Open Source development works!

By Max Grabner & Christopher Chung

We recently hosted a hackathon for participants to build on our open source Ion framework. The event was a great success and we will write more about our takeaways and the outcomes in due course, but first, we would like to thank all the participants for not only attending but also putting their bright minds to work and showing that open development really does work!

There were some great ideas, implementations and contributions to the Ion framework which will help us, not only Clearmatics, but the continued collaborative development of interoperable systems and applications.

Our friends at Adhara definitely exhibited great creativity and understanding whilst using the Ion framework. Crucially, the work they developed highlighted the need for further efficiencies in the Ethereum implementation of Ion.

Some bright and motivated A level students from Bedford School were one of the teams and they raised issues in our GitHub repository, and even wrote a pull request.

The first issue they spotted is that the command line interface we wrote for Ion fails to compile unless the contract name is the file name. While it is not a usual convention to name a contract a different name to the file, this raises and important point around robustness of systems and the unknown unknown. You can always rely on the sharp minds of the young to think differently.

The second issue they raised was around using the Ganache environment and the consensus mechanism used by the blockchain, versus the consensus mechanism that are currently supported by the Ion framework. This usage → feature request → roadmap and prioritisation is a great user-driven process.

Notably, no vulnerabilities were discovered in the Ion framework itself and we are really looking forward to seeing the output of the Ethereum communities work at ETHDenver.

Stay tuned for more!

Max Grabner, Blockchain Engineer, Clearmatics

Christopher Chung, Blockchain Engineer, Clearmatics