ETH.Portland Retrospective (by Devin P. Marty)

In this retrospective report, Harmony aims to reflect on our experiences at ETH.Portland. This feedback is taken from the Harmony Event Operations team, contributors, and ecosystem partners. Establishing an open forum allows us the feedback needed to celebrate victories and humbly review areas that we can improve on as we move forward.

Event Sign Off and Approval: Li, Essa, and Boris

Hackathon Details:

First, a moment to reflect and few things to celebrate:

ETH.Portland was a refreshing event. Over the three days, around 50 hackers, 4 title sponsors, and many more blockchain-interested individuals all got the opportunity to build and become close friends. We heard several times that the event felt like a blockchain summer camp, which is quite accurate. Boris and Devin had tons of time to meet new friends, hackers, and future partners – both at the conference building and dinners each night.

ETH.Portland was a highly-valuable conference to sponsor with lots a meaningful networking moments, though low key enough to still accomplish other essential work.

With this said, let’s celebrate a few achievements:

1. Boris spoke on ZKU and Zero Knowledge on Harmony – Lots of interest for ZKU following his talk. The University of British Columbia will be looking into ZKU for their developer club.
2. Harmony gave out 4 Hackathon prizes and 1 Project Y grant – Totaling $28,000 to builders!
3. The team stayed healthy and on top of all other Harmony work over the three day conference.
4. The ease of building on Harmony’s testnet/mainnet was lauded by all of the developers, so keep it up dev team!

Initiatives that worked that we should continue:

1. Sponsoring these smaller hackathons is far more valuable (ie accomplishes our primary events objective) than putting lots of money towards big event sponsorships. The team felt that the cost of a title sponsorship was well worth the money and could be replicated again and again with hardly any impact to the overall events budget.
2. The amount we gave to builders was also perfect. Not only were we the top contributor, but we had four teams building on harmony’s testnet and mainnet, which made the hackathon a fun competition as well.
3. Technical support on the ground was essential. Shoutout to Boris for all of his hard work and helpful developer insight.

Initiatives that DID NOT work that we should stop:

1. Though we didn’t do any, events during the day would not have been successful. ETH.Portland was much more of a hackathon.
2. Unclear event leadership going into the event – going forward, all event leads should be determined by the events team (and should likely be members of the events team).

Ideas for improving at future conferences:

1. These hackathons represent perhaps the most intimate and powerful way to accomplish our primary events goal – attract and support more Harmony protocol builders.
2. More technical support/education on the ground would be a great idea. Though it was fine for ETH.Portland, it should be considered going forward.
3. Paying out hackers faster is a priority. Any process to make this easier would be appreciated by all parties.

Survey Results:

The team was asked to rank, on a level of 0 to 10, 6 questions regarding the performance of Event Operations. The questions and the average response is listed below:

1. Event Operations worked effectively as a team.
1. Result: 9.25
2. Event Operations worked effectively with the venues, sponsors, and event managers.
1. Result: 10
3. Event Operations fulfilled the goals of Harmony at EthPortland.
1. Result: 10
4. Event Operations met their deliverables.
1. Result: 9.5
5. Event Operations produced high quality work.
1. Result: 10
6. I would work with the Harmony Event Team again.
1. Result: 10

Qualitative Feedback:

What is the BEST thing about your experience at EthPortland?

The people attending this conference were there for the tech and the community and it was refreshing. Everyone was on the same page and was eager to collaborate.

What was the WORST thing about your experience at EthPortland?

Three days was a bit long for a hackathon of this size but by no means the worst thing.

Would you want to work with Event Ops again?

Absolutely! Boris was so easy to work with and executed support and his ZKU talk perfectly!

Team Open Forum:

Feel free to add in any extra commentary below. This is an opportunity to call out particular “Heroes”, identify potential flaws that could have caused bigger problems, and basically add anything that isn’t captured in the sections above.

Shoutout to the Transak team for sharing our ethos and for their eagerness to do events with us in the future.

Project Y Grants + ONEPitch Grants (via Project Y)

Standard Project Y Grants:

$10,000 - Devin and Boris

Iweus - Project Y

Name of Project Iweus Proposal overview Our platform unites us all by what we all have to share. We all hold so much information and value. Enormous companies exist just to get the information from us and sell it. A change is needed.

talk.harmony.one

Hackathon

From April 7th to April 9th Harmony had the pleasure to sponsor the first ethPortland Hackathon organized by Dystopia Labs. Attendees gathered in the beautiful city of Vancouver, WA to build around 20 projects tackling multiple issues in web3, including DeFi, NFTs and tickets sales among many others. The harmony team lead by @Devin P. Marty and @Boris Polania spent three days talking with the teams, providing technical support to all the teams that used Harmony blockchain as the base technology for their project.

As in other previous Hackathons, we found that there is a lot of value in directly supporting the builders community. This time though, we were surprised by the resourcefulness, creativity and skills of many of the developers in the Pacific Northwest. They managed to deliver technically complex applications in such a short amount of time, including projects like trust.fund, Guild Halls and stub3–Harmony Track hackathon winners–that implemented smart contracts in our network to create decentralized applications in Harmony’s testnet.

Trust.fund (winner of a $10,0000 prize) makes possible the creation of irrevocable living trusts on Harmony. Users can create accounts that release funds to a designated beneficiary when a set of conditions is met. Currently estate planning and trust funds have close to $2 trillion locked up in legacy traditional contracts, so we believe the potential is enormous and are very excited to see where Albert Ho (trust.fund founder) can take this project.

Guild Halls (winner of a $5,000 prize) created a secure, verified and anonymous freelance job board or bazaar, to tackle some of the more pressing issues these marketplaces face in web2 such as reviews manipulation, previous work verification and payment disputes, by providing a set of smart contracts so reviews can only be submitted after provable client worker interaction and by providing a history of work completion / status in the blockchain. Jake Nylund and Philip Zenn (Guild Halls co-founders) deployed a live application where job contracts bids could be launched and milestones could be tracked easily.

Finally, stub3 (winner of a $2,000 prize) created and deployed a web3 app that simplifies the process of selling and buying tickets with crypto. Sellers can create their own events and drop tickets with a very detailed customization of prices, reseller fees, and quantities. And buyers can search for events, buy tickets and re-sell them if they wish too. Stub3 not only simplifies the process by providing additional services like on-ramps so users can easily buy the coins they need to pay for the tickets, but also provides a simple solution for the problem of scalping, by allowing event organizers to get a cut of each resell. Richard Ryan Garcia and Byanca de la Fuente (stub3 co-founders) had plans to keep working on deploying their application in mainnet, we cannot wait to see it live!

Congratulations to all the winners and hope to see you next year in ethPortland!

🌲 THANK YOU!