ETHIndia 2022: Bengaluru

7 Dec 2022

Team Asynchronous ❤️

Our team was formed out of BlocSoc, IIIT Dharwad comprising of all the founding members of the club: Siddharth Bhandari (president), Neeraj Choubisa, Aditya Pandey and me. We were looking to participate in any upcoming hackathons to gain experience into hackathons so that we can share the same to other students of our college via BlocSoc so that the crypto culture of our college improves. Out of the various hackathons, we had applied to ETHIndia as an add on. At that point getting selected into the world's largest hackathon would have been an achievement for our team. Fast forward 2-3 weeks, we received the acceptance email from ETHGlobal. We were very excieted about this and approached our BlocSoc mentor, Dr. Rajendra Hegdi. We still weren't sure if we would be allowed to attend the event in Bengaluru. To our surprise, not only our professor allowed us to attend, he also granted us travel & stay reimbursements.

Timeline was very close. Upon acceptance, we had to book train tickets soon, most of the trains were sold out. We luckily found out one train that somewhat suited our timings and was available. After 3 failed booking attempts, a close friend got our tickets booked.

Reaching Bengaluru station + Phoenix Mall

We reached the station at 4am in the morning. We were thinking between booking a room for the day and crashing there or exploring bangalore and saving on the hotel charges. We decided to go ahead with the later. The bus for Whitefield leaves at 5am from the station, so we had to spend some time in the station. We ate some food there and rode the bus. 2 bus changes dropped us at KTPO (venue) at 6 am. The venue was all set but it was completely empty. We met another guy from Mumbai who was also attending ETHIndia. Us five found out the sleeping area and sneaked into the room and slept till like 10 am. That is when I was woken up by Neeraj. Apparently someone had locked the room and now we were locked out in the room with our luggage. We found out one escape point and squeezed out ourselves and our luggages through it. We went to the washroom after it and it was when the guy from Mumbai and team Async parted ways.

It was around 10:30 am now and the entry starts at 1 pm. We decided go out of the venue for having some breakfast. We didn't find any nice food joints nearby so we decided to go to Phoenix mall which was somewhat nearby and is a famous mall of Bengaluru. At the mall we explored around, clicked pictures, and ate some pizza and momos. Then we went into Zara to spend some time.

Us being Async at the Zara store xD

Aditya and Neeraj wanted to go to Starbucks but we were running out of time. It was around 11:45 at this point. Anyways, we decided to go there and get some cafe with "Aditya.ethx" & "Neeraj.sol" labels 😂. It was the point which defined out ETHIndia journey without us even knowing it. While we were having fun and clicking pictures, a guy approached us and asked if we were attending ETHIndia and what were were building. After listening to our project, he told us that he was the co-founder of Revise and introduced us to what Revise does and how it could be the missing piece to our build. We also learnt that Revise was one of the sponsors of ETHIndia and they had a track for implementing Revise. We were starting to form our problem statements at this point. We travelled back to KTPO and all the participants were in the venue at this point and there was a long line for the checkin. It was a completely international crowd and people were there from various industries including banking and auditing.

Day 1: KTPO venue & workshops

Since the moment we entered the KTPO venue, it was a surreal experience. We were given a hand band and an ID that we were supposed to be wearing at all times. Then we recievend a bag full of swags that had 5 t-shirts, stickers, badges, deskpads and what not!

Crypto Swags 👀

We entered the main hall and took hold of a nicely positioned table. Then we went to various booths of various crypto companies. They were giving thier own swag kit, t-shits, caps, NFTs, etc upon interacting with them. It took us around 2 hours to get all the swags. We went straight to the workshops that were happening in various halls. Speakers from various parts of the world had come to the venue to introduce thier startups and give talks on exciting and cutting edge technologies.

zkBob workshop

The best part about the hackathon was the delicious and unlimited free food for breakfast, lunch, evening snacks and dinner. Not only that, we could take anything from the refreshments stalls for free at anytime in any quantity! We were lying on our bean bags, munching on snacks and coding our build.

We changed our idea a little based on feedbacks recieved from various booths. This was a crucial aspect to our win. In the evening, Sandeep N (co-founder of Polygon) gave a talk at the grand stage. Before our dinner, we were waiting in front of Sandeep N's car so that we could catch a picture with him. Unfortunately, he was taking a lot of time, and waiting further would mean skipping dinner and there was no way we were going to skip such a delicious dinner. So we went to the dining area. We were shocked to see a team of asians coding in a setup made in the dining area itself. We decided that we would pull an all nighter but due to our slow progress that night and poor internet connectivity, we slept at around 2am.

Sandeep sir's talk at ETHIndia 2022 on the impact of Polygon

Day 2: 24 hr hacking

We woke up at around 9 am and realised that our of 36hrs, we had just spent 8hrs sleeping 😭. We decided to not waste any more time and started coding again. Our frontend was mostly done by afternoon. A little bit of backend on the NFT minting was left. A major portion of the smart contract portion was left. Some new booths had come up offering more swags. We decided to go to the booths to relax a little.

