My Decentralized Innovations Startups’ Hackathon – DISH 2019 Experience

Warning! Off topic. This is not about Alexa but I did use some AWS services in my DApp entry for this hackathon. First of all I would like to thank and congratulate Decentralized Innovations Startups’ Hackathon – DISH 2019 organizers, sponsors and volunteers for a successful event.

I found out DISH2019 through Roy Selbach whom I met at WordCamp Manila 2018 event. Later by December 2018 I met Amadeo Brands thru Roy at HackManila 2018 hackathon. Roy’s team and I won in that event! check out the event highlights at https://hackmanila.com/. Amadeo asked me to signup on DISH2019 hackathon.

So right after my lose at AWS Hackdays 2019, I moved on quickly (lol 😂) to focus and prepare my tools and reviewers for blockchain. So at least I got 2 more weeks to prepare. (You can check my AWS Hackdays 2019 HealthTech Chatbot entry at https://www.alexachamp.com/my-aws-hackdays-manila-2019-experience/ and please don’t laugh with our presented app (lol 😂)). These are the things I prepared and hopefully can help my co-hackers at hackathons or even on startups.

• Udemy courses – cost me around $48.00, $12.00 each course as I dont have time to read (lol 😂).
  • Learning Blockchain Development with EOS and C++ By Jackson Kelley. Special thanks to Jackson Kelley for answering my Q/A in his course. I suggest you add MultiSig concept in your course.
  • Starting with EOS Blockchain for Developers By Stone River eLearning
  • Create a PHP website that interact with EOS blockchain By Phu Tze Pang
  • Perfect React JS Course for Beginners by Paul Carlo Tordecilla
• VPS – cost me around $60.00
  • To run EOS on a local test net it requires at least 8GB RAM. Unfortunately AWS free tier excludes free EC2 with that specs so I purchased a VPS server at Contabo, the cheapest I found so far. I bought 1 year coz im planning as well playing around with GoLang. I can setup locally on my laptop via Virtualbox to setup EOS but for sure ill reset/format the server from time to time as this is my first time to use EOS. Reset/format and installing EOS from source, compiling together with CDT will take a while and I’m using my laptop for work.
• EOS – bought some 28 tokens which is around $70.00
  • Im a fan of this cryptocurrencies (gambler as i say (lol 😂)) and want to feel having an EOS token at my local wallet thru scatter.

So roughly a total of $178.00 or around ₱9,000.00, just imagine the face of my wife now she knows where I spent my extra money (lol 😂). I didnt know that this hackathon has a big prize for the winners. My goal is just to learn DApp/blockchain development, to have a FinTech experience and hackathon is my sports (lol 😂).

I want to be innovative so I am little picky on what blockchain technology to use. I am expecting that majority will use Ethereum, the king of smart contracts. So while reviewing Ethereum, EOS is always there comparing to that technology. I am also a fan of Dan Larimer since bitshares which i invested around 400K BTS so I didn’t hesitate to use EOS. I’m not saying EOS is an Ethereum killer but what I like about it is that it tries to solve some problems of ETH. These are as follows:

• Fees/Gas. EOS doesn’t have that just to make an action or transaction.
• Scalability issues by Ethereum. We can argue about this one as EOS sacrifice a little bit about decentralization but heard of Cryptokitties?
• Devs entry to smart contracts. EOS is using c++ unlike ETH where it introduce new programming language Solidity. Maybe this is just my preferences as I’m coming from LAMP stack dev. PHP is written on C++.
• Scary public address. ETH’s 0xd1aEb1e6e84d545124cfEFc000c3D37cF57cC157 VS. EOS’s thegigamike1. Which is better? EOS has this concept of accounts.

The following URLs saves me a lot:

• Smart Contract – https://developers.eos.io/
• For Identity via Scatter – https://github.com/EveripediaNetwork/eosjs-browser
• MultiSig –https://steemit.com/eos/@genereos/eos-multisig-tutorial
• Setting up – ttps://ylv.io/how-much-does-it-costs-to-run-dapp-in-2018/

I team up with Ma. Amah Concepcion B. Galon,CPA,MBA and Ace Mark Llentada. For sure a big smile from Roy Selbach seeing Ace Mark around hahaha. Im just enjoying hackathon honestly. Ace joined on to my team to learn.

Many thanks to the hardcore mentor Mark Vernon (I can’t forget this guy, when he went to our table, he never asked to see our laptop to demo our DApp but just asked what problem we are you trying to solve and never checked my Dapp (lol). Also when he gave me an idea about the process of voting via smart contract, eliminating the owner of project and even us (ProsperEOS) as handler of funds for the spending request), Amadeo Brands (gave me other features for my DApp like timeline for spending request feature and incentives for voters) and Roy Selbach (this guy already saw me pitching at HackManila 2018 and his good in presenting so he gave me advice on my slides) and Go Nagata (you are ready!) . I got many changes on my slide and working with EOS is a little messy as its new. I even encounter they updated from 1.4 to 1.5 and they remove the EOS_ABI code in smart contract so it destroy all my test smart contract, resetting my VPS blah blah tech sh!t.

With regards to DApp idea we created, I just went down to basic use but realistic or practical use of blockchain. Then considering the DISH 2019 hackathon theme “Inclusive Prosperity FinTech Summit” I came down on the idea ProsperEOS. Combining Prosperous (meaning characterized by financial success or good fortune) and EOS (Most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications). ProsperEOS is a Complete Decentralized Funding Platform. For innovation I added Amazon Rekognition to automate checking of submitted documents like BIR and Mayor’s permit for supplier entry. Im also extra careful in my idea as I don’t want to have the same ideas on recent EOS hackathon https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eos+hackathon. EOS hackathon got hyped and for sure panels or blockchain tech lovers knows it. Our app might not be new but implementing it with EOS is something different.

I just slept 3 hours in the whole hackathon, lost my appetite last Sunday as I always get nervous on pitching, but fortunately we won 1st place. Below is our demo video

Congrats also to all participants. I lose a lot of hackathons and i know the feeling but you can always use your DApp as portfolio, you learn something new, and new FinTech friends/network. It was a great experience, fun, and new friends/network from FinTech. Hoping to see you in the next hackathon or FinTech events!