Buidler DAO in ETHSF: The Crazy 48 Hours of the World's Largest Blockchain Hackathon
ETHSF Hackthon is the largest offline Ethereum hackathon in the world, held from November 4 to 6 in San Francisco, USA.Author: Rui, Co-founder @Buidler DAO, Twitter: @popolandRuii
ETHSF Hackathon is the largest offline Ethereum hackathon in the world, held in San Francisco, USA from November 4 to 6. BuidlerDAO built the social endorsement protocol Dorse during the three-day competition and won three awards.
This hackathon felt like a dream. If you were to draw lines on a world map representing the flight records of all participants, you would see scattered points from China, Dubai, the UK, India, Mexico, Egypt, France, Germany… converging in San Francisco, forming an incredibly dense line.
This is a global Web3 pilgrimage. The first question when greeting everyone was not "Where are you from?" but "What are you building on?" This greeting as an opener is exciting; it signifies that your gender, skin color, and region do not matter. We share a commonality that transcends these physical barriers; we are a community.
Overview:
- The Palace of Fine Arts and sponsors
- Female engineers solving sexual harassment issues
- Teammates from China, France, and Mexico
- Sponsors offering jobs through messaging
- Minimum viable development with limited resources
- Egyptian engineers discussing Eastern insecurities
- The daily grind of collapse and rational recovery
- The explosive performance of the guy with the big hair at dawn
- Winning, brief happiness, and prolonged loss
- My doubts, determination, and expectations
Ethereum San Francisco Hackathon:
The Palace of Fine Arts and Sponsors Checking in early on Thursday at the Palace of Fine Arts, hosting the world's largest blockchain hackathon felt like the most romantic thing this year. Swans glided across the lake as I walked through the grand, beautiful archway towards the ETHSF entrance, momentarily feeling like an ancient Greek scholar about to engage in a graceful intellectual duel.
On the way, I saw young boys in various Stanford, Yale, and Columbia apparel skateboarding and greeting me with enthusiasm. I regretted not wearing my NYU uniform to show off.
The Palace of Fine Arts was originally built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The ETH SF hackathon is a two-day development competition (from Friday 7 PM to Sunday 9 AM), with 10 teams ultimately making it to the finals. Each project can apply for the sponsors' prize pool, with all sponsors carefully selected by the Ethereum Foundation, representing official support. Categories include blockchain (L1, L2, sidechains, modular blockchain execution layers), KYC, storage, oracles, data analysis, social graphs, cross-chain communication, DeFi, etc.
Presentation by Lens Protocol before the competition starts.
Beautiful Engineers in the Bathroom:
Blockchain Solutions to Sexual Harassment Issues I saw a girl with green hair doing her makeup by the sink, and we naturally struck up a conversation while washing our hands. Their team might be the only all-female engineering team, aiming to use blockchain technology to address the social issue of "sexual harassment."
In real life, many victims of rape and assault are afraid to report crimes to the authorities because they fear their personal information will be exposed. However, using cryptographic zero-knowledge proof technology, similar to how XMTP provides end-to-end encrypted communication, can ensure the authenticity of reports while fully protecting the victims' privacy.
Thinking about my own and those around me's experiences, I repeatedly expressed my support for this idea. The moment I walked out of the bathroom, I felt more confident and empowered as a woman.
We fear that exposing wrongdoing will drown us in others' malice.
Anonymous Team Meet-Up:
Us from China, France, and Mexico My teammates and I had been anonymous users on Discord, and when we met, I realized we were a super diverse team. Nael from Paris is a contract engineer, Yanis from Paris is a front-end developer, Alex from Mexico is also a front-end developer, and I, JP from China, am a product manager.
Lovely teammates meeting for the first time.
From 2 PM on Friday to 2 AM, we brainstormed non-stop. We focused on areas like cross-chain communication, identity reputation, and lending: from combining push protocol to create a tiered message alert system (advertisement -> events -> feature updates -> major spam/hack emergency alerts) to a crowdfunding platform for the people of Ukraine (allowing donations in NFTs, tokens, and fiat, with swaps on the platform) to a social credit endorsement lending platform (similar to Shuidichou). The brainstorming lasted 12 hours, with teammates repeatedly leaving the table, pausing discussions, overturning ideas, and reorganizing.
Me organizing the product plan.
When we presented a complete product plan to the official mentor, he said, "To be honest, your product looks too intimidating." Given the limited time, rather than building a large and comprehensive product architecture, it would be better to delve deeply into one aspect. At 2 AM, I returned to the table with a messy draft and said, "Let's start over."
