SKALEing ETHNewYork
With every hackathon we get better; and this past weekend was no exception! As the team with the most submissions for any Execution Layer (Layer 2) solution, we know we’re continuing to improve and deliver great value to developers.
We are extremely proud of everyone on the team for working around the clock to support our fellow hackers and make SKALE the goto Execution Layer solution for ETHNewYork! And we took this as a great opportunity to sit down with a number of brilliant hackers and gain valuable insights on how we can continue to get better.
We would like to thank everyone who attended and our incredible community for your continued support and dedication!
Winners
As expected, there were a number of creative hacks at ETHNewYork across the board — making it difficult to decide who to award our bounties to. SKALE had 6 bounties: one $1000 and five $500, all denominated in Dai. Here are the teams that were awarded a SKALE bounty:
Collusion Game
Collusion Game team won SKALE’s biggest bounty of $1,000 for their implementation of SKALE in their fun, fast-paced, interactive, turn-based game. The concept is similar to “Capture the Flag” whereby players work together to either overthrow the current leader or work against each other with the goal of reaching the center of the game board first. Players who reach the center first can claim their NFT prize.
Thank you, Jacob Shiach, Brent Lagerman, DJ Rosenbaum, and Devavrat Kalam for your submission and showing everyone how SKALE brings speed to decentralized games!
See their code, here!
Alice.si
Alice.si is another winner for their implementation of a SKALE-Dai Bridge for their dApp ‘Tappy’. Tappy makes it easy to load and unload crypto assets into any object equipped with an NFC tag (e.g. card, pin, bracelet, sticker,..). The best part? Using Tappy doesn’t require any technical skills! Simply tap a device to load the wallet with assets, and tap again to spend them. No smartphone, no gas payment, no metamask, no browser-cached keys, no QR code scan…users don’t even need the Internet.
Thank you, Raphaël Mazet, Sam Everett, Alex Suvorov, and Jakub Wojciechowski for your dedication to innovating new decentralized technology that anyone can use and easily adapt for their needs!
See their code, here!
investr
investr won a bounty for its implementation of SKALE in a plugin that lets users monetize their digital content and give back to their social media following. How? Investr encourages your followers to help make your content go viral by allowing them to purchase shares of it. Once any sponsorship money comes in, it is automatically disbursed to the original backers.
Thank you, Kerman Kohli and Carlow Beltran for your dedication to the improvement of existing content platforms!
See their code, here!
Collusion Resistant Button
Collusion Resistant Button was awarded for their implementation of a collusion-resistant upvote button. The collusion resistance comes from the fact that every time you press it, a payment is made to the author and all voters who had previously upvoted it. Payments are nearly instant, nearly free, work everywhere in the world and cannot be reversed or blocked. This system encourages the discovery of quality content and rewards early upvoters.
Thank you, Jenniy Lin, Adrian Barwicki, and Muhammed Nagy for your dedication to the improvement of content discovery and incorporation of incentivization into existing social platforms!
See their code, here!
ERC20 Voting App
ERC20 Voting App implementated SKALE in their dApp which allows anyone to create a ballot for current token holders for any ERC20 token. With governance being such a hot topic, we hope to see this team take the project further as a standardized library for blockchain governance!
Thank you, Roman Storm and Per Alexey for your dedication to governance!
See their code, here!
Blockchain Name Service
Blockchain Name Service is another winner of SKALE’s five $500 bounties for its integration of SKALE in a decentralized search engine. The impetus for this was to provide transparency to users and to show them how to their sites would be ranked and listed based on keyword associations. This is favorable to all of the existing search engines which are closed source and completely opaque as to their inner-workings.
Thank you, Jérome Rastit for your dedication to transparency in the search engine market!
See his code, here!
Learnings / Feedback
We collected feedback from our hackers on a number of different topics relating to SKALE, here’s what we learned.
In general, SKALE is very easy to integrate and use. There are some issues with more complex smart contracts from other vendors. This is due to some compatibility issues with between Aleth (SKALE uses this) and Geth (which the contracts were exclusively run in). So, we’ll be pitching in to the Aleth repository to help the team close the gap on Geth compatibility!
Our block explorer sounds like it performed well but could use a bit of touching up in the UI — particularly around showing more data and preventing users from have to click around the interface to see more detail. The faucet received great reviews, there were no complaints on deployment (most used Remix to deploy), and one team was surprised that SKALE’s File Storage worked and didn’t fail for large files (which is both awesome and sad to hear). We could also use a few more tutorials for beginners as well as more documentation on the money transfer agent.
Lastly, SKALE is pretty flexible! While we developed a SKALE-Ethereum bridge, one team was able to build a SKALE-Dai bridge (sDai) over the weekend, showing that the design and engineering patterns are pretty flexible when it comes to using SKALE with other currencies and layer one chains! Overall, SKALE has made huge progress in its development and we look forward to continuing to improve the technology and watch it mature!
See you all at ETHBerlin!
If you are interested in trying out SKALE’s Elastic Sidechains out, make sure to join the SKALE community on Discord and check out the Developer Documentation! Also, feel free to also check out SKALE’s Technical Overview and Consensus Overview for a deeper dive into how SKALE works and is able to provide 20,000 TPS.
SKALE’s mission is to make it quick and easy to set up a cost-effective, high-performance sidechain that runs full-state smart contracts. We aim to deliver a performant experience to developers that offers speed and functionality without giving up security or decentralization. Follow us here on,,, and sign up for updates via this on the SKALE website.
Originally published at https://skale.network on May 23, 2019.
