Transactions of Value: Me, Time & the World of Crypto
I competed in my first hackathon EVER and won—and I did it without knowing how to code.
Writing this now I’m still in shock of what really ended up happening. I went into this conference expecting to make it a HUGE learning experience—which it was—but not much else. What actually happened: With a limited skillset, the right attitude, and my best friends at my side, I ended up winning the hackathon and so. much. more. Attending World Crypto Con 2019 was the best decision I’ve made in a minute.
Spending two weekdays on the Las Vegas Strip with two of my best friends was exciting to say the least. Whether it was the questionable chance of meeting Cardi B, eating overpriced, but Instagram-worthy food, or seeing the tiny red brick that was our high school off in the distance from the comfort of our Cosmopolitan hotel room balcony, you could say we were enjoying ourselves.
But we all knew we weren’t there for the perks. We were there for the World Crypto Conference, to compete in the hackathon we registered ourselves for in a fit of spontaneity.
My experience at WCC was super impactful. I learned exactly what industry leaders are doing in the world of cryptocurrency and the kinds of problems that software developers and businesspeople deal with when addressing today’s blockchain problems as well as when they look to the future of the field.
I learned that digital currency is all about value, and transactions thereof. Interestingly enough, my experience at WCC can be appropriately summed up by these transactions of value: value I was creating for myself, value I was adding to time, value I was taking from WCC. I’m beyond thrilled to share my experience at the 2019 WCC Hackathon, and thank you for reading!
Creating Value for Me
As October came to a close, I felt underwhelmed with how I had spent my time. It was my first full month in human accelerator program The Knowledge Society, but I still felt like I wasn’t pushing myself to my fullest potential. Being held on the last two days of the month, World Crypto Con was decidedly my last chance.
Okay, that might sound dramatic, but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of saying “there’s always next month,” and pass up an opportunity sitting right in front of me. I want to be doing cool things EVERY month. I had no idea that tech conferences came to Vegas of all places, that the entertainment capital of the world could also be home to something like #VegasBlockchainWeek.
So when I found out about the WCC Hackathon, I knew I had to go. But there was a lot that would have easily steered someone with the wrong mindset away: I didn’t know terribly much about blockchain or cryptocurrencies at that point; I would have to miss school; I would have to organize rides/book a room for the event’s overnight hours. There were so many moving parts that I didn’t know with certainty how would turn out. But what tipped the scales in the other direction was the quality of the things I did know:
- I knew what I didn’t know
- I wanted to learn, and
- I liked a challenge.
From there, coordinating everything else became easy. I found no trouble recruiting two fellow comp sci-obsessed friends to join me. In thinking of reasons to persuade them, new opportunities materialized in my mind and actually heightened my own excitement: networking with professionals, the prospect of internship or job offers, the clout of being the youngest people to attend the conference.
We resolved that the experience would be wholly invaluable and unique. It was all we could talk about in the week leading up to the event. I was excited I was setting out to do what I intended: I was creating value for myself.
The Hacking Begins
Going into the hackathon, I was PUMPED. I was able to sleep in until 6 (yep, sleeping in) and I was ready for the challenges that lay ahead over the next two days, whatever those would be.
Project Goal
The hackathon began with a rundown of the project goal: create a decentralized app to reduce tribalism and increase interoperability.
Tribalism is a problem in the cryptocurrency community describing divisions based on lacking crypto regulations, large enterprises taking advantage of blockchain, impractical and complex solutions of idealists, and rivalries between the thousands of different forms of cryptocurrency.
One solution is interoperability, which allows blockchain users to make transactions across networks with few restrictions. This means truly embracing decentralization — connecting blockchains for different coins to each other; creating integrated, not separate, hashing algorithms and consensus models; encouraging harmony among different blockchain ecosystems.
In addition to this overarching theme, there were also three partner challenges sponsored by eosio, Ravencoin, and XYO International. Each of these companies provided us with resources that we could use to build our dApps, such as SDKs and sample projects. Each company leverages blockchain in a different way:
- EOS uses Delegated Proof of Stake as opposed to Proof of Work in its blockchain protocol to make transactions faster and more flexible and require less energy.
- XYO validates crypto transactions involving geospatial data through a secure Bound Witness protocol between Internet of Thing (IoT) devices.
- Ravencoin involves peer-to-peer transactions of cryptocurrency with large potential in revolutionizing financial tech.
Now the stakes for winning were pretty huge. Each of the partner challenge prizes were worth $1000 USD in each company’s respective currency, and the grand prize of the WCC Hackathon was $3000 USD.
Being a Dev for Halloween
After the kickoff, we found out exactly how unprepared we were for a competition of this caliber. We didn’t even know what IDE to use or how to use the SDKs to create our dApp — and we weren’t even sure we were using all those terms right! For the first few hours, the hackathon went something like: be confused, write down and look up technical terms/acronyms we didn’t know, get more confused, repeat. It quickly became the running joke that we were only pretending to be devs, and that at least we had an excuse since it was Halloween.
