gm! It’s Derek & welcome to my inaugural blog post! I’ve never published one before but figured if I’m going to be doing this as part of my day job, I might as well get some practice in via a personal blog of my own. I intend for this blog to be a way for me to memorialize my journey in web3: from my first steps to wherever I end up.

This post will be Part 1 of a series I intend to use to cover the unique experience and story behind each ETHGlobal Hackathon I participate in. So far, I’ve been 4 for 4, having won prizes at New York, San Francisco, Waterloo, and now Paris!

After placing as a Finalist at ETHGlobal Waterloo with A(i)udit, the teams over at Polygon Labs and Developer DAO graciously offered to sponsor myself and my team to travel to Paris to build on Polygon for ETHGlobal’s Paris 2023 Hackathon! I was thrilled and accepted their offer without hesitation. As the only requirement was to build on Polygon, take some pics, and write a blog, I quickly rounded up my team: Luis, Dan, and Vivian.

While Vivian had been on my team for all my previous hackathons (NYC, SF, Waterloo), Luis had only hacked with us at SF and Dan had never done a web3 hackathon before at all. This was going to be both fun and challenging - we were pumped.

While we didn’t have enough time to attend EthCC, the overwhelming number of crypto side-events, or nerd out about some Ethereum scaling solutions at Pragma, the experience we got was nonetheless unforgettable.

In the weeks leading up to the hackathon, we spent our weekday evenings studying the sponsors and their prizes - trying to pick up on any common themes and hopefully converge on a general topic that would maximize our winnings with whatever we ended up building. It became quite clear that Account Abstraction (ERC4337 implementations like Safe{Core}, Metamask Snaps, dfns, and Biconomy) and applications of zero-knowledge technologies (e.g. Polygon zkEVM, zkSync’s Era, Consensys’ Linea, Mina Protocol’s upcoming zkEVM, zkBob, etc) were the focus of the event this Summer. We decided to build something at the intersection of these 2 worlds: Account Abstraction and Zero Knowledge Proofs.

Originally, we intended to use ERC-2535 to make building and modifying modular smart contract accounts as trivial as possible. We wanted a drag-and-drop interface for users to pick the features they want for their wallets, and an open-source framework & marketplace for anyone to share and use community-built wallet features. On Day 1 of the hackathon, we started to dig deep to determine how feasible and novel it was. As it turns out, this idea was not only quite technically challenging for the time we had, but it wasn’t a new/unique idea either. The idea was actually proposed in EIP-6900 a few months prior, evaluated & disregarded by the team at Safe, and was already implemented as a project at ETHDenver in Feb 2023.

Based on our findings, we decided to pivot and focus on tackling the problem of web2 adoption for a particular use case: private, on-chain payments with a Venmo-like user experience. Inspired by Partiful and Lu.ma links, we built a no-code tool for organizations (primarily employers) to issue smart contract accounts to their web2 employees with a URL link secured using zero-knowledge proofs. This wallet would come packed with the novel account abstraction features (social logins, gasless transactions, etc) AND would be linked to a zkBob account for private withdrawl of direct deposit funds. We genuinely believe this infrastructure could be applied to many more use cases, like identity or loyalty programs. For more details about the implementation, please check out our official project page!

We spent the majority of Friday evening finalizing our roadmap, workflows, and sponsor prizes we wanted to optimize our demo for. We called it a night on Friday at around 1 am before meeting back at the venue the next morning (Saturday) to do a 36-hour sprint, basically from 9am Saturday to 3pm Sunday.

Sunday morning came in the blink of an eye. We submitted our project at 8:58am and took a minor break to prepare the demo path, charge our laptops, and fruitlessly trying to record and upload a demo video. Not soon after, the demo chaos began. Just imagine: 965 hackers across 321 projects trying to squeeze in a 5 minute demo to impress the judges - all within a 3 hour time window. It was crazy! Mix in some anxiety/nervousness, terrible wifi, and the loud echo-y main hall and you can get yourself your very own ETHGlobal Hackathon Demo Day.

We worked relatively quickly to get in line for the sponsors we wanted to demo to: mainly Polygon, Safe, Mina Protocol, IPFS, ApeCoin DAO, and the Finalist judges. We genuinely tried our best to pitch and get our product across in the short time frame that we had. Our demo didn’t load at times due to bad wifi, some judges didn’t hear us due to how loud the venue was, and still others couldn’t even see our slides because of how crowded it all was. We tried our best, even parallelizing our efforts at times by splitting up.

Shortly after 11:30am, we had finished all the demos we needed to do and agreed to head out to grab a light bite, take a power nap, and watch the live stream to see if we won anything. As we recovered in a WeWork nearby, we were elated to hear we took home 2nd place from Safe{Core} for Best Use of their Account Abstraction SDK and a pool prize from zkBob! Totaling $1,900 USD in prizes. This, combined with our Polygon Labs sponsorship, more than paid for our travel + accommodation costs to come to Paris to hack.

ETHGlobal Paris was done. There were many emotions to feel, experience, & reflect upon but that all would need to wait. We were exhausted and had flights to catch. Dan, Vivian, and I flew out that same evening, while Luis left the following day.

Before leaving the venue, I remember looking back and saying to myself: “Crypto Winter is surely over, right? There’s no way someone can call this a bear market...”. Despite the chaos and sounds, I realized that the sheer amount of energy and optimism in that venue made it feel like early 2021 all over again.

Upon deeper reflection, it still bewilders me how so many bright, enthusiastic minds came together to build at the bleeding edge in Paris. Over a very short 72 hours, I met and saw so many great projects and builders - all collectively believing and working together towards a brighter future.

I genuinely believe this community is going to be the driving force that will usher in the next generation of the internet. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I’m lost for words on how to describe this, honestly. It is just so surreal.

To the ETHGlobal team and the many other foundations who continuously strive to push this ecosystem forward: THANK YOU. Neither I nor many others would be in this vibrant space without your efforts.