How Beer Inspired Our First Ethereum Hackathon Win At The Inaugural ETHSingapore
Over the 7th — 9th December weekend, our Rate3 engineers took part in ETHSingapore — the inaugural Ethereum hackathon to be held in ASEAN. Projects were given under 36 hours to collaborate and build decentralized applications using Ethereum as well as the APIs of various other sponsor projects that included Aragon, bZx, Celer, Giveth, Kyber, MakerDAO, NuCypher, Raiden, Set Protocol, Quantstamp and Status.
With most of the above project teams being based overseas, many took the opportunity to host meetups with the local Ethereum community across the days leading up to the weekend, presenting a great opportunity for the Rate3 team to expand our network and share learnings around the blockchain space.
Alas, it was this final event — the MakerDAO Dappy Hour — on the Thursday preceding the weekend which provided the inspiration behind the Rate3 team’s submission for ETHSingapore, which they affectionately named DAI-ly.
DAI-ly was selected as just one of six finalists winners (this was the highest accolade possible. The six finalists were not ranked into positions by the judges in line with their theme to encourage collaboration) by a judging panel which included Vitalik Buterin and Loi Luu. The team also won the MarkerDAO prize for its innovative usage of the Maker API.
DAI-ly provides users hailing from any level of technical sophistication with a beautiful user interface to make payments with the DAI stablecoin, while — get this — relieving these users of the need to keep an Ether balance for gas fees to the Ethereum network. The benefits of this feature cannot be underestimated, as it solves for one key area causing friction today that is preventing new users from using Ethereum applications intuitively— the need to maintain Ether for gas fees when making any type of transactions.
The DAI-ly team envisions such a product to be a great aid for onboarding new users to pay with cryptocurrencies including Dai. It will also open up the possibility for service providers and merchants to pay gas on behalf (with or without a fee) of consumers who are choosing to buy something from their store — as opposed to airdropping Ether to a large number of Ethereum accounts (including inactive ones).
In addition, the team foresees such a product to be useful for payments for all other stablecoins as well, including an SGD-denominated one.
Technical Challenges Faced By The Team And Some Closing Thoughts
“The original ERC865 implementation code was outdated and had some bugs in it, so we had to tweak and write a working version for it,” said Davis Gay, our CTO.
“Since we are implementing a new functionality on a token which existing ERC20 tokens do not have, we needed to create a dummy upgraded version of DAI. This prevented us from having complete working integrations with intended Dai and Kyber Swap APIs.”
“Other challenges on the client-side and server-side included making sure that the delegated transfer transaction is verified to be what was originally agreed upon.”
While all hackathons are termed as competitions in their own right (that’s what prize money does), the greatest reward for participating in these events are the friendships that are forged and the industry learnings that are shared. Last weekend’s ETHSingapore event was no exception to this. Thank you Ethereum Singapore for this terrific opportunity — until next time!
About Rate3
Rate3 is a decentralised dual protocol for cross-chain asset tokenization and identity management. The Rate3 Tokenization Protocol is an end-to-end protocol for tokenization on both Ethereum and Stellar, while the Rate3 Identity Protocol is a protocol to create and manage a unified cross-chain identity.
Website: https://rate3.network
Twitter: https://twitter.com/officialrate3
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