Nevertheless, we became overwhelmed with all the info being thrown at us and the challenges we were expected to do, and I decided retreating from the hackathon room and going out into the conference might provide some much-needed respite.
Networking: The People Kind
Taking that physical step out from the hack room reminded us of one of the things we were so excited to do: meet new people and network! The main part of the conference took place a floor up from the hackathon, and on our floor there were just six booths. It made for a more intimate and low-stakes atmosphere for networking — i.e. THE perfect situation for us three somewhat dispirited but still curious kids.
No matter how disheartened we felt about our lacking knowledge, we still wanted to learn. We could have quit at any point during the 48 hours we were there for the hackathon — but we didn’t. This perseverance is what made our later success possible.
We were first attracted to the booth for Storj Labs for several reasons:
- I had read about Storj in some preliminary research I did on cutting edge blockchain companies. I recognized the company for its decentralized cloud data storage system.
- The name was cool! It’s pronounced “storage,” I told my friends when they asked what “stordge” was.
- They had a FAT stack of shirts to give out that we were SO ready to accept.
We introduced ourselves, and I was aware that the two adjacent booths, belonging to XYO International and Monero.org, had begun to listen in when we said we were high school kids curious about blockchain. We eventually admitted that we had close to no idea what we were doing at the hackathon, but hoped we’d be able to learn something from the conference and from the experience at WCC in general.
It felt GOOD to set aside our pride in order to be honest. We figured out we had nothing to be embarrassed about, and that the people there were more than happy to teach us what we didn’t know about blockchain.
We ended up getting a unique, in-depth rundown of cryptocurrencies and how blockchain works for different applications from each of the booths we went to. They confirmed what we already knew at the same time they provided us with insights we never expected.
Probably the most striking and memorable was from Diego Salazar of Monero. He offered a perspective that completely contradicted everything else we had perceived blockchain to be. He dismantled the hype of the system, and said that blockchains are good at one thing: removing trust. He was intensely frank about the “sh!tcoin” industry he was apart of and showed how Monero restores the security, privacy, and trust that other crypto ledgers lack. The passion he spoke with was invigorating.
The more people we spoke with, the more comfortable we got. And soon we had armfuls of business cards, stickers, shirts, and other swag before we realized we would eventually have to return to the hack room and compete.
Networking: The Computer Kind
We returned to the hack room just in time for the workshops that EOS, XYO, and Ravencoin were holding. There, each of the judges, who also assumed the role of hackathon mentors, showed the SDKs and other resources available to us as participants.
With a better idea of how decentralized blockchain networks operated, we were drawn to the XYO challenge, just because geospatial data sounded like something we could work with. The XYO network was the one we seemed to have the best understanding of. Now it was just a matter of creating a disruptive dApp idea.
Adding Value to Time Itself
We were in full brainstorm mode now. I was reminded of a super cool example that Atikh Bana from Storj told us when we had talked with him earlier in the day:
Everyone has self-driving cars that communicate with each other as apart of IoT. Say you’re running late one day, there’s traffic, and you just can’t afford to be late. Wouldn’t it be COOL if your car could simply ask other cars to move out of the way for you in exchange for cryptocurrency? That’s the power of blockchain.
I was so impressed by this idea because it combined several pieces of emerging tech — autonomous vehicles, IoT, blockchain. And conceptually, it was revolutionary: In this instance, digital currency wasn’t just being exchanged for monetary value; the transactions involved exchanging time. Now this really stuck with me. The fact that we can leverage cryptocurrency to add value to time itself was crazy to me!
The only problem with this idea, at least in the scope of the hackathon, was that self-driving cars aren’t commonplace or able to communicate with each other yet.
That didn’t stop me from sticking with the underlying concept though. I urged my teammates to think of time transactions, everyday tasks that involve time that we could monetize.
And then, miraculously, it came to us. We were going to use a blockchain to allow users to shorten long wait times at restaurants in exchange for digital currency. ️We pitched our initial idea to the hackathon organizers, and to XYO judge Phillip Lorenzo. They all confirmed it was a valuable idea and that we were on the right track.
Now it was time to get into the technical development. We ended up figuring out we needed to download the XCode IDE, which should have been an easy task, except for the fact that my Macbook was about four OS versions behind the one that supported XCode. This unfortunate discovery meant hours of operating system updates, and even more for downloading XCode. How IRONIC it was that the very thing we put a value to in our project (time) was the thing we were losing in trying to develop it.
Killing Time
That night we had hours to wait for those software updates to take place. We didn’t want to waste them, and so dedicated that time to fleshing out the idea a little more, though we did take the luxury of taking our time in doing so. We storyboarded our pitch, thought of downfalls and limitations of our idea, and attempted to teach ourselves how to make the software.
We even settled on a solid name for our dApp — QJump — because it allows you to “jump the queue.”
Conceptually, everything was coming together. The same could NOT be said about the dApp itself.
