The author Rui, co-founder @Buidler DAO, @Vitae3, @MetaShield Twitter: @popolandRuii
ETHSF is like a wild dream that I met so many smart and crazy blockchain builders in just three days.
If we visualize the flight records of the hackers on the world map, we would see scattered points on the earth from China, Dubai, England, India, Mexico, Egypt, France, Germany, etc. aggregated at San Francisco, like a huge dense beam.
This is like a global Web3 pilgrimage. “What are you building on?” became the greeting instead of “Where are you from”. It excites me because it indicates your gender, race, and region are no longer important, we are a group that is beyond those physical differences in this context.
The Palace of Fine Arts and Hackathon Sponsors
Female engineer trying to address sexual harassment
Teammates from China, France, Mexico
The PUSH sponsor got the job because of a DM
Extreme limited time and resources, build MVP!
Egyptian engineer reveals the unconfident in our oriental context
Crash and restore sane development routine
Crazy Big-Bang guy cross-chain performance
Winning rewards but in a weird mood
My doubt about blockchain grows just like my faith and love for it
The most romantic thing is the world’s largest IRL blockchain hackathon held in the Palace of Fine Art. As the swans flew over the lake, I passed through the huge and beautiful gatepost and walked towards the entrance of the ETHSF sign. An illusion occured to me that I am an ancient Greek scholar who is about to engage in an elegant intellectual duel.
Young boys wearing Stanford, Yale, and Columbia hoodies said hi to me on the bustling road, kind of made me regret why am I not bringing my NYU hoodie here.
The rules of ETH SF are two days of development, only 10 teams will enter the final list, while every project would also have chance to win prize from the sponsors' prize pool. All sponsors are selected by the ETH officially, they are blockchain (L1, L2, sidechain, modular blockchain execution layer), KYC, Storage, Oracles, Data analysis, Social Graph, Cross-chain Communication, Defi, etc.
Saw a pretty girl putting on makeup by the sink of the restroom, and we started to chat while I was washing my hands. Her name is Sara, their team maybe is the only all-female group in this hackathon, and they wish to use blockchain tech to address the social problem of “sexual harassment”.
In our life, many victims are not willing to report crimes because the possibility of personal information being exposed, and they may drown in the accusations and malice of others, which cause fierce secondary harm. But we know the “cryptography” of blockchain may have the potential to solve this problem. By using XMTP we could use the end-to-end encryption communication protocol, protect the victim’s privacy and at the same time guarantee the authenticity of the report.
I couldn’t say how impressed I was when I heard this idea, it strongly related me to some previous experiences. As I stepped out of the restroom, I feel more confident and stronger as a woman.
In the venue, I first met the four other teammates who have been anonymous on discord, and we’re such a diverse team! Nael is a contract engineer from Paris, Yanis is our front-end also from Paris, Alex is front-end from Mexico, JP is a data analyst from China, and I, the product manager and designer from China.
Our brainstorming is non-stop from 2:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.. We basically focus on the fields of cross-chain communication, decentralized identity, and lending:
from a graded message alert protocol based on PUSH (advertising -> events -> feature updates -> major spam/hack emergency alerts), a public fundraising platform for Ukrainians ( Donate NFT, Token and fiat currency, and do swap within the platform) to a lending platform endorsed by social credit (a bit like Shuidichou). For the whole 12 hours, we left the table and returned, suspended discussions and re-started, over and over again.
When we asked the mentor’s opinion about our first product plan, he said it was too ambitious to finish within two days and it was better to go deep with one section rather than build a comprehensive product architecture.
We returned to the table with the messy scratch notebook at 2 am, “Let's re-think it all over again.”
Carpool back to the hotel in the morning, notice a sponsor friend from PUSH also taking the same car with me.
I mentioned I met with PUSH’s founder at NFT NYC when PUSH is not so mature as now, she is a lovely and smart Indian lady. He told me that is exactly the time, he saw the information about PUSH (previously EPNS), and he highly agree that cross-chain communication is one of the most important missing parts of the blockchain. We existed on the blockchain as a “wallet address”, but there is no communication method like Email or iMessage, the problem it causes might be serious, a lot of rugs or crush-down information can only be known by randomly swiping the Twitter or Discord.
He sent a DM to the PUSH team saying he want to help somehow even without any salary, and it turned out he got a job offer and now became one of the sponsor judges for the ETH hackathon.
The other day I saw him at the venue at 4 am and asked him why he stayed so late while other sponsors are long gone around 11 pm. He said he would leave until help every project successfully use the PUSH protocol.
Grab every opportunity when you meet something you really believe in, it’s never hurt to try.
We team agreed to focus on "Social Endorsement" for development on Saturday, we believe that introducing social endorsement can lower the entry barrier for others and enhance behavioral credibility. The application scenario can be: Endorse for your acquaintances’ financial credit when they don’t want to do over-collateral; endorse for your ex teammates tech skills when they want to find a job or form a hackathon team, etc.
We named it "Dorse", originally from “Endorsement”, which also means "Open a door for others on chain”
We do not have a back-end engineer on the team, so we can’t realize the request process since it needs to be stored. We start building the product from the endorser’s process:
Proof of humanity: Login by wallet and proof of humanity (WorldCoin, PolygonID)
Recommendation: Pick the endorsement request from people you may know (Lens, Covalent)
Credit context: Browse the person's information, additional background check, community, and DApp engagement (DUNE)
Endorsement: Confirm and airdrop endorsement SBT for both parties (Polygon, Optimism)
API: Serve as an API that allows others to further develop on top of our protocol (Graph)
In our spare time, we would go downstairs to line up for the coffee, and that is the time when I started a conversation with Mahmoud from Egypt. We talked about his previous work experience with a giant tech company and his current consultant position, I mentioned my background from Web2 entrepreneurship, TikTok pm, to Web3 entrepreneurship.
