Community #1 - ETH Denver hackathon recap

Last week was full of excitement, frustration and celebrations, we participated in the ETH Denver hackathon!

Purpose for the hackathon

In our experience with Creaton’s pre-release version, we realized that fees will be a huge problem if not taken care of from the beginning.

Therefore, we decided to test and integrate technologies that provided faster & cheaper transaction fees during ETHDenver.

We successfully integrated:

• Polygon (Matic): A L2 solution that has faster & cheaper transactions than Mainnet ETH
• Biconomy: Abstracting away blockchain complexities related to gas-efficient meta-transactions (users pay no gas fee)
• Superfluid: Created a treasury architecture, enabling a small transaction fee while creators still directly get their income in real-time
• NuCypher: Implemented policy sponsorship separation contract (The subscriber pays for the NuCypher re-encryption costs instead of the creator, much more scalable)

Challenges

To integrate meta transactions with superfluid, we realized that superfluid contracts must support EIP-2771. Thanks to the great help of superfluid’s development team, they deployed their meta-tx compatible contracts both on Goerli and Mumbai. Our test shows that the integration is successful and meta transactions are now supported for our SuperApps as well.

Our design is such that each creator is associated with one smart contract on-chain and all the creator related data (e.g. posts, likes, streams, subscribers, post comments, etc.) are stored there. Since Biconomy needs to know in advance which contracts to support the gas fees for, we routed all our transactions through the admin contract in a proxy over proxy fashion; all while making sure that the original transaction sender cannot be tampered with.

Working with all the different technologies and protocols also presented us with other challenges in our development cycle. These included:

• Integrating Ceramic, it was working locally but it had build issues due to Rollup, a module bundler which can’t build/polyfill node packages well, therefore we’re transitioning to Webpack until packages are more compatible with the new web module builders.
• NuCypher isn’t on Polygon yet, but for the rest we have a fully scaled application.

We also tried using The Graph to index data on the blockchain, but Polygon wasn’t on The Graph yet, luckily now it is! This will help us a lot in order to minimize the data stored on-chain using cheaper events.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Now to the prizes…

We won both the Superfluid and Biconomy sponsorship prizes!

• For Superfluid we won the “Best App built with Superfluid” prize.
• For Biconomy we won the “Leverage Meta-Transactions” prize.

Finally, In the quadratic funding judging round, we finished in the top 10!

Upcoming

We are still aiming for a Q1 token + (stealth) beta DApp launch.

These are the points we’ll be working on pre-launch:

• Update our subgraph design and deploy it for Polygon.
• Cooperate with the NuCypher team to deploy NuCypher on Polygon.
• Make every post a NFT, indexable by The Graph
• Migrating from Svelte/Rollup to React/Webpack, although Svelte provides a great developer experience, we stumbled upon a lot of blockers with Rollup and to be as friendly for new open-source developers, React is a better choice.

Please, hold tight, we’re building on the cutting-edge of the cutting-edge!