The Road to RPCh — Part 2

With the idea for RPCh set and the prototype built, it was time to see what the Infinite Hackathon in Bogotá would bring. I tried not to have any expectations — crypto is always unpredictable, and you can never be sure how many people will be at an event or how enthusiastic they will be. But it was hard not to feel like there was a lot riding on this event. We wanted RPCh to make a splash and build on the momentum we’d already created with DERP.

In the end, there was a huge crowd of developers in town to attend Devcon the next week, and we were delighted to see that local Colombian devs had also showed up to hack.

Of course, there was no guarantee that anyone would choose to work on HOPR’s bounty.

The format of the hackathon was that projects would give a presentation about their bounty and their project and then teams would choose one or more to work on over the three days of the contest.

This made the presentation a key part of the process. I knew from attending hackathons that most people stick with their first choice bounty, or choose several and then drop ones they’re having difficulty with. It’s rare to successfully switch to a brand new bounty mid-way through. So the more people you attract with your initial pitch, the more likely you are to get strong bounty entries.

Although we’d put huge efforts in the weeks before to make the bounty accessible and completable, I didn’t want to only focus on that in the presentation: some people attend hackathons just to find low-hanging fruit and win as many prizes as possible, and we wanted to attract devs who might stay with the project long term, perhaps as part of our own bounty program.

So I centred the presentation on HOPR’s place in the crypto ecosystem and why it was so important to build a service like RPCh, for wallets and users alike.

This paid off: Diego, Camilo and Luis, three young developers who knew each other from their undergraduate Informatics and Engineering course at La Sabana University, loved the presentation and were inspired to work on our bounty. When we talked about it afterwards, all three commented that the clear graphics and high level overview of what HOPR does and how it works was a big factor in their decision, further proof that you can really never provide too much info and guidance to hackers at these events.

But they also all said that the main reason they chose to work on the HOPR bounty was because it seemed like important and interesting technology, even if it seemed more challenging.

The Hack

And the hackathon was indeed hard work. Although we had the prototype and the integration guide, it was basic. A smooth integration with a real Wallet UI in a Google Chrome extension was a whole other level. Even with the API we’d built, most of the time was spent trying to hook the wallet up to the HOPR nodes in a reliable fashion.

My colleague Tino — from HOPR’s core team — and I provided as much support as we could without getting in the way of letting them actually solve the problem. We could have done more, but since the ultimate goal was to source great devs to expand our ecosystem, it was smarter in the long run to see how the team fared on their own.

The guys worked long hours to complete the integration with Tally Ho! wallet, which worked perfectly as you can see below.

They also gave a really impressive presentation of their entry, which unfortunately wasn’t recorded.

And it paid off: they were awarded second prize and a $3,000 bounty. The organizers also kindly sourced them tickets for the rest of Devcon.

Over the next few days we’d run into them again and again at the various talks and presentations. It was clear that the hackathon had given them a thirst to learn more about web3.

Where Now?

With the hackathon complete, we needed to decide what to do next. Or if there even was a next. We’d achieved our short-term goals of creating an interesting and engaging bounty and attracting talented developers to work on top of HOPR. Maybe that was the end of it, perhaps with the occasional bounty to flesh out the RPCh idea and use it as an educational tool alongside our existing DERP site.

But the problems that set us down this road and which I’d highlighted in the presentation still existed. RPC provision really is a centralized black box which undermines web3 and creates unnecessary privacy problems for users and data liability for wallets. None of this was new information, and no-one had bothered to do anything about it. Could we really just leave RPCh as a proof of concept to inspire others? Why would we expect anyone else to make the effort? If you want something to exist, often you have to build it yourself.

At the same time, nothing about HOPR had changed either: we were still a small team with no scope to work on anything outside the core protocol. However much we wanted to, we couldn’t progress this further on our own.

The Colombian team had done a great job at the bounty, but as they admitted themselves, they’d had to hack their way around multiple challenges to get the integration working. This was fine — I’d done similar to make the prototype — but you can only push this so far.

And this was still only single transactions for individual wallets. This proved that RPCh could work, but it was worlds apart from a working private RPC service handling thousands or even millions of requests from different wallets simultaneously.

If we were going to take RPCh further, it was clear we’d have to treat it with the seriousness the idea deserved. That meant sitting down to properly spec out everything about how RPCh would look and work, from the architecture to the business model.

All of which led to one inevitable conclusion: our original plan to spin off more bounties from the hackathon wasn’t viable. The next stages of RPCh would be too complex and require too much coordination and oversight.

Since we lacked the resources internally, and we couldn’t see how to build RPCh through bounties alone, there was only one solution: grow the team, and spin-off RPCh as a separate tech team away from the main protocol work.

Camilo, Diego and Luis had impressed us so much that they were the obvious first choice. They also had a head start on understanding RPCh, which was important as we planned to move quickly.

Of course there was no guarantee they would join us: they were all already working as developers and making a success of it in Colombia. Would they really want to leave their jobs to work remotely for a startup on the other side of the world, one they hadn’t even heard of a week before?

But we’d seen how hungrily they’d worked on the bounty, and how keen they were to attend Devcon and learn more about the problems facing web3. They wisely took some time to think about it, but in the end all three agreed to join HOPR and work at the newly formed RPCh team.

And it was clear this would be an exciting challenge for me as well. It was decided that I would be product lead for RPCh. While I’d had positions of tech leadership before, this would be my first experience managing a global decentralized team.

I took a week off to enjoy the sights and hospitality of Colombia and then returned to the HOPR office in Zurich, excited for what lay ahead.

Steven Noni
RPCh Product Lead

Website: https://rpch.net
Run RPCh Alpha for free: https://access.rpch.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RPC_h_
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