Quick overview
I flew to New York City immediately after my trip to San Francisco to attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. This time, I am getting hands-on as I participate in a hackathon—more specifically, the EthGlobal hackathon, a blockchain event taking place from September 22 to 24, 2023. Before introducing my team and our project, I would like to provide some context and share information from EthGlobal.
Overview of the Event:
Demographics of Participants:
950 Hackers
49 Countries
33% new to Web3
My Experience
1. Meet the Team
Team taking a night walk
The team consisted of fellow NOC Toronto friends, namely Adam, Eugene, Hein, and Vaishnav. We took time off from work to attend this hackathon, hoping to learn new technologies and network with like-minded individuals. I would say the event was pretty cool; we got to interact with different companies like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Filecoin. I even met a fellow Singaporean, from whom I learned about her past experience working for GovTech in the San Francisco office and her current role as a software engineer at Filecoin. Really exciting stuff!
2. The Food and Environment was great
Apart from meeting people from the Web3 community, we were also treated with great food and a wonderful environment. The hackathon was held in Pier Sixty, here is a view at sunset, really beautiful!
Sunset at Pier Sixty
Next, here is a quick glimpse of the food that was provided! I would say the FOOD was GREAT, and it really kept us going for the 3D2N hacking away.
3. What We built
Current Payment systems have inefficient multi-currency transfers due to unaligned real-time gross settlement hours in global banking, high costs in fees, and poor exchange rates. Additionally, StableHr plans to help empower and bring currencies closer to people in currencies with weak currencies. This will allow them to be financially sustainable and not be entrapped by their domestic broken financial system. Our project aims to solve this problem by implementing, StableHR, a cross-border automated payment system that allows efficient, low-cost, multi-currency transfers. We plan to target Companies & Organizations requiring global payments to remote workers, freelancers, and outsourced vendors.
How it works: The company uses WalletConnect’s Web3Modal v3 to connect the wallets of the employees. The smart contract encompasses using Unlimit to onramp FIAT to USDC and then using 1Inch’s Swap API for the most efficient paths for a token swap to stablecoin. The stablecoin is transferred to the employee’s wallet and can offramp using Unlimit to FIAT. The employee will be notified of the payment through XMTP messages. Read more about our project here!
Github Repo: https://github.com/erwinqxy/stablehr-fe
4. The Aftermath
After a grueling 3 days and 2 nights with a crazy amount of hacking and little sleep, my teammates crashed immediately after the submission. Here’s a glimpse of the scene during which we were all glued to our computers, fueled by copious amounts of coffee and tea to stay awake. Finally, we all just knocked out for a well-deserved morning nap.
During the hackathon
After the hackathon
5. My Favourite Project – AirTracker
The project is about Decentralized physical asset tracking using AirTags and blockchain storage and messaging. See below for the project demo:
What is it?
AirTracker lets you use AirTags to keep an immutable record of your physical asset locations. It scrapes location data from Apple for each AirTag asset, encrypts the location data, and stores it on chain and on IPFS. Location updates are also sent via XMTP with ENS lookups using AirStack.
You can log in to the web UI to see the historical locations of each asset on a map, as well as the specific time and location updates.
You can share asset location with anyone or any application by simply sharing the randomly-generated tag name, which also acts as the location encryption key.
My Thoughts
I felt the person giving the live demo was quite effective, and the problem he was trying to tackle was valid. What blew my mind was his actual demo and tracking of an AirTag that he purposely left on a bus in NYC. Here is a screenshot of the saved location. It was really impactful to see the product in action, and it genuinely works. It brings out how a simple idea can be as effective as long as it is useful.
Post Hackathon
After the hackathon, I treated myself to a classic NYC $1 Pizza since it was my first time in New York City. Although my team did not win any prizes, I would say this was a fantastic experience. I had the opportunity to meet interesting people, learn about fascinating projects that are underway, and even explore some sponsor technologies. One observation I’d like to share is that New York City is home to exceptional talents; watching the finalist pitches and product demos was incredibly motivating, making me think, “Wow, why didn’t I think about that?” All in all, the hackathon in NYC was intense and competitive, and I thoroughly enjoyed the adrenaline rush.
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