Building things is so much more fun when you’re in the same room with other developers. That’s why blockchain conferences are such havens for hackathons, especially when hosted by product teams. What better way to build community than to host a handful of devs in one house for a week, right? This year at ETHDenver 2024, Holonym Foundation, the privacy and trust-minded group behind Silk, brought together 8 brilliant hackers out of 30 applicants for a full week of building with ZK proofs, secure sign-on, and wallets so simple your grandma can figure it out.
Developers from 5 different countries gathered in Denver from Sunday, February 25, to Saturday, March 2, to code, learn, and bounty-smash their way through ZK proofs, full-stack building, and UI problems. We recently chatted with a few of these residents to learn their backgrounds and why they’re building with Silk.
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ETHDenver was full of ZK everything this year. We saw many improvements to wallet use cases and user experience and upgrades in both privacy and identity mechanisms. To discuss what Silk has been up to for the past year and to hear about what’s coming next for future Silk hacker houses, Silk Devrel Renee provides some insight on future ETH events, too.
"In Denver, teams used their creative efforts to build Telegram bots, embed wallets into their apps for seamless Silk integrations, and more. Between building and hanging out, teams were treated to workshops from sponsor teams Ceramic and CoopHive among several others."
With Silk, now in open beta, creating a new wallet is as easy as entering an email address and password. Once you’re in, all the usual wallet capabilities are there with the added benefit of an Apple Wallet-like UI with cards showing balances and identity Zero Knowledge tech allowing you to verify with both phone number and government ID. As Renee mentioned,
“With Silk’s trust minimized wallet recovery, you don’t have to worry about misplacing your seed phrase.”
This dramatically reduces the friction of signing into apps. This makes Silk a transition to a wallet that not only just works but gives you peace of mind other embedded wallets don’t offer. Try out the Silk beta today and learn about the Silk Hacker House builders below.
Marco Huberts and Ayat Abourashed from PoSciDonDAO
Chatting with Marco and Ayat, two team members from PoSciDonDAO, you quickly realize the impact that DeSci has on our futures. The two of them have worked together since September 2023 in DAOs while at University studying virology in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Marco, the technical co-founder of PoSciDonDAO, talked to us about how they are working to solve the science issues of today and tomorrow. He’s been studying virology and oncology since May 2020 and was brought into the DeSci space to help bring more funding to the field.
The duo was accepted to the Silk Hacker House to complete a bounty integrating the embedded wallet into the website for their DAO to make onboarding super easy. Marco said they use their parents as test subjects to know when things are easy enough, which, come to think of it, isn’t such a bad baseline. Marco said the goal is to “make voting on proposals and the future of DAOs more user-friendly”, and that’s why he chose Silk as a continuation of the work he’s put into the DAO’s early builds.
The team completed the bounty for this build in under 24 hours, too, and if you take a look at the Silk docs, you’ll find just how simply an embedded wallet can be integrated. Marco added that another reason they chose to implement Silk was because “once more infrastructure is set up for the DAO, PoSciDonDAO will have more chances for funding” in the future. It turns out that making an interface so easy to use can actually make it easier for folks to say yes when it comes time to apply for grants.
Levi Rybalov from Coophive
Catching up with Levi is always a brilliant exercise in how much you can handle drinking from a firehose of info. Levi is building CoopHive, an EVM-compatible two-sided marketplace for computing resources. Essentially, CoopHive is working to create a multi-chain, multi-token marketplace for exchanging compute for AI agents. If that sounds complicated, well, it is. But that’s what makes the blockchain and AI marriage so fascinating.
Levi was first invited to the Silk ETHDenver Hacker House in 2023 and returned this year to sponsor a $1000 research bounty to prevent cheating in certain use cases. Imagine one day you’re driving around and need to take the most efficient route; well, with such compute resources exchanged between cars driving on the road incentivized to take the most efficient route for all, you wouldn’t want any single car cheating their way to the top of the leaderboard.
As for future Silk Hacker Houses, Levi said he definitely intends to return. Maybe we’ll see him and CoopHive again at the next event with a new puzzle to solve.
Coming Up Next for Silk at for the next Hacker House
Closing out our interviews with builders at ETHDenver, we get a sense that both the wallet space and DeSci are maturing. These 8 hackers came together to create wallet solutions they were either already considering or were newly attracted to because of how simple Silk is to build with. The goal for Silk and the Silk dev community at these reoccurring hacker houses, according to Renee, is to give residents space to get creative. An IRL presence helps developers make new friends, gain a new understanding of the tech they are using, and earn bounties along the way. Going as far as getting contracts or full-time work for residents internally or with sponsors.
The apps built at ETHDenver Silk Hacker House were
AI chat application with native silk sign-on
A data batch upload tool
Governance platform for scientific funding
Coming up soon, Silk plans to host another hacker house for builders working on ZK proofs, building consumer apps with Silk, and, hopefully, a few surprise use cases. Taking feedback from previous hacker houses in mind, the upcoming activations in will see the return of familiar sponsors and more time to network. Curious hackers may also find new open experiments with the upcoming release of Mishti by Holonym, a personhood AVS on Eigenlayer for deriving private keys from biometrics and programmable privacy. Stay tuned for announcements when we reveal the next Hacker House.
A Big Thank You to Our Sponsors
Ceramic, Next.ID, Private AI, Bacalhau, CoopHive, Akash Network, Threshold Network and a big thanks also to all who came out to give talks and meet with the house residents.
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