It’s dAppening (Part II)

Words by MP — Special thanks to Vivek Singh for offering his pair of eyes, Helena Flack & Jess Salomon for the 3am proofreading.

We are still not recovered from the overwhelming support received after our first blogpost where we announced we would run most of the operations of ETHBerlin via dApps.

Web 3.0 adoption is our vision. It is what drives us, it is what got us here.

While we pray to the high priestess of low gas, and navigate through the myriad of tasks to be completed before ETHBerlin kicks off, we would like to announce the second batch of dApps and platforms we will be using!

A Users’ perspective

Coming from Golem, I realised the importance of testers a while ago. I jumped later into testing Golem (as any responsible team member would), Status, Aragon Core (for a very long time — thank you for putting up with all those issues I filed on GH), and of course, the previous project I worked for, Polkadot, among others — obviously, in the latter, as time is not my friend and I lack technical knowledge, I did not succeed but as soon as I’m done with this, I’ll spin up my node. I checked out all dApps we’ll be running for ETHBerlin. I jumped into Olympia at dAppcon and gave it a spin. No matter how much awareness we create in our own project silos, the need for more ecosystem testers continues to grow.

Improving UX is key, and for this, feedback is crucial. So let’s push this a little bit more — we can do it together, we can tell the people saying dApps are crApp to ship themselves to hell.

And here we are again, challenging the gods of gas

We will not get users out of thin air. We need to explain how our dApps are more reliable, more private and secure, and offer them unparalleled freedom.

The cliche (not because it’s cliche, but because everybody’s been quoting it) Cypherpunk’s Manifesto still stands: we must defend our privacy, if we expect to have any, we must come together to create systems that anonymously allow transactions to take place. So let’s do it!

The Second Wave Of dApps

• ETHBerlin prizes will be looked after by Gitcoin, a dApp focused on growing open source software, paying developers by the Github issue. When Scott from Gitcoin offered this idea, we could not think of a better, fairer and more reliable way to distribute our prizes and sponsors bounties. So we relayed the task to Gitcoin, and we cannot be happier about it. Check out their Issue Explorer today to see their product in action!
• DAOing Community Improvement: as some friends stepped up for sponsoring our party, we had some leftover money. Then we thought — what could we do to give something meaningful back to the ecosystem? We tagged along with SecurETH, ETHSecurity, Conflux and Consensys Diligence to prepare bounties for UX improvement & security documentation upgrades, tooling, bugs (under bug etiquette, by all means). To step it up, we thought of a second way to vote, as our judges will have their hands full on a new judging system to be presented on the next post. Then Aragon, our dear friends, with their Survey Dapp on mainnet came into play — we chose honorary security and UX council members from projects to vote via the DAO Survey Dapp and award each prize with 1000 €, we got four prizes like this. The best thing? Council members can vote from anywhere in the globe via the survey, so we have the best experts lined up.
• Have you ever tried as a dev, to contribute to an OS project, but documentation was so scarce or hieroglyphic-like it was too much effort? Well, Kauri is working on that. So we decided, alongside our Github hero Sina, to task them with structuring the documentation for all toolkits, frameworks and manuals hackers will need to build their projects. And push the documentation standards high for all OS projects by example.
• Youtube recently put some ridiculous bans on blockchain conferences, due to soundtrack rights and etc. — as you, Kanye West, needed more money for using your music — we ain’t got time for that. So while Livepeer livestreams, Viewly will host all our videos in the most censorship resistant way possible.
• As known, we already got a Peepeth account, and guess what? No scammers there! So we are thrilled about it. So thrilled that we will only announce our Blockparty smart contract fueled tickets on Peepeth, and will micro-blog the entire event. We brought in quite some new users to this platform, so we are thrilled to walk this path alongside them and wish them a successful development.
• ERC-725 for all: Zinc reached us out for identity solutions for our hackathon. While we can’t sign all of you up via this ERC (let’s face it — we can’t get hackers to open their e-mails, sending their addresses would be an impossible task), we will provide via Zinc, work-proof identity for all the ETHBerlin hackers. Workshop owners will also be able to provide this for the attendees if they wish, and even teammates can learn to give work proofs to other teammates, to contribute to this.
• More Status: what can we say, they are SO MANY. So Hutch and Shawn are running a t-shirt competition which will be voted via their dreddit app (an up or down voting mechanism they came up with).
• DAI happy hour: so MakerDAO hijacked a bar where you can only pay with DAI. 1 drink = 1 dai. DAI will be obtained by proving your knowledge about it — deal with it. In a cash-based city, we made it possible for you, hacker, to use a stable coin to pay for your drinks.
• Berlin Coin goes mainnet this week: at the end of the week, together with Bounties, we’ll announce the mainnet. And during ETHBerlin you’ll be able to earn the coin, and stake or tip people and the top 8 will win hardware packs to make your lives more secure and private. Nay, the token does not have a FIAT conversion. No moon, just hardware.
• We have our ENS address, and researching with the incredible ENS team how to make the best out of the ideas we have for them in the hackathon — thanks again to Makoto, Jeff, and fine, Dean. Sometimes.

We cannot promise this list will stop growing. We are only at the gates of mass aDapption. As we spin up the Olympia predictions, chat with people on Status, assemble the Aragon survey, distribute prizes on Gitcoin, and, and, issues will arise along the way.

To sum up our blogposts, and list all the dApps + decentralized platforms we will use, please read our DevOps lovely list of pain — thoughts and prayers, and all of our love for David who will make sure this stays afloat.

So let’s just pray gas will be okayish, and that we can raise some further awareness on the dAppening. We need to give all this a shot. It may fail, of course, but what if we don’t? This can change everything.