DAO HACK MONTH: DELIVERED ⛵️
DAO Hack Month was nothing short of a flaming bucket of awesome sauce, two kick-ass events, hosting 50 teams, from 30 countries. Countless workshops and limitless amounts of collaborations have been seeded from this month of DAO Hacking excellence.
We had hackers coming together from every corner of the globe. One of our winning teams had members from The Dominican Republic, Greece, India, Spain, Ireland, and the USA. Now, that's what we call distributed!
Hacking together on DAO's really is a game-changing and globe-trotting experience that you need to see to believe.
We spoke with a few of our most distributed hacker teams and here's what they had to say about the event experience, takeaways, and what we can improve upon for the next time around:
FaceBook Fly 🇬🇷🇩🇴🇺🇸🇮🇳🇪🇸
Dhanwanthari Ramakrishnan (@Dan13Ram) 🇮🇳 Bangalore, India/ Front End Hacker 🏗
What's the motivation behind your project?
"So the idea was to empower existing Facebook groups, to help them onboard themselves into a DAO structure. Many Facebook groups already have many members, but they're going stale. They don't do anything. But if we could give them a DAO model for them to pool funds and then, you know, collectively direct those funds to build something cool, that would be a great idea. And so we wanted to build on that".
Are you solving a real-world problem here? If so, describe it?
"I think the problem is that there's a lot of potential in these groups with these huge amounts of people that I think we should be able to translate that people power into something actionable."
When you say potential, you mean potential for what?"For a change, you see before blockchain it is impossible for a group of people to just put some money together and then direct that towards an action as a whole. It would need somebody to create a bank account and then, which country, which bank account, and then who owns the rights on the bank account and how do we make good decisions on that money in a collective way, all those things. With DAO's we have a solution to all that. Yet for a DAO to happen, you need a group of people with like-minded ideas, let's say, and a focus to do something, but then Facebook groups are already there, they have like-minded people, they have some shared ideas, and common goals, et cetera. And if you could just give them a simple way to create a DAO and manage funds, then whatever they want to achieve, they can achieve seamlessly."
What inspired you to join DAO Hack Month?
"So as you mentioned the group of people from around the world coming and hacking on something and building it and also getting paid. Uh, it's just all possible only because of blockchain. So that's where like I got interested in blockchain, let's say two years ago, two-three years ago when the whole cryptocurrency bubble.
I mean, I already knew about Bitcoin, but then I found out about Ethereum, and then I realized the relationship. This is incredible. This is going to be amazing, but I didn't act on it. It was only now this year that I acted on it. And yeah, so this year, I was looking at how I could just get into the dev community and work on Ethereum stuff.
I participated in one hackathon previously the Stop COVID-19 hackathon to get going. And through that hackathon, I met James ( a teammate) and James says, "Hey, I've got this idea do you want to join and hack on this thing with me?I said yes. Within a couple of weeks or something, we were in a room together and we started hacking on it."
Any major takeaways from DAO Hack Month?
"I think the biggest thing I've noticed in the Ethereum world is It's just really cool people and cool stuff being built, and people just meet up, and stuff happens. I don't know how it happens. It just happens!"
El Dorado 🇻🇪🇬🇶🇦🇷🇪🇪🇩🇪🇳🇱
Juan Andreu (@Juan El Dorado) 🇻🇪 Caracas, Venezuela / Full Stack Hacker 📚
What's the motivation behind your project?
" El Dorado offers a digital USD savings account and a peer to peer exchange so that people can trade their devalued Venezuelan Bolivars for digital dollars and crypto-assets. We provide a vehicle for doing P2P payments, remittances, and access a new suite of financial products powered by blockchain. This will allow financial inclusion to flourish by introducing unbanked Venezuelans to the benefits of digital currency.
We found that our initial solution of using a peer to peer exchange was a bit hard for people to use, for the day to day person you know and we also figured why don't we make it easy for moms and aunts, you know, that kind of person to use for day to day daily transaction stuff, you know? And, so we want to cover any Latin American country that is experiencing. How do you call it? Hyperinflation, like Venezuela or Argentina, but then not only that, also for example, dollarized countries like Equador. We also have a very diverse group, so we understand the problems people have and create these solutions for our own struggles, you know? "
Are you solving a real-world problem here? If so, describe it?"Well, in my experience, my mom's living in Canada, and my grandma is in Caracas. Right. She doesn't want to go to Canada though, so for them to send her money, they have to go through so many people and exchange so many hands, each time the money is sent that when the money arrives at its destination, it is not the same value anymore. It's also difficult for her. You know, for my grandmother to find people she can trust people, that her money is safe with.
