I recently had the opportunity to participate in ETHGlobal's hackathon in Paris, this hackathon brought together so many talented individuals from all over the world. Let’s start at the beginning, it’s Friday, we checked in and received our badges and bracelet’s. We’re a team of 3, all women. This is my first ETHGlobal hackathon this year, but don’t fret, I’ve been around this scene a bit. As the day ends, we still have no idea what to build, we call it a night around 11pm and decide to brainstorm some more in the morning.

It’s 9am, we arrive at the venue, still undecided on an idea. We go back and forth for a few hours before our friends decide to ask us to join their team. We now have Raza, an OG devrel, Kevin, a lead designer, Jen, a 10x dev, and Claudia, a nurse turned designer on our team. We’re now building Wala. Our goal is to improve the user experience of paying gas fees by allowing people to pay with gift cards backed by NFTs.

A major pain point we wanted to solve was the difficulty of managing gas fees for users new to web3 wallets and applications. Our solution uses Biconomy's account abstraction and paymaster architecture to abstract a lot of the complexity away from the users. Users can simply login with their email via Biconomy, without needing to set up a web3 wallet first. Then using the paymaster, we were able to allowlist and then start paying gas fees for specific users.

For communication between gift card users we integrated XMTP, a decentralized messaging protocol built on XMTP that enabled features like group messaging and broadcast announcements. This allows users to stay coordinated, learn about special promotions, and discuss issues.

For users that already have a web3 wallet, we included WalletConnect integration so they can easily connect their preferred wallet like MetaMask, Zerion, or Coinbase wallet.

To make the experience more fun and engaging, we used a lot of the art assets from NounsDAO. They have a great design and so we built on top of that.

Under the hood, we minted NFTs on Polygon zkEVM and Goerli testnets. We tired deploying to Linea test net, but the RPC’s were down. To represent different gift card levels that users can redeem to pay gas fees. The NFTs act as the gift card balances.

It was very rewarding to collaborate with this team and create a solution that makes web3 more accessible to mainstream users. The event gave us hands-on experience with cutting-edge protocols like zkEVM rollups. I'm grateful to ETHGlobal and the sponsors for providing the environment to learn and build.

We were grateful for the support of sponsors like Fluence, a decentralized computing platform and marketplace powered by blockchain economics. Fluence provides a scalable, secure alternative to centralized cloud computing by connecting developers to a global network of compute providers. Providers earn rewards in Fluence's native token and other cryptocurrency for serving applications. Fluence's technology helped enable the decentralized nature of our project.

I’m also thankful for the Developer DAO, a community of thousands of web3 builders creating a better internet.

Without their support, I would’ve missed this one. I was originally supposed to fly home on the 20th, but extended my trip thanks to the scholarship, and was able to participate in this hackathon. I’m forever grateful for the memories, friends, and lesson’s I’ve learned on this trip.

OHHH we won some prizes! You can see the exact list on the ETHGLOBAL showcase page for Wala. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed this.