By
Dimitar Bogdanov
October 30, 2018
4 Min Read
The team of LimeChain decided to attend the Cryptolife hackathon hosted by Status, on the weekend before Devcon IV. Truth be told we were not prepared and we did not go there with a clear vision on what we are going to hack and how will we organize ourselves. We decided to go with the flow.
The first day was full of friendly meetings and lectures by the organizers and the sponsors (MakerDao, POANetwork, Bloom, Streamr, etc.). Cool content and lots of food for thought, no idea popped up yet though. We contemplated merging with another team, but they all seemed assembled. It wasn’t until the speech of Mariano Conti from MakerDAO on the importance of stable coin in volatile economies (f.e Venezuela) that an idea dawned on us — we were going to create a marketplace for handmade goods (think Etsy) that pays the receiver in stable crypto (Dai).
We also wanted to showcase our proficiency in UX for Dapps and decided to go through and integrate our current work-in-progress product LimePay(more to this soon) and allow for the regular non-crypto-user to pay with fiat money while still executing all the sweet traceable blockchain transactions. Last, but not least, we decided to integrate with Bloom, in order to have a clear way for login and KYC of our users. So it began.
We embarked into building this Demo platform. We started working on the presentation website and the Bloom integration. Bloom is a beautiful platform, quite easy to integrate. I had to occasionally poke around their community manager Derek, to trace if all I’ve done is correct, but nothing out of the ordinary — bloom worked very well. By early afternoon, the contracts, the homepage, and the Bloom integration were done. We started working on the purchase workflow and here the things began to go south. Up until 2 A.M., we were trying to resolve issues with the payments until we gave up and called it a night — we were almost heartbroken.
Sleep helped. We found that the system was not working, because we were trying to send 50000000000000000000 (5 with 19 zeros) instead of just 50 dollars. No wonder it did not work. Quick fix and we are good to go. We shot a video of the platform working and the pitching started. It’s safe to say all were in awe — I mean, executing blockchain transactions with credit card is pretty cool. Sending DAI back to Venezuela is awesome too!
Come awards time, in addition to meeting Vitalik, we were knackered. We were competing in three categories — best marketplace, best DAI usage, and best Bloom usage. We did take latter two of those and happiness took over the tiredness. We were one of the 3 teams with more than 1 prize.
On stage with the winning teams
LimeChain & Vitalik
Last, but maybe most important, we made lots of new friends and the Ethereum community showed once again to us that it is the most welcoming community these days.