So we want to solve that. It's one of the main issues that we want to solve. We want to solve the problem of remittances, and we want to do it in a way that people can trust what we're doing. And that people's money is not like lost or wasted in stupid ways."
What inspired you to join DAO Hack Month?
"One of our team found the event, and we said, "Hey let's do it, maybe we can learn something there, and we might come up with some ideas and create some new features. Right. So we spent one week brainstorming. We actually lost one week of work, actually like thinking how we can do this, because we are like a FinTech company, centralized and autonomous doesn't exactly fit there, right?
So one of the features that we implemented just for the hackathon was the payroll in a stable coin. Once we got started, everything just went together, we used linkdrop and some others that went together magically. Brilliant. We were able to create these mini organizations totally decentralized."
Any major takeaways from DAO Hack Month?"Coming into this event, our devs had zero experience interacting with the Ethereum network, they were able to learn loads of concepts necessary to successfully work with it; things like ERC20 spec, signing transactions, chain events, gas, gas price, and Web3.
We are extremely happy with this invaluable knowledge they gained.
As a company based in Estonia, we got access to several pieces of technology that we will now include in the future development of our project. Sponsors like TheGraph, MagicLinks, Linkdrop, actually have a solid product offering that will make our developers' lives easier.
The most important of all was understanding and to fit-in with the Aragon ecosystem, because it surfaced a new product idea for our roadmap: decentralized business accounts."
LexART DAO 🕵🏽♂️🎨🔓☠️
Audsssy (@audsssy) 🏴☠️ Anon Web3 Advocate and DAO Tinkerer ⚗️
What's the motivation behind your project?
"I thought it'd be interesting to experiment with adding an economic layer to NFTs. Kind of like creating different token models for art, music, etc. DAOifying, it would be dope. I think there's potential in capturing some value from the minting of these different tokens. But still unsure."
What did you build that solves a real problem?
"Built a token factory that mints NFTs with decaying royalties and automated licensing patterns."
What is the impact you're making? How are you using the thing?
"Eh, good question. I'm encouraging some of my web2 friends to let me tokenize their photography, paintings, and music. Maybe they'll be surprised by how easy it is to sell art on Ethereum. But still got a lot of work to do. Will def need some front end help to compete in web3, unfortunately."
Major take-aways from DAO Hack Month ?
"I found the workshops helpful. I checked the schedule to see if there are things that would help with LexART, and thought they helped see what other tools were available. Scaffold ETH talk by Austin was fun. It was also good to just get out there and pitch what everyone is working on to a bunch of people. The feedback was great. Loved it. Thanks for organizing this massive thing btw. I don't know how you guys do it. Would do it again!"
This is only just a sampling of the many dedicated and novel projects submitted to the event. You can find out more details about the final contenders for Fork The World by watching the Demo Day recording where the participants came and shared their projects with the judges.” 🗣
Hack For Freedom finalists can be found here 👇🏼
Bounty Winners can be found here 👇🏼
Fork The World finalists can be found here 👇🏼
Here's to a successful month of hacking for freedom and forking and everything in between, many thanks to the community efforts of MetaCartel, Aragon, & MetaGame. Our amazing Judges and Organizers, our crafty bounty creators & sponsors Wyre, The Graph, Circle, Gnosis and DAUhaus.
*Remember* In the end though it's not about winning, because the real treasures are the friends we made along the way 🤜🏽💗🤛🏿
What’s Next From The DAOsphere ?
We couldn't be more excited about DAO Rush Week hosted by MetaCartel and friends. This event brings all the coolest DAO's from the Ethereum ecosystem together for a week of presentations, discussions, and electronic music festival vibezzz 👨🏼🎤🎶
Join in on August 31st - Sept 5th RSVP early for the events that pique your interest, READ up about the DAO's you will see or JOIN the organizers' panel and help make this event magic by diving into Discord
We hope to see you there, or anywhere on the interwebs ! Sincerely your DAO Hacking Council 🧙🏼♂️✨