ETHIndia 2 — Flashes of brilliance, Fun and Vitalik
In a time of great uncertainty for crypto in India, ETHIndia was just the sort of cerebral celebration the doctor ordered.
ETH Global events come pre-bundled with a certain energy. An enthusiasm for building on the blockchain that’s agnostic of whatever scandalous or regulatory affliction the ecosystem is currently suffering from. That ETH India managed to carry this energy, despite being set in, well, India, is incredibly significant. Those who don’t live in India, or don’t crypto, might need a little more context.
In March 2018, the Indian government made an ignorant, regressive reference to crypto in the Budget and it’s been all downhill since. Crypto traders having their credit cards blocked, crypto exchanges being shut down, crypto trading exchange associations lobbying for better regulation, for any regulation, or at least a proper dialogue. And now there’s a draft ban on crypto floating around, with ridiculous punitive measures like a 10-year prison sentence for holding crypto. ETH India happened in this climate. Ballsy.
Lendroid were Gold Sponsors at the event. We had a whale of a time on stage. Three of us — Vignesh, Vii and I, took the stage alone and at one point, all together, to convey the following messages -
- We’re here to share, not shill
- Lendroid is more than a protocol
- Building on Lendroid is easy, rewarding and cutting-edge
- We’re here to help
I went on first, to offer some context — spiffed to stand in front of a roomful of super-smart hackers and potential game-changers, and address the elephant in the room — crypto and the Indian government. At one point, I pulled in a reference from Rick & Morty. The idea was to warm the stage for Vignesh. I think it worked. Watch and tell me what you think.
A little while later, Vignesh delivered a talk on the ‘Limitless Promise of Hackathons’. This was a special talk for us. For Vignesh, it represented life coming full circle, in a way. In the talk, he encapsulates his crypto life — from cobbling together the first Bitcoin ATMs in Canada, to finding and investing in seminal blockchain products, to founding Lendroid — as the overstory of three hackathons. He split his talk in three parts — The Noob, The Searcher and The Maximalist. Why go autobiographical at a hackathon? Because there is a bit of a journey between a first time hacker and where Vignesh is today, and his story might help melt some of the miles away. More importantly, if we’re asking hackers to work on Lendroid, they need to know what we stand for, and they need to know why they’re building what they’re building.
Lendroid is one of the few projects that have defiantly remained in the decentralised space. We are going to remain truthful to the decentralised theme. This is a reflected in how the protocol is designed and architected. Those who choose to build on Lendroid will feel the flexible, customisable, open nature of the protocol. This is what Vii, in his tech workshop, demonstrated.
In the runup to ETH India, Vii and I worked on solving a rather painful part of hackathons — dev support. This quite often includes ideation and invariably includes documentation. We put together a sort of a booklet that contained a dozen or so ideas for things you could build on the protocol, along with the tools you’d need to build them. These were meant to be stimulants only; nobody wants to be told what exactly to do. It was surprisingly effective. It was originally a blog (with a back-link to another blog), but the final version, replete with QR codes, looks something like this. It’s a print ready file, so if you want to make copies, go for it.
Vii, in a sweeping talk, managed to cover much ground. He enumerated the recent milestones for Lendroid, spoke about the reasons for some of the decisions we took over the past year, showcased ideas, presented a sneak peek into the roadmap ahead, and managed to pack in a live demo of a proof of concept dApp as well!
‘The God is live’, an ETHIndia tweet said. Takes a while to get over the ‘the’, but going by the enthusiasm in the room, it’s hard to argue with. To be honest, it is a bit of a coup to have Vitalik be part of the event. Considering the general mood of crypto in India, it was just what the doctor ordered.
There was some criticism (when is there not); that he didn’t say anything new, that we knew all of that stuff anyway. Perhaps, but that’s because those of us in the community have become conditioned to hanging on his every tweet, keeping ourselves abreast of developments large and small. It gets easier over time. On the other hand, consider the demographic on that day — 68% of the hackers are new to Ethereum. He certainly must have seemed ethereal to them.
Kartik Talwar moderated the discussion really smoothly. His questions were contextual and open. The discussion never lagged anywhere. What was really endearing about it was Vitalik himself. That image you see at the beginning of the blog was him horsing around before the discussion began. While everyone was tying themselves up in knots over a technical snag, this is how he diffused it. The range of questions and responses — from general and autobiographical to highly specific and technical — this is catnip to the curious. If there were any doubts about the legend of Ethereum, I’m sure there were none post that discussion.
Vitalik spoke about scalability, decentralisation, his initial vision for Ethereum versus where it is right now, Ethereum 2.0 and much else besides. One part I liked was when Kartik asked him how one grows a general purpose platform, where there’s no specific idea about what’s going to be built on top of it. How do you plan for it, optimise it? He was rather diplomatic, or at least understated, when they discussed Libra. He did get in a matter-of-fact kick in the shins when he said ‘basically Facebook wants to get into payments’ and that ‘blockchain was regulatorily the easiest route’.
The Q&A part with the audience was beautiful. Partly hilarious (‘why Ethereum, why not Viterium or Buterium’, one inspired citizen asked), and often impressive. The takeaway was that there are a lot of serious people building stuff on the platform.
