ColoradoCoin ETHDenver Wrap Up

The Colorado community did something ambitious for ETHDenver. We made a SolidCoin called Colorado Coin and distributed 1200 of them; one to each attendee.

Colorado Coin is a Solid Coin — a physical coin

But Why?

This was an experiment in distributing a blockchain product to the physical world. The great thing about physical coins is that they can be handed from person to person. It sounds simple, and it is; that’s the point.

Our first test use cases:

1. Food Vendors accepted Colorado Coin Credits for meals by scanning the QR code on the back of the coin.
2. At the end of the hackathon, we distributed an ERC20 token via the QR code on the back of the coin.

Here’s a video of the coin in action:

Colorado Coin in the Wild — A vendor scans the coin in order to pay for a meal

Here’s a wrap up of how it went.

User Feedback

• I loved it. Merchants seemed to love it. I watched them go through a line of people switching back and forth between ColoCoin & credit cards. Seemed easy for them. A+
• I totally enjoy the meal coin! Just one thing we had trouble was that we didnt know how much meals were left… (maybe there was a way to know it and i missed it) we were kinda blur about how much of the food point we have used we had to just cross our fingers last night~this morning 🐶 other than that i loved the coin!!! Its super cool and food truck was waaaay better than having a food catering i think!!
• Super easy to use to get food at the event. I’m not exactly sure how you guys ran the backend for actually paying the merchants, but from a user perspective it was awesome.
• Hey! Thanks so much for the Colorado coin it was great!! Everyone of the food providers knew what to do, it was really smooth. I think though in the future as an organizer I would put out a locked in place iPad or something to scan balances. The food truck people were informative enough but that’s just a convenience idea!
• All the food vendors I talked to loved it!
• I am having trouble scanning my qr code. I will try out another app and report back ( room for improvement )

Next Steps

Theres a few different directions we could take this project. We’re having conversations with leaders in the emerging Ethereum ecosystem about ways to leverage this project to increase awareness and mainstream usage of blockchain in the everyday world.

Here are few directions we’ve discussed.

Launching a Whitelabel Solid Coin Printing Service

Want your own whitelabeled Solid Coin for an event upcoming? Click here to get in touch.

More use cases, better game design.

We have lots of ideas of how to use a Solid Coin to incentivize emergent action at hackathons and events across the blockchain ecosystem. A few ideas the organizers are kicking around:

• What if we could incentivize random acts of kindness?
• What if we could tokenize mentorship relationships?
• Where can we introduce game mechanics into live events?

We invite you to co-create the next SolidCoin with us.

We hope that attendees of the ETHDenver Hackathon enjoyed this unique piece of schwag.

It’s been a lot of fun building this token with the other organizers of the Colorado Blockchain Community. If you have feedback or you want to take ownership of launching a Solid Coin, let us know in the #colorado-coin channel of the Colorado Blockchain Slack.

To learn more about Gitcoin, click below. We welcome you on our journey to grow open source and change the way we work.

Disclaimer: The ColoradoCoin token is a proof of attendance at ETHDenver 2018, which has no monetary value.