"Hey you're surprising me, every sentence you said lets me know a new you", and then he said, you remind me of my younger self. Each of your sentences is followed by a "BUT". You are talking about your lack of understanding of the market, your fear of not having a solid tech background, and your feeling that you have not done enough or are not good enough. It's a lack of self-confidence and dissatisfaction that is uniquely bound to the oriental context, we can't accept mediocrity or failure.
Saying “BUT” is my personal habit, because I feel that I need to be humble and take the initiative to expose my shortcomings and reflect on myself. But that is the moment I realized, deep down my "humbleness", I had never been satisfied with my experience and achievements. In most of my contexts, self-confidence is complacency and arrogance. Mahmoud burst my "humble" bubble and saw the uneasy me. I saw him a true friend at that moment too.
One of the cool things about this hackathon is that whenever we have any questions about using a sponsored service or API, always go downstairs and find them. Like when Alex encountered difficulties when doing Proof-of-humanity verification, he asked the person in charge of Worldcoin for help.
Our daily routine is: developing, designing, adjusting interfaces, luch, developing, asking questions, discussing, dinner, developing...
Nael can quickly write the contract while listening to French songs on the spot; Yanis called his American girlfriend and complains about the terrible American food; JP was worried about his Akita puppy he left home; Alex and I throw stuffed toys at each other from time to time (our only entertainment).
A big-bang head guy suddenly came across to our table around 3 am, He lined up all the chairs and started to crawl on the table and chairs: "Look, assuming I am an asset, I will do the cross-chain by climbing the chair to another table, isn't it easy?"
I explained some of the current cross-chain problems: Decentralized Exchanges introduce their own token that increase complexity and cost; Centralized Exchanges have problems with trust issue; Polkadot’s rely chain causes extra costs; the emerging LayerZero protocol offers lighter solution...
The friend looked at me suspiciously and continued to crawl. He said that you are trapped by the existing mindset, you need to crawl with me!
Nael and I looked at each other, speechless. There is a fine line between genius and madness, maybe this guy could solve some underlying problem innovatively, we will never know.
I finally started recording the demo video at 6 am in the morning on Saturday as Alex and I were sitting on the cold steps. After 23 hours hustling without rest, I felt like my nervous and physiological system was about to collapse. So I went to the lounge to sleep for an hour.
In the first 10 minutes of the deadline on Sunday, more than half of our materials were not completed, but the teammates were so reliable that we completed the submission in the last few minutes.
After that, we went to the main area to give a five-minute presentation to the judge, and then we went to the sponsors for a road show. We won three awards from Worldcoin, Lens, and Covalent, as expected.
Alex and I looked at each other at the end of the celebration, and we realized that we were both in a weird mood, I thought that maybe the weather in San Francisco was too bad at that time. When I left the venue, I received a message, "I think the bad mood is because we will hardly see each other again."
Since the blockchain has a "consensus" layer, the cost and speed (theoretically) performance cannot be better than the existing centralized network. Blockchain has undeniable advantages in terms of “immutability”, “attack resistance”, and “data transparency”, but do we really need everything on the chain? The Web3 trend may be caused by mass investors and money and also people think Web3 is mysterious and cool. But my friend Ryan thinks in different way: just like the history of the Internet, build and then ask why.
There are many builders, and capitals in Web3, but where are the users? Most people are Defi traders and NFT players. You will find that all DApp layers are designed around the "airdrops" mechanism because no one is here to find good content and make friends. Before solving the problems of high entry barriers and infrastructure security, cost and interoperability; before the mass “real” users flood in, what is the point of the non-Defi DApps? Since I'm doing a DApp myself, the current conclusion is that by accumulating users and data before the wave hits, products with a first-mover advantage may have a better chance of being a killer app.
Whenever I ask this question, my friends will ignore me like I’m an idiot. Will Web3 completely replace Web2? Will Web3 exist in parallel with Web2? Of course, no one has a definite answer, but we builders are just like sailors of this industry, and we should think about where we should drive this great Wheel. such as solving the accessibility of the population to financial products; returning to personal ownership of data, etc.
Reminds me of the original intention when my friends and I initiated Buidler DAO:
"It may be years before the best models, but the inspiration comes from today's foundations, and that alone is enough to keep our minds open."
Buidler DAO has grown from only 6 people to more than 5,000 enginners and investment researchers in our Discord. Currently, we published 107 original courses, 64 original research papers, and 8 projects are in incubation.
Buidler DAO link: https://link3.to/buidlerdao
Because it is a product, it has been trying products this year. For example, MetaShield, an anti-phishing security plug-in that is purely non-profit, has been downloaded by thousands in the Chrome store, and has protected the encrypted assets of hundreds of users in the event of large-scale theft.
Vitae3, which was originally developed for the management needs of our DAO, is now gradually introduced to the open market as a tool for issuing and managing SBT reputation on the chain. Currently 40,000 Gitcoin Donators have claimed their identities on the platform.
I want to remember the people who are side by side:
🤍: Buidler DAO Fam, Zixun, Alex, Nael, JP, Yanis, Mahmoud, Micheal F, Sara, Jace, Jackson, Mehdi, Ryan Yihe, Justin, Charles Laowang, Jiahui, Ruihan, Chris Zhu, Jonason, wendy, James, Brian, Jack He...
Move over hodl, it's time to buidl!