Kickback at Berlin Blockchain Week
Metacartel Demo day (Mon)
Metacartel demo day kicked off with a talk from Alex Van de Sande talking about his Universal Login. A nice surprise was when he showed the integration example using our very own Kickback.
We have been working closely on the integration work but it was the first time to see the Universal Login integration in action.
Then I gave a talk about our Orochi DAO initiative.
Here are my talk slides.
DAOFest (Tues)
DAOFest used Kickback to manage their half day event.
On the surface, it looked as if everything ran smoothly but it was quite a struggle.
To begin with, I wasn’t initially involved in doing check-in but I ended up jumping in as our admin UI was showing some obscure errors on the window laptop of the check-in volunteers.
We also had some email related issues so people either got no email or got 100s of emails. Sorry for the spam!
In the end, 124 out of 150 people turned up (82% turn up).
After the event, one of the participants emailed us that he was not treated as attended even though he was there and was checked-in. Once we click “finalise” button and people start withdrawing, there is no way we can pay back the commitment from the contract so someone has to pay from their own pocket.
In the end, the organiser (Genesis DAO from DAOStack) kindly agreed to cover the loss of the participant.
Resolving these issues is very important before we completely go completely public beta. I will elaborate more on this in another post.
Dai Breakfast club (Wed)
We have been working on DAI integration and we just managed to deploy the super experimental version under alpha.kickback.events. For the ultimate dog food eating spirit, we decided to host a small gathering. My initial intention was to have people from MakerDAO and a few of my friends but Maker team was quick to promote to the world.
The interesting fact was the “cut-off time” we added in the description page.
We set start time as 9am and cut-off time as 9:30 am. MakerDAO team was late but still came by 9:14. By 9:30. Pretty much everybody came except one person (Stani Kulechov ) who couldn’t make it in the end.
I am also glad that Anthony Sassano , who lost his commitment at DAOFest managed to get in this time.
This event was also not perfect.
Firstly, a couple of people could not make it due to pending transactions never confirmed. Secondly, there were several “Crashers” who took their space so people who came just before the cut-off period could not sit in the same table with us.
The possible solutions would be to make cut-off time same as the start time (if that was the case only Charlie from MakerDAO and I would have split all commitments) or tell off crashers not to sit with us (which may be a bit too harsh). In the end, these finely detailed rules come down to social consensus and not sure if crypto-incentives would be able to help.
ETHBerlinZwei (Fri — Sun)
I came to Berlin without specific ideas about what to hack. I wasn’t even sure if I would even hack because I was planning to deploy Orochi DAO during ETHBerlin. While I was in Berlin, I got to know @FrancescoRenziA from RDai project. He initially suggested integrating RDai into Kickback which I support the idea (I even wrote about the concept here) though it was too risky to do last-minute integration along with the DAI integration which we were about to submit for code auditing.
Instead, we tinkered around the idea of integrating rDAI into OrochiDAO and use all the interest to cover smart contract insurance premium via Nexus Mutual. Will Harborne from DeversiFI and we decided to hack together.
Here is our project called Offset DAI.
The result was ….. Disqualified!!!
The reason was that it consisted a bunch of pull requests extending multiple projects rather than independent product/service which is fair enough.
I still love the concept so I hope to integrate the idea into Kickback soon.