It was almost 1 AM when my Macbook was finally updated and Xcode was successfully downloaded. We were pretty drained by then, despite not having done any real coding. And while it was our intention to have stayed up all night coding if we needed to, we decided we could afford to get some real sleep and code all morning the next day.
The Final Stretch
After six-ish hours of rest, we were more than refreshed to get up and at it. A part of me knew when we went to bed that we would still have difficulty understanding the how to use the SDK, much less use it to make a working demo, by the 11 AM project submission deadline. I was right, and we didn’t make much progress coding that morning.
That said, we weren’t defeated. We knew we had dedicated our time doing the right thing in practicing our pitch presentation because it was what we knew how to do well. If we had instead spent our time trying to learn how to code in Swift and utilize XYO’s SDKs, we would probably still not have been able to produce a working demo and we would have compromised the well-refined pitch we made.
When it came time to submit our project, we declared it was on a local device, uploaded no URL, and planned to make a bomb presentation with mockups even if we didn’t have a demo to show off.
The hackathon culminated in the pitch presentations that took place around 2 PM. We felt accomplished knowing we would have competed in our first hackathon and put forth our best possible effort despite not knowing much about the software coming into it. For us three and how competitive we can get, this was a new feeling of satisfaction.
We were also excited to see what the other hackathon participants, who actually knew what they were doing, had been able to develop, and we hoped to turn that into a learning opportunity as well.
So, we pitched. We pitched to a room of adults super knowledgeable about blockchain applications who were cheering us on as the only kids at the conference. We pitched a story, capitalizing on how everyone should value their time as a resource as precious as money. There were no slip-ups because we had spent so much time practicing, we met the time almost perfectly, and the delivery was spot-on.
We were asked a couple questions about how we implemented the XYOracle Network into our solution, as well as if all we had to show were our mockups. I responded with confidence that we had technical difficulties we couldn’t overcome, and that we just wanted the opportunity to pitch our idea to everyone. I was SO proud of us, and it seemed that the judges, event organizers, and fellow hackathon participants had that same energy when they applauded and congratulated us afterwards.
At this point, we were proud and relieved. We had just completed our first hackathon and we were stoked! And it went better than expected for us not having a demo to present. Which is why what happened next caught us completely off guard.
The XYO Challenge Prize Winner
The self-pride we felt had put us in a good mood for the rest of the day and we were ready to cheer on our fellow hackers at awards. EOS announced their winner, then Ravencoin, then Phillip took a pause to explain why the XYO winner was chosen. The winning project was the one that best implemented the XYO network. No duh, I thought as I got ready to applaud the next winner. And all I remember next is “QJump” appearing on the screen.
It took us all a minute of gawking at the screen for the fact that we had won to register. We stared at each other in smiling disbelief as we slowly made our way onto the stage for a picture with Phillip. We didn’t know how we did it.
We remained in this state of functioning shock for a while after awards. We were told that our pitch was what sold the judges on our project, which was incredibly reaffirming. And Phillip told us he liked our idea so much that he wanted us to bring the project to completion. And boom, we were on our way to being app developers. If we were in a good mood before, I don’t know what I’d describe this as.
Taking Value from WCC
Tangibly, we won $1000 USD in XYO tokens. We were offered sponsorships. We were being asked to make QJump a reality. But for me, the real win was the key takeaways:
- Make the most of your skillset. Even with as much as we learned in the 2 days we were at the conference, we still did not know software development or design well enough to create a working dApp. Rather than focus our efforts on the technical skills we did not have and could not realistically cultivate in the time we were there, we fleshed out our idea and planned our pitch presentation.
- Run the marathon, but know when to sprint. We had a LOT of downtime at the hackathon. And we wouldn’t have gotten through each day without the downtime that broke up the spurts of intense, deep work we were doing. Finding the balance between productivity, and knowing when to take breaks after the struggle became unproductive, was key. When our project submission deadline or pitch time approached, we knew when we had to eliminate distractions and put forth 110% efforts. At other times, we knew when we could afford to mess around or sleep.
- Finish strong. There were many times when we could have easily called it quits, retired home and without ever having to return to the Cosmo. Something kept us there and we were intentional about making the most of the experience regardless of any external prize we could win. We put our all into the hackathon when it mattered most (for the pitch) and in the end, it all paid off.
QJump is far from taking off. Phillip made it very clear that unless we worked for it, our idea would be just that and nothing more. We have a lot ahead of us: more mockup designs, REAL software development, testing with sentinels. And after that we’ll have a longer list including integration, marketing and accessibility to worry about.
But wherever it takes us, it started here, at the conference I took a leap (edit: jump) of faith at.
Thanks for reading! Applause and feedback welcome. Thank you to BeMyApp for organizing the hackathon and to everyone I had the chance to meet at WCC, especially those I mentioned above! I’m so grateful to be developing my app and to be doing it with two of my closest friends. I can’t wait to see where QJump takes us!
Follow me on my journey as I use emerging tech to change the world. Let’s connect on LinkedIn or email me (caitayc@gmail.com), and subscribe to my monthly newsletter!
