Metahacking at ETHSF

The beginning of a reluctant crusade

Peter ‘pet3rpan’

Published in

MetaCartel DAO

4 min readOct 9, 2018

MetaCartel’s got some serious commitment going on. After our first call, we got to work on the Harbour MVP, our community-based project aiming to be a generalized solution for gasless payments.

Now, we’ve been building the knowledge base, the MVP, the community, but some of us have never met live, and we decided to look after that too. So we shipped ourselves to San Francisco.

Moritz, Austin, Mark, Pedro, Seb & Jehan got hacking. Peter spent his time researching cryptoeconomics applications for our project — whether we need an open access participatory network or not. MP got shilling and pep-talking (sort of). Okay. We’re lying. He just made memes. Scott was named the scapegoat when the team trolled Peter way too much, but then we figured out Scott’s too nice so he came out of the hackathon without a scratch.

Most importantly, Franky, MP, and Peter got together and created a logo, which Franky drew masterfully. We can’t be happier — no matter how controversial it is.

Artist — Franky: https://twitter.com/gnarKnarf

Finally, the MetaConnect (metaconnect.me) by Austin, Moritz, Mark and Pedro product was born — a seamless onboarding experience that’s aiming to offer solutions for new users: gasless transactions, on-chain user verification and improvement of key management process via the deployment of a multi-sig, plus human-readable addresses (ENS-style but with the Tenz-ID); all in a gamified setting to make the experience fun and easy.

Meanwhile, Seb & Jehan built a wallet that uses gasless transactions, Efectivo. People sending money are able to pay their mining fees in DAI to a network of relayers who pay the Ether gas for them. From the user’s perspective, it appears that they are using dollars at all times, and never need to think about cryptocurrency. They used the Tenzorum SDK to accomplish this.

While the teams built, MP & Peter made unrealistic plans about expansion and mergers and acquisitions, but then sobered up and decided to think about how to expand consciously and sustainably and drive the MetaCartel community to complete the Harbour MVP as a common good.

Judging time came, we were honestly amazing. While Peter and MP shilled the project almost creepily, Moritz, Austin, and Mark gave a great presentation to the judges Simon de la Rouviere, Joey Krug and Linda Xie.

Unfortunately, MetaConnect was only a runner-up, and Efectivo didn’t make it. But the Cartel is relentless, ruthless and will continue to work towards mass adoption — stay tuned.