Learning About Decentralized Apps
A Workshop with Truffle
Our mission at Rice Blockchain is to demystify the world of blockchains & cryptocurrencies. These technologies will allow for trust between participants without the costs of involving “trusted” third-parties, allowing existing social, economic, and political infrastructure to be redesigned in a more democratic way.
We strongly believe that educational initiatives will help to motivate curious students, entrepreneurs, developers, and researchers to act on their interests in the space. Interest in blockchains—and more generally, cryptonetworks—is growing quickly at universities, but technical students overwhelmingly lack exposure to new development patterns and tools.
One possible reason for such diverse interest in blockchain is its potential to impact society across many domains. “Blockchain combines theory and practice and can lead to fundamental breakthroughs in many research areas,” says Dawn Song, a computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley. “It can have really profound and broad-scale impacts on society in many different industries.” — The Coinbase Blog
On March 21st, Rice Blockchain hosted Kevin Bluer of Truffle Suite, the leading smart contract development framework, for a workshop on decentralized application development.
Kevin, the content lead at Truffle, graciously walked the 35+ students in attendance through topics including…
- motivations for using decentralized blockchains instead of centralized databases as a single-source-of-truth
- real-world examples of how blockchains (such as Ethereum) are being adopted by companies and institutions to solve problems involving trust and coordination
- an introduction to the decentralized internet stack, also known as Web 3.0
- installing Metamask and requesting Ether from a faucet hosted on a testnet
- using Truffle’s suite of development tools—namely Truffle, Ganache, and Drizzle—to bootstrap a decentralized app from provided boilerplates
… and much more.
This event would not have been possible without:
- Wes McVay and Kevin Bluer from Truffle who offered to host, sponsor, and promote our first workshop of the year
- Kim Raath and Dr. Kathy Ensor of CoFeS Institute @ Rice University, who generously sponsored appetizers & sandwiches for over 35 students from Local Foods, a gourmet restaurant known for delicious & healthy food
If you want to learn more about blockchains & cryptocurrencies, follow along with Rice Blockchain’s course on Medium here. If you’re interested in receiving updates on what we’re working on, please subscribe to our mailing list here. Thanks for reading!