Carpooling with Sponsors:
Getting a Job from a Message After discussions ended at 4 AM, I shared a ride back to the hotel with the head of PUSH. During our conversation, I mentioned that before PUSH became so mature, I had met their founder at NFT NYC, who was a very lovely and impressive Indian woman.
He mentioned that at that time, he saw information about PUSH (previously called EPNS) online and felt that cross-chain communication was one of the most lacking aspects of blockchain. Currently, individuals use wallets as carriers but lack communication methods like "Email" or "iMessage," leading to many rug pulls or stolen information only being visible through Twitter or Discord, not to mention wanting wallet-to-wallet cross-chain chatting.
He sent a private message to the PUSH team saying, "Hey, can I do something for PUSH? I don't need a salary; I just genuinely appreciate your value." As a result, he received a job offer and is now one of the judges at the Ethereum hackathon.
One day at 4 AM, I saw him again at the venue and asked why he was still there so late when other sponsors left early at midnight. He said he had to help all the projects using PUSH solve technical issues. There are many opportunities in this world; when you see something you truly believe in, be brave and pursue it. It's never hurt to try.
Combining Limited Time and Resources:
Minimum Viable Development We decided to focus on developing the "social endorsement" aspect. Introducing social relationships as endorsements can lower the entry barrier for others and enhance the credibility of actions. The application scope could include: to avoid over-collateralization, social endorsement relationships can be introduced in loan applications; when forming teams for the hackathon, friends can guarantee your tech stack, etc.
We named it "Dorse," derived from Endorsement, which also symbolizes "opening a door to the chain for others."
Dorse homepage.
There is always a gap between ideals and reality. We didn't have a back-end engineer, and if we started from the endorsement requester's process, their requests couldn't be stored. Therefore, for feasibility reasons, we chose to start from the endorsers. The product logic is as follows:
- Endorsers need to confirm they are real people: we use WorldCoin and PolygonID for Proof of Personhood;
- Endorsers browse endorsement requests from "people they might know": we extract social relationships from Lens protocol and use Covalent to analyze on-chain behaviors similar to theirs for recommendation display;
- When an endorser clicks on someone's request, their personal details will be displayed: we use DUNE to provide more detailed on-chain reputation and behavior analysis about the requester, allowing the endorser to better consider this person's background;
- When an endorser agrees to a request, this endorsement relationship will automatically go on-chain, airdropping a non-transferable token (SBT) to both parties' wallets;
- All endorsement relationships will be integrated into our API, and using The Graph, we will visualize these social relationships, making it easy for all DApps to use our API.
Interlude 3 / The Egyptian Engineer in Line for Coffee:
Insecurity in the Eastern Context During my leisure time, I went downstairs to queue for coffee and had a brief chat with a tall Egyptian friend, Mahmoud, about what we were both doing. He is a technical director from Amazon Prime and now works as a consulting advisor for mature companies. I shared my experiences from marketing, design, front-end, Web2 entrepreneurship, TikTok to Web3 entrepreneurship, receiving countless "wows" from him.
"Hey, you are such a radical girl; every word you say reveals a new side of you," but then he added, "You remind me of my younger self. After every sentence you say, you add a 'BUT.' You talk about your lack of understanding of the market, your fear of not having a technical background, and how you feel you haven't done enough or well enough. This is a unique insecurity and dissatisfaction we have in the East; you can't reconcile with mediocrity or failure."
Saying "but" is my personal habit because I believe in being humble, actively exposing shortcomings, and reflecting. But at that moment, I realized that behind this was my never-ending dissatisfaction with my experiences and achievements. In most of my contexts, confidence equates to arrogance, complacency, and ignorance of one's limitations. Within ten minutes, he burst my "humble" bubble and saw the anxious me. At that moment, I also considered him a true friend.
Collapse and Rational Recovery: The Daily Grind of Development One great thing about the hackathon is that if you have any questions about using sponsors' services or APIs, you can just go downstairs and find someone. For instance, Alex encountered difficulties with real-person verification and directly found the head of Worldcoin to resolve it, and we also consulted while using DUNE and Lens.
Our daily routine was: develop, design, debug interfaces, eat, develop, ask questions, discuss, eat, develop…
Nael could quickly finish contracts while dancing to French songs; Yanis called his American girlfriend to complain about how terrible American food is; watching JP frown at his computer, worrying about his Shiba Inu at home; Alex and I occasionally threw plush toys at each other, as our only entertainment was this silly game.