The Hackers
It’s what we were there for. While last year felt a little like a fact-finding mission or an elaborate recce, this year, Lendroid came prepared with a dozen viable ideas and some comprehensive dev tools. The hackers rose to the occasion splendidly and built incredible dApps on the protocol. The sponsor prize, which we initially set for $3,000, had to be raised to $5,000 because of the sheer coolness of projects that the hackathon churned up. Here are the prize winners. -
- First Place ($2,000 USD): Virtual Heders — A Lending-based ICO platform
First off, kudos to this team for having managed to cobble together a working product in 48 sleepless, energy drink-fuelled hours. The concept was neat and well executed. Basically, the platform allows investors to get liquidity from the Lendroid protocol (they retr-fitted our proof of concept dApp Reloanr), and invest in projects showcased on the Virtual Hedgers platform. They also integrated Kyber (for swaps of ICO tokens into stable currency) and Torus. The whole experience inspired them to build something outside of the hackathon as well. A dozen energy drinks do take some time to wear off. They talk about the hackathon experience in this blog.
2. Second Place ($1,000 USD): EZTZ — ZK Loans on Ethereum
We love this project. As we explained in the closing ceremony, EZTZ was the only project that dug really deep and did protocol-level programming. They successfully implemented Aztec protocol’s zero knowledge concept onto the Lendroid protocol and achieved confidential loans. We had a great time calibrating convenience and usability with confidentiality. What they finally came up with will, we’re sure, take the DeFi conversation forward. For obvious reasons, the journey was not fully completed by the end of the hackathon. For obvious reasons, we’re working with them to bring this great idea to fruition.
As an aside, these guys won the prize last year too. They’ve gone on to do interesting things since and have been instrumental in organising blockchain hackathon in premier tech institutions in India.
3. Special Prizes ($500 USD Each)
A beautifully put together lender aggregator from cryptomaniacs Sergej and Anton. 1Lend is a single interface for your deposits and withdrawals, with comprehensive overview of lending providers and smooth wallet integration. We’re looking forward to working with them.
b. STFI — Securitising Finance
Securitization of assets is a complicated problem. STFI initially wanted to integrate Lendroid as a lending partner on their platform, which enables trading of securities. They’re ever so slightly ahead of their time. We had very recently begun speaking with Swarm about securitization and enabling SRC20 tokens on the protocol. While real estate might take a while in India, there are other assets that can potentially be securitised without too much of a hassle. Watch out for these guys.
C. Crypt Lender — Voice-based Loans
Gimmicky? Perhaps, but who cares. It was really cool to speak to your phone and get a crypto loan. Crypt Lender was still a little way away from a fully functional working product, but they’re on the right track and we intend to help them get ahead.
D. Voith Mascarenhas — Graph QL
Voith is a serious guy and brimming with passion for Python. He didn’t participate in the hackathon per se, but built a really cool hack to improve the current method for communicating with/querying a node — inflexible and read only. Voith has made it possible to custom queries for specific information, fast. He makes it look easy, and exciting. More power to you.
A Bromance with Matic and Kyber
For all of us in crypto, the past year has been interesting, to put it mildly. There have been technological breakthroughs and highs, and some frustrating bureaucratic and regulatory lows. The common denominator is that we’re in it for the long haul, and we’re in it without compromise on what we stand for. Reconnecting with Matic and Kyber has been one of the most rewarding takeaways from ETHIndia 2.0.
In their neat and very timely post event blog, Kyber generously sprinkled references to Lendroid and posted pictures of our swag — the tee shirt that said ‘Bro, Code.’ really was a hit. But I think Kyber outdid us all. We couldn’t get enough of ‘I am Satoshi Nakamoto’ and their redeemable $5 coupon was genius — it combined a gift with a live demo. Matic, on the other hand, were everywhere. On the lanyard, on a gazillion tee shirts, and they even brought a selfie booth. After trading swag and PJs, we also got to talking about real things.
We shared notes on what it’s like to run a blockchain enterprise. We marveled at the diverse paths we had taken, and also at similar bumps we had navigated by ourselves. We were also able to explore real synergies at several levels. Tech, branding, engagement and much more. We are as curious as you are about how those things will take shape. Stay tuned, we’ll let you know.
ETH Global and Devfolio
Having connected with them for four events over the past year, Lendroid has had nothing but helpful conversations with Jacob and Karthik of ETH Global, which has clocked up a dozen events in two years. The ETH Global events are a bona fide phenomenon and have arguably done more for the Ethereum community than any other initiative. And they would be the first to acknowledge the splendid on-ground support of their regional partners. In the case of ETH India, that would be Devfolio.
It is important to understand that ETHIndia is a part of the mammoth task Shakti Goap, Denver Jude, Nash and the rest of the Devfolio team have set for themselves. They drive a larger programme of encouraging coding in the student community, and organise close to 50 hackathons a year in a range of premier tech institutions in the country. Lendroid looks forward to partnering with them to support this initiative in any way we can.
The Team Dynamic
It was so much fun. We felt invincible together — Pranav Davey, who heads ops at Lendroid, Vii the tech lead, Vignesh the founder and I, the talker. I had always wondered why some projects arrived in huge numbers to hackathons. A generous mix of tech and non-tech guys mostly just hanging out. This time around, the correlation between numbers and swagger became clear.
The team dynamic sort of shaped the Lendroid persona at the event. Even before we arrived, we had a really good idea of what we were going to wear, the aesthetics of our stall, the messaging, the swag, and most importantly, what we were going to say.
We fed off each others’ energy both on stage and off it. In the 48 hours that hackers built cool stuff, we brainstormed the pants off the protocol and made blueprints for spectacular futures (pun unintended).
It changed us in interesting ways, ETH India did. Makes us look forward to ETH Berlin, where you can catch Vii and Vignesh, and ETH Denver, where we intend to make an entrance. Wherever you run into us, you will find us in good spirits, you will find us in animated conversation with hackers and friends, and you will find us together.
Until next time.