Booth @ Router Protocol

By afternoon to evening we coded heavily on NFT minting and design. At the same time we were enjoying ourselves and attending talks. Luckily Sandeep sir was at the Polygon booth and we managed to get a pic with him.

Most awkward pic ever... but we were frozen standing next to the co-founder of Polygon 🥶💜

At night our frontend and backend was completed. The integration required to have a fighting chance at the Revise track was complete. But we were struggling with 3 tasks till midnight: Integrating the smart contract, integrating Push Protocol (which was necessary to compete in the Push Protocol track) and integrating sub-graphs (for The Graph track). I gave Siddharth a structure which I told him to make the team follow and went to sleep since I had to present in the morning the next day. Afterall presentation is as important, if not more, than the actual work itself :)

Day 3: Submission and results!

In the morning I got to learn that the push protocol had been implemented but not tested yet. On the other hand the smart contract was not done much. Either ways we managed to tie all the loose knots and perform some testing. We had been working from 6am to 8am. Now the submission deadline was 9am. We had to record a demo video and fill in the submission form at Devfolio for our submission to be accepted. Me and Siddharth went outside to a quiet place to record the demo video. But midway while we were recording, we got a notification that only 2% battery was left in my mac. We had to end the recording and immediately returned to our table.

I quickly plugged my mac to charging and got to recording. At that point we didn't care about any background noises. All that we cared about was if the video was submitted or not. If we failed to submit the video, we would not even get our 4000INR stake back from Devfolio. Luckily we recorded a nice quality video in the first go. Then I uploaded the video to google drive while filling up the form. Mid way into filling the form, I realised that the video link needs to be a youtube url. We were all freaking out since we knew the wifi at the venue was very poor. Anyways we kept calm and uploaded the same video in Youtube and proceeded to fill the rest of the form. Neeraj had mistakenly pressed the back button of the form and all our details were discarded. At this point, I zoned out for a second. Again we calmly started filling the form from the beginning and by the point we reached the demo link part, youtube upload had completed successfully. We put the links, filled rest of the details and submitted at exactly 8:58am. It was a close call!

After a short break, we went to various booths for piching out hack. We recieved good feedback overall and asked for suggestions everytime. For the next pitch, we always improvised on previous suggestions if it was relevant. By the end, we came up with a really nice short, crisp and to the point pitch. We didn't pitch to the main pannel.

Yayyy! And the winner is MetaBorrow! 🥳

Post lunch, the results were supposed to be declared. We slept in the bean bags itself since we didn't want to miss the results. We were hearing rumors that the winners had recieved email from Devfolio. This got us very demotivated and frustrated since we didn't recieve any such email. Still we kept each other's morals up reafferming that atleast we got to experience ETHIndia and recieved so many swags! To our shock, we saw our project MetaBorrow in the giant screen under Polygon's Best DeFi Project. We couldn't believe this was happening!! We waited for Revise track and to our satisfaction, also saw our name in the Revise track's 3rd positon. As we were screeming, our judge from Revise had come to us to congratulate us. We were so so grateful to him. We wanted to cannet later that day but he was travelling to Mumbai, so we told we'd connect to him at a later date via Zoom. Later after the results were declare, we also saw our name in Push Protocol's track. We didn't pay much attention to it's results since we didn't have much expectations. Polygon was giving swag boxes to all the members of the winning team and were taking interviews. We skipped the interviews and went to the after party sponsored by Polygon.

Best DeFi Project in Polygon Network 💜🚀

Day 4: Returning to Dharwad

A new challenge had arrived. We had to much luggage! And 60% of it was swag kits. On addition to it, we had the 4 swag boxes from Polygon. We had plans for going clubbing for the night, but with so much luggage, it was impossible. We booked a room and a cab and headed straight to the room. After checking into the room, we were too tired and broke to travel again to the club. So we sneaked booze inside the room and had a small house party. It was a good relaxation for the entire team.

After party 👀

Our eventful time at ETHIndia had come to an end. But it was one of the rare occasions when I could say that I had 0 regrets! We had the time of our lives and we got wayy more than what we had initially imagined. Polygon was throwing a meet & greet with 150+ VCs at a 5 star hotel and we were also invited to an exclusive party along with that at the Royal Orchid. But we had presentation and tests back at college. So we had to skip the invite and return back to college. We enjoyed ourselves like we always do throughout the train journey.

Banaswadi Railway Station

Conclusion

Throughout this journey, we only had passion for blockchain and held no expectations. Whatever we got was a win for us and we were always grateful for being where we were. Maybe this is the reason why the entire experience was so enjoyable for us. We had a vision which we executed with proper hardwork and gameplan without focusing much on the results.

"Always keep one's eyes on the horizon while maintaining focus on what's in front of us"
- Charles Hoskinson