[Klaytn Hackathon Winners] Interview #1 — BlockDevs Asia
#Unlock your keyboard, and go hack.
Dear Klaytn readers,
The Klaytn Hackathon was Klaytn’s first blockchain hackathon, and developers were able to create BApps (Blockchain Applications) on Klaytn’s public testnet, Baobab. Klaytn allows developers to build service-centric, user-oriented BApps, and the Klaytn Hackathon was a virtual hackathon designed to allow global developers to unite and work together towards a common goal.
Passionate developers from all around the world joined together to commit and create BApps. During the 5 weeks of the hackathon, developers from across the world joined together virtually, and 4 winners were ultimately selected from the diverse, creative submissions.
The Klaytn Hackathon Winner Interview Series will feature the first and second place winners, BlockDevs Asia and TryCrypto, respectively. Through the series, Klaytn readers will be able to learn more about the winning teams, their projects, and their thought process behind and throughout the Klaytn Hackathon experience.
#1. Introductions
Hello BlockDevs Asia! Congratulations on winning 1st place at the Klaytn Hackathon! Could you please introduce your team and team members? How does it feel to be the winners of the Klaytn Hackathon? :)
Hello Klaytn! BlockDevs Asia is a non-profit community group organized by and for software developers, technology enthusiasts, and business people looking to learn more about developing blockchain apps or systems. By organizing free, educational meetups about complex and technical topics, we dive together with a large group of passionate developers into advancing blockchain technology. To date, we have organized more than 20 events, 2 large hackathons, and 20 meetups.
We all have diverse professional experiences individually, but we are united by our strong interest in blockchain along with our experiences in software development and IT.
Our team members are:
Caspar Oostendorp
- Caspar Oostendorp is a software/blockchain architect, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Oost and Voort, a software consulting company based in the Philippines.
Amadeo Brands
- Amadeo Brands is a co-founder of EOI Digital, a digital marketing agency based in the Philippines with strong roots in blockchain technology.
Roy Selbach
- Roy Selbach is a co-founder of EOI Digital with Amadeo Brands.
Teresa (Tracy) Li.
- Tracy Li has been a software engineer/architect for 17 years. Many of her experiences were in building enterprise solutions for corporations.
Despite our time constraints, we were able to create a working BApp in just a few days by devoting a significant amount of time. We feel nothing but proud for what we have done, and being the first place winners, we are very excited to promote our BApp and the Klatyn blockchain platform to everyone.
#2. The Journey from the Netherlands to the Philippines
Your team, BlockDevs Asia, is currently based in the Philippines, but it seems like some of you are from elsewhere. Why did some of you relocate to the Philippines, and how did all of you come together to form a team? What piqued your interest in blockchain?
With Asia as one of the most promising continents regarding blockchain innovations, Caspar Oostendorp, Amadeo Brands, and Roy Selbach moved from the Netherlands to the Philippines. Blockdevs was founded in early 2017 by Caspar Oostendorp and Chris Verceles. At that time, there were a modest number of developers attending the meetups; then things changed in 2018 — blockchain gained more interest.
We all came together at the start of this year, 2019. We started as volunteers, and we eventually found ourselves continually contributing our skills and resources to grow the organization. From there, we were able to build a good synergy as a team, hence, we decided to formally incorporate it as a non-profit industry organization for blockchain.
What piqued our interest in blockchain was the strong narrative of having a purely decentralized, trustable, and immutable system that grows in open governance. Blockchain gives us the ability to subvert overbearing government and central authorities, which is quite powerful.
Wow, what a dynamic journey! In that case, how would you describe the blockchain community and ecosystem in the Philippines? Would you say that the Philippines is a blockchain-friendly environment?
The blockchain community in the Philippines is very vibrant and interactive due to the 2017 hype that stimulated community growth. There are regular meetup events that occur in different parts of the country. Once we saw how quickly people were starting to become interested in blockchain and crypto, we realized that we should foster and grow the technical talents here in the Philippines. We would like to position the Philippines as a global hub for the blockchain and crypto industries.
