Blockchain@Berkeley Fundamentals en Español: B@B members Liam DiGregorio (’21) and Nishan D’Souza(’22) presented at Cincel and Lumit’s Blockchain Fundamentals workshop. All of B@B’s education material on blockchain fundamentals was translated into Spanish.
Blockchain at Berkeley Alumni Association
Although a B@B member might graduate from UC Berkeley, they never truly leave the B@B family. From speaking to our members about career opportunities, to judging our infamous biannual blockchain debate, the B@B alumni community is always involved and welcome! A few examples of how they were involved this year include:
Former B@B president Gloria Zhao (’20) is inspiring and helping B@B members contribute to Bitcoin Core. You can read about her and her recent news (she is now the second female Bitcoin Core contributor and has just been awarded a fellowship by Brink to do so full-time upon graduation) here.
B@B alumni Akash Khosla (’19) spoke with our newest members early in the fall semester, to talk about his career path, experiences, and give advice about navigating the blockchain industry and how to make the most of your time in university and within B@B.
Jobs and Career Development
Our former B@B president, Gloria Zhao (’20), had a saying that still reigns true — in B@B, we help you get or create your dream job. Blockchain at Berkeley attracts the best talent, and as a result, are either working at the best companies, or founding companies of their own. Here is just a snippet of where our members are today:
Blockchain at Berkeley in the Media
Blockchain at Berkeley’s presence is ever-growing. Our YouTube videos are popular and referenced as terrific learning resources, and we have been featured by media outlets around the world. This includes, but is not limited to, being featured by CoinDesk as both a top university blockchain organization, and as the university-based organization with the highest industry reputation.
Want to stay connected?
Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
YouTube: Our YouTube Channel features videos from our lectures, meetups, conferences, Whitepaper Deep Dives, DeFi Discussions, and more.
Educational Inquires: education@blockchain.berkeley.edu
Consulting Inquiries: consulting@blockchain.berkeley.edu
News and Media Inquires: marketing@blockchain.berkeley.edu
