Winning at the EOS London Hackathon (2nd & Best UX)
It’s not every day that I find myself in front of a crowd~700 strong, plus however many thousands tuned in via a YouTube live stream. The previous 24 hours were a blur of brainstorming, designing, coding, and caffeine. Then came the 3-minute closed-door demonstration to a group of 3 judges that would decide which of the ~450 participants across ~90 teams would make it into the top 10 and present on the main stage.
Block.one, the creator of the EOS blockchain, announced a 4-hackathon series back in April that would culminate in a Grand Finale made of the winners from each hackathon. Each hackathon, spaced ~2 months apart, would have its own ‘challenge’. In London, the challenge was “Create an application on the EOSIO platform that improves the relationship between technology and a user’s privacy or security”. You can read about my experience at the first hackathon, in Hong Kong, here.
The entire hackathon and several hundred spectators crammed into the iMax theater to view or participate in the final presentations. Finalist teams were not told ahead of time that they were selected and were announced in waves of 3 or 4 at a time. We were hopeful, but pretty nervous when we weren’t called in the first two waves. They called Team Chestnut in the last wave and we were elated. Even making it into the top 10 is quite an achievement and an honor. Our presentation went well and we were asked some smart questions by Daniel Larimer, lead developer of the EOS blockchain.
Winning 2nd Place & Best UX
Our first indication that something special might be happening was when we were called back on stage to accept the superlative award for Best UX. Shortly thereafter, we won 2nd Place Overall and a chance to compete in the Grand Finale in South Africa in December. What a rush!
The 1st place winner was a team of two who built a reputation and identity verification protocol. Their pitch was flawless and the announcer proclaimed that they won with the most unanimous decision of the entire hackathon series. The 3d place winner built an identity passport with which the user can control who has access.
Our fantastic team came together earlier this year when we all happened to be living in Bali and bonded over our shared love of blockchain. I loved every minute of working with them!
What we built
We at Team Chestnut believe that widespread adoption of blockchain technology is only going to happen when we develop Smart Accounts with similar security and protections that exist in the current banking system. However, with blockchain accounts, there is no 3rd party intermediary monitoring your transactions, deciding whether or not they are acceptable. And that’s sort of the point. However, there is no recourse if you accidentally send 10k EOS instead of 1k EOS or if you accidentally send crypto to the wrong address.
Unlike the current banking system, Chestnut Accounts enable a user to cut out the intermediary (bank) and use a smart contract to set their own preferences, including daily spending limits, blacklisted/whitelisted accounts, and time-based transaction limits.
A Chestnut Account is a multi-sig account, which means multiple signatures are required for any transaction to occur. The owner of the account controls one of those signatures and a Chestnut Smart Contract owns the other signature. Whenever a transaction occurs, Chestnut compares the transaction against the predefined user thresholds and signs the transaction if it aligns with the user preference, but doesn’t sign if it falls outside of the acceptable parameters.
What are the keys to winning an EOS hackathon?
What does it take to win an EOS hackathon? I don’t think it’s a swat team of developers. We had a fantastic team with a diverse skill set and I was the only one who actually wrote code. You should try to have as many of the following as you can: a great team with a diverse skillset, an important problem you’re solving, a well-thought product to solve that problem, a beautiful design with an intuitive UX, and someone that can pitch your prototype and stand out from the crowd. We were lucky enough to have all of them.
You do also need to be able to build a working prototype of your product with an integrated smart contract, so you’ll need a developer(s) that can code a frontend and who knows C++ for the smart contract. The boilerplate is written with React and Demux draws a lot of inspiration from Redux, so bonus points for knowing those.
The Hackathon Itself
If you’ve ever been to a hackathon, you probably experienced all-night coding in a large commercial room with 50–100 participants and little fanfare. Maybe there was decent food, but most likely it was simply pizza, soda and water.
EOS hackathons are nothing like that. It was held in the London Science Museum and we were on the antique airplane floor. We were literally surrounded by massive airplanes in every shape and color. It was beautiful and inspiring. The food was gourmet and they served espresso. They even had an entire floor dedicated to sleeping, which was full of bean bags. The provided swag was also impressive and included a Patagonia sweater, portable battery charger, Moleskine, and toiletries.
During the hackathon, they held breakout sessions for smart contract development, for frontend development, for design, and for pitching. There were also countless mentors specializing in development, design, and business. The mentors were a fantastic resource, especially for developers who were building on EOS for the first time. It was easy to flag them down and there was also a hotline via Slack where you could request a mentor to your table. Having this quantity of experts available during a hackathon is incredibly unique and is probably the most valuable element of the entire event. We also collaborated with other teams to refine our idea/product, exchange technical know-how and practice our pitch.
There is one more EOS hackathon that’s part of this series, which will be in San Francisco on November 10th. I highly recommend that you attend if you can. The Grand Finale, which is an incubation week and demo, will also be held in early December, but only the top 3 teams + the social impact winner from each hackathon will be attending. By placing 2nd in London, we’ve also locked in a spot at the Grand Finale!
What’s next?
Since winning at the hackathon, we’ve received an incredible amount of positive reinforcement and interest in helping us continue to build Chestnut into a real company. We think that this is essential infrastructure on the path to widespread adoption and we are proud to be working on something so important. We’re hoping that participating in the EOS Grand Finale in December will springboard us into a leading EOS infrastructure project. If you’d like to be kept in the loop, be sure to sign up on our website by clicking here!
Let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in a technical article about the dapp we built for the hackathon. We’re in the early innings and we’d love to chat with you about partnering or joining our cause!