#3. Klaytn Hackathon & Klaytn Champ
Why did your team decide to participate in the Klaytn Hackathon? How was the experience? What challenges, if any, did your team overcome and was your team able to grow from the experience?
We first learned about Klatyn from Asia Blockchain Review. They asked us to co-organize an event to introduce Klatyn in Manila, Philippines. After the event, we saw the huge potential of Klaytn.
We later noticed the hackathon by coincidence, which gave us many opportunities to build on Klaytn. We decided to participate in the Klaytn Hackathon since we are strong advocates of blockchain technology and would like to push mainstream adoption forward. We also believe that Klatyn has the potential to drive blockchain technology since Klaytn is developed by Ground X, a subsidiary of its multi-billion, parent company: Kakao.
The Klatyn hackathon was an opportunity for us to showcase a fully functional blockchain application (BApp) to the world. Despite our busy schedules, we managed to devote a significant amount of time to create the Klatyn Champ BApp, which is a challenge game for all users with verifiable scoring and certification. We have implemented an ownable smart contract that stores each user’s level information and certificate while also verifying developer activity at the same time. Our goal is to make technical documentation and onboarding with Klaytn more fun through gamification and incentivization.
We are always motivated to promote positive usage of blockchain, which is the main reason why we joined the hackathon. We also strive to encourage developers to build tools that would help solve real world problems, especially in the areas of corruption and government bureaucracy.
By partnering with bright talents, we put each of our skills into play and encouraged each other to produce the best possible results. The major challenge we faced was the time constraint and our busy schedules, but we all pulled it through. Asides, not only did we learn to work effectively as a team, but we also learned how to work with Klaytn. This opens future doors for building blockchain tools and for utilizing Klaytn.
Looking back, would you participate in the Klaytn Hackathon again? Why or why not?
Yes, definitely! We strongly believe in Klaytn’s mission, and we firmly believe in the technology that Klatyn has established. Secondly, we’d like to expand our reach globally to promote Klatyn and blockchain in general. We, of course, learned much through this experience, but it was a fun process overall to work with Klaytn to build a winning app.
Do you have plans to continue and develop your project, Klaytn Champs? What additions could you make to Klaytn Champs to improve it even more?
It’s good that you ask that question — currently we are building out the project even more. Thanks to the hackathon, we saw a huge potential for this tool. After the announcement that we were winners, we immediately created a roadmap with the end goal of pushing it to the public. With the addition of many new courses and features such as leaderboards, referral programs, and integration, we are aiming to take a prominent position in rewarding and onboarding developers onto Klaytn. We are confident that Klaytn Champs can be beneficial for the long term strategy of Klaytn.
#4. Klaytn from a Developer’s Perspective
Having experienced Klaytn first-hand, are you continuing to use Klaytn? How has Klaytn helped you and your team?
Yes, we are using Klaytn to further develop Klaytn Champs. Klaytn has helped us as an easy-to-start-with platform, and we see great potential for Klaytn especially in Asian markets due to Klaytn’s enterprise blockchain system. Since Klaytn is based from Solidity, contracts are easily portable, which makes it very easy to get started.
For our last question, we would like to ask if you would recommend Klaytn to other developers. How is Klaytn different or better from a developer’s perspective?
Klatyn has more user-friendly developer tools and documentation compared to other blockchain platforms. It is easy and quick to set up and get started. Since we are all familiar with Solidity, we were able to build our smart contracts quickly. We also didn’t have that much difficulty in integrating our contracts with the frontend. We used caver-js, and it was pretty straightforward.
Once again, congratulations! We look forward to inviting your team to our all-expenses paid, TXGX conference in November!
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The next article in the series will be an interview with our second place winners — TryCrypto! Please be on the lookout for more content and events from Klaytn.
