From March 20th to 21st, the first Substrate Developer Hackathon in 2021 held at Shanghai, China. The event attracted developers and enthusiasts from all over East Asia. The OAK Foundation team was among the 21 teams that got into the final competition. Let us review the exciting event together.
Group photo of the participants
There are a total of 33 developer teams entered the competition of the hackathon in early February 2021, and 21 were selected to enter the final hacking competition and demo day. The hackthon starts with a 50-day online preparation, followed by a 36-hour on-site hacking session. Teams are required to develop products related to Polkadot ecosystem, either based on Substrate framework or using toolchains such as Polkadot.js library.
OAK Foundation team members (Zhongwei Shi, Leah Li, Xingyou Chen) participated in the final hacking session and the demo day. At the beginning of the demo day, Dr. Yao Qi, head of Parity Asia, delivered an opening speech for the event, introducing the goal of the hackathon, the rules of the competition, and the members of the on-site jury.
Dr. Yao Qi delivering the opening speech to the demo day
Leah Li, member of the OAK Foundation team, introducing the product
Leah Li is presenting the OAK project to the audience
The OAK Network team delivered three improvements to the Polkadot.js Chrome extension. We believe that the Polkadot.js extension is a very important piece in the Polkadot ecosystem. Its functions are to store private keys in the browser and sign for transactions. However, compared to Metamask, the Polkadot.js extension’s functionalities still comes short. Therefore, we decided to take on the challenge to help add a few new features to the extension. Our proposal got valuable support from the official Polkadot.js developers, so we took advantage of the hackathon to tackle the following problems:
- Developed batch import and export function for wallets
- Developed an Address Book within the extension
- Integrated Polkadot and Kusama identity in to the extension
OAK Network founder Chris Li is presenting the demo remotely from San Francisco
Post OAK’s presentation, the judges who are Polkadot technical experts and representative from investment institutions raised several questions to the three OAK team members.
Polkadot Technical Ambassador John
Web3 Foundation Community Manager Qinwen (left), Patract founder Lipeng Yue (middle), Asia Business and Operations Director Helena (right)
OAK technical team representative Zhongwei Shi (left), Leah Li (middle), Xingyou Chen (right)
Through the Hackathon, OAK Network has raise a lot of attentions from the audience, and received many interesting questions from Polkadot enthusiasts. The team also got to mingle with other developers in the after party, exchanging ideas and discussing the future of Polkadot ecosystem. The team truly felt belong at the event. Although the event is over, we are looking forward to the next get-together with Polkadot people!
OAK Network builds an Operating System for smart contracts on Polkadot. In the past few years, most blockchain solutions focused on horizontal scalability to solve the current problem of speed and throughput. In comparison, OAK strives to improve the future of blockchain by taking on the challenge of vertical scalability with a smart contract virtual machine (VM) redesign.
Our mission is to empower high-level business models innovations with a smart contract engine redesign at the low level. By solving critical problems from the bottom up, we can unleash product potential not possible today. With original solutions on batch operation, access control and resource management, OAK VM will introduce new smart contract features while staying EMV-compatible, all to expand the feasibility of a blockchain application. In addition, OAK will offer developer tools to streamline the setup and troubleshooting process, enabling more powerful and versatile applications to be built.
Stay tuned for further information about the OAK Network here on Medium, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as in our Discord Server!
Please check out our engineering and growth job openings, contact partner@oak.tech for partnerships, or contact@oak.tech for any general inquiries.