The Explosive Performance of the Big-Haired Guy:
I Don't Understand Cross-Chain At dawn, a big-haired American guy suddenly appeared across from me. He lined up all the chairs together and started crawling on the table and chairs, saying, "Look, suppose I am an asset; I can complete cross-chain by crawling from one table to another. Isn't that simple?"
I explained some current issues with cross-chain: decentralized exchanges (DEX) require secondary swaps of their tokens, incurring extra costs and steps; centralized exchanges (CEX) have trust issues with centralized swaps; Polkadot relies on relay chains, leading to extra costs; the emerging LayerZero protocol offers lighter solutions…
The guy looked at me in confusion and continued crawling, saying I was trapped by conventional thinking and needed to crawl with him. "Everyone stop writing code for now; just watch me; I'm about to start cross-chain." My French teammate and I exchanged glances, feeling both impressed and bewildered. Genius on the left, madman on the right; it seemed this guy might innovatively solve underlying issues.
Hackathon Awards: Brief Happiness and Prolonged Loss At 6 AM on Saturday, we finally started recording the demo video. If you listen to the audio in the video, you'll find I was in a completely dazed state. At that moment, Alex and I were sitting on the cold steps, and after 23 hours without rest, I felt my nerves and physiological systems were about to collapse, so I went to the lounge to sleep for an hour.
With 10 minutes left before the Sunday deadline, we still had a large portion of our materials incomplete, but my teammates were incredibly reliable and finished the submission in the last few minutes. Then we rushed to the main competition area for a five-minute presentation, after which we split into five groups to pitch to sponsors, waiting 30 minutes for a 2-minute speech. The presentation deadline was 12:30 PM, and the results were announced at 2 PM. We won three awards from Worldcoin, Lens, and Covalent, which was within expectations.
However, at the end, Alex and I exchanged glances, and he said my mood felt strange; I wasn't very happy. I joked that perhaps it was because the weather in San Francisco was too bad today. As we left the venue, I received a message from Alex saying, "The sadness is because we won't see each other again," and I suddenly felt down, as if I had briefly entered a beautiful vacuum environment, only to be forcibly pulled out.
A team that became inseparable in three days.
My Doubts and Expectations for the Blockchain Industry:
Personal Perspective, Self-Questioning and Answering Is Web3 a solution to problems, rather than a solution to all problems?
Due to the "consensus" layer of blockchain, its cost and speed (theoretically) cannot surpass existing centralized networks. In terms of immutability, attack resistance, and data transparency, blockchain has undeniable advantages, but does everything need to be on-chain? I've seen many products created for Web3's sake, and I wonder if it's the influx of hot money that creates the illusion that all Web3 stories are very appealing. However, Ryan also provided another perspective, referencing the history of the internet's development: Build and then ask why. Before Mass Adoption, what is the significance of creating non-DeFi application layer products?
Currently, there are many blockchain builders and abundant capital, but where are the users? Most people are first and second-tier retail investors and NFT players, and you'll find that all application layers revolve around "airdrops" as a mechanism because no one is here to seek good content or make friends. Before addressing high entry barriers and issues of infrastructure security, cost, and interoperability; before a large influx of users, what is the significance of creating non-DeFi application layer products? Since I am personally involved in this, my current conclusion is that accumulating data before the wave arrives, products with first-mover advantages may have a better chance of becoming killer applications. What is your ideal vision for the ultimate Web3?
Whenever I ask this question, my friends fall silent. They say, "You're the first to ask such a vague question," "…" Will Web3 completely replace Web2? Will Web3 coexist with Web2? Of course, no one has a definitive answer, but as builders in this industry, we should think about where we should head, such as addressing accessibility of financial products for the population; returning personal data ownership, etc. While I don't know what the endgame is, I know what it is not, what to pursue and what not to pursue.
I recall the original intention when my friends and I initiated Buidler DAO:
"It may take years to find the best model, yet new inspiration comes from today's foundation; this alone is enough to keep us open-minded."
I hope to remember those who stand shoulder to shoulder with me at this moment.
?: Buidler DAO Fam, Zixun, Alex, Nael, JP, Yanis, Mahmoud, Micheal F, Sara, Jace, Jackson, Mehdi, Ryan Yihe, Justin, Charles Lao Wang, Jiahui, Ruihan, Chris Zhu, Jonason, Wendy W, James, Brian, Jack He, Wendy, Julie, Davion…
Move over hodl, it's time to buidl.
Inviting some friends for a space in Beijing on Monday night.
