ETHDenver 2019 Recap and Zeppelin Bounty Winners!

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by Dennison Bertram

That’s a wrap! ETHDenver 2019 has just finished up, and while everyone is exhausted, we couldn’t be more thrilled at how vibrant and active the community is!

We want to extend a huge thanks to the organizers, the sponsors, the amazing speakers, the judges — and, of course, the hackers. Everyone was giving it their all to make the event such a success.

Hacking for 36 hours straight is no small challenge, and we were very impressed with all of the projects and the hackathon winners in all of the categories. You should absolutely have a look at the list of winners to see the results of the hard work that was put in over the weekend.

Zeppelin Bounties

For all of us here at Zeppelin, we want to especially highlight the winners of our Zeppelin bounties. This year we were offering two bounties: Best EVM Package and Best Use of Zeppelin Tools, which includes our OpenZeppelin Solidity library of audited secure smart contracts; ZeppelinOS, our development platform for easily creating secure upgradable smart contracts; and our newly released product: ZepKit, an all-in-one tool to supercharge secure application development on Ethereum.

Best EVM Package

SuperRandom EVM

Randomness on the blockchain is hard, but Joseph Schiarizzi impressed the team with an EVM package that offers users two optional levels of randomness deployed in a single package. “Decent,” the first level of SuperRandom, generates a fairly random value, only slightly influenceable by miners, for applications that need a random value for non-critical work. At the “Ultra” level, the EVM packages use a novel application of the CryptoKitties randomness algorithm combined with a “push/pull” function to select a value at a future block time combined with a payable ether reward to the “puller.” It’s very impressive work and exactly the kind of novel application we’ve been looking for in EVM packages.

Best Use of Zeppelin Tools

FundEm

For the best use of Zeppelin tools, Daniel Mowchan and Joshua Hannan created FundEm. Leveraging ZeppelinOS and our newly released ZepKit, the FundEm team created a censorship-free platform for artists and creators to connect to their fanbase and generate income. Inspired by the recent increase in bans on platforms such as Patreon, the FundEm team set out to decentralize expression without censorship.

ZepKit and ZeppelinOS Workshop

For #buidlweek, we hosted a hands-on live coding workshop where we were really excited to release ZepKit, our new tool for jumpstarting application development on Ethereum. Dennison Bertram and Ramon Recuero, with support from Santiago Palladino, presented to a group of about 50 developers. We want to thank all the attendees for their participation, incredible questions, and enthusiasm. We look forward to hosting more workshops in the future!

Panel: #Buidling the Infrastructure for Adoption

Ramon Recuero leads an exciting panel that included George Ornbo(Clearmatics), Igor Barinov (POA Network), Yaniv Tal (The Graph), and Neil Bly (Mainframe). They covered many of topics regarding how we build the infrastructure for adoption. The video of the panel discussion is available for viewing here.

 

Stairway to Zeppelin: Whole Lotta Toolkit for Kickstarting Your dApp

On Friday, Santiago Palladino, Francisco Giordano, and Dennison Bertram presented Stairway to Zeppelin, an overview of developer tooling provided by Zeppelin to kickstart dApp development, as well as a discussion of the mechanics of upgradeability and EVM packages in the ZeppelinOS system.

It was a whirlwind weekend, and while we are sad to leave, we are thankful for all the attendees and participants who made the conference so successful. We encourage all the hackers to keep in touch and to reach out with questions. From all of us here at Zeppelin, a big thank-you!