This week I’m in Denver, Colorado with some friends to take part in the EthDenver conference 2019. So far we’ve been to 2 workshops and one presentation.

The first workshop was in the morning and was hosted by Chainshot, using their very own classroom software. The workshop was about MerkleTrees and involved a live-coding experience where we had to implement our own functions to determine the merkle root of a collection of nodes, and also how to prove that a specific leaf exists in a merkle tree. The workshop took around 2 hours and was well paced. The software we were using, developed by chainshot allowed us to see on screen what the instructor had written, and to run their pre-defined unit tests against our solutions, at each stage of the walkthrough.

The second workshop was about the ERC721 standard, what ERC means and eventually a coding session where we went wrote our own Pokemon related non-fungible ERC-721 compliant token.

We then went to a presentation about an incentivisation project in the phillipines, using blockchain as a means of holding funds in eskrow and paying out after proof that the particular bounty has been satisfied, in this example an Ethereum smart contract was used to store funds until proof that a beach had been cleared of garbage. Incentivising this activity lead to 3.3 tonnes of waste being collected in under 2 days.

Overall it’s been an impressive start to the week with a lot of interesting topics and ideas to reflect on.