The Torus Team headed down to Berlin to catch the tail end of Blockchain Week Berlin 2019 from 22–25 August and we were truly enamoured of Berlin. We met many folks hailing from 40 over countries and had great conversations with thought leaders from the community. In this post we briefly recap the wonderful week we had in Germany’s multicultural capital.
Binance Developer Meetup
Binance started out the hackathon weekend by hosting their own developer meetup to announce their latest programs, in support of the decentralised community. There they unveiled Binance X, their initiative to foster innovation on the Binance platform and the decentralised ecosystem.
Through Binance X, Binance is building up an ecosystem to support the developers with tools they would expect from an established platform like iOS and Android. This would familiarize developers with building on the Binance platform and its subsidiaries including Binance Chain, Binance Exchange APIs, Trust Wallet SDK and Binance Charity donation platform.
As one of the key industry stakeholders, Binance is entrenching itself within the community and taking up a prominent role in building up the infrastructure for the decentralised ecosystem. The Binance Developer Fellowship, Labs Incubation, Launchpad, and partnership programs are all initiatives that developers are looking forward to engaging with to cater to bring the industry into mainstream adoption.
As partners of Binance Labs, Torus will be hosting 2 hackathons in collaboration with Binance within 2019, namely Game Oasis Hackathon and Torus4Everyone2019. Our hackathon is open to all Ethereum DApps and we’re looking out for amazing projects!
ETH Berlin Zwei 2019
2019 marks the first time Torus Labs is sponsoring an ETH Berlin hackathon. The organizers welcomed 730 participants to Factory Berlin Görlitzer Park’s with a line-up of multi-talented developer performers who set an upbeat pace for the rest of the weekend. The ambience was absolutely energetic and the developers were ecstatic to start hacking away at whatever came to their mind.
Unlike any hackathon we’ve ever attended, ETH Berlin provided developers with an assortment of amenities to optimize their coding hours within the short weekend. From resting pods to ball pits, exercise stations, live DJs, ice-cream vendors, gallons of Club-Mates, and delicious meals cooked on-site, the developers were treated to a campus equipped to give them the space to explore their creativity and focus on building out amazing projects.
Zhen was on-site actively assisting teams in integrating Torus and developing their code-base. There, we met the sharpest minds who were set on building novel solutions and projects to solve modern-day issues in the industry.
Sinlin, our in-house UX designer was on-site as well to conduct user acceptance tests and surveys with fellow participants of the hackathon in exchange for some of our fancy swag. We managed to gather essential insights to maximize the user’s experience when interacting with the Torus Wallet.
Aside from taking part in the festivities, our team got to catch up with our partners and friends as well. Together, we are still at the forefront of developing the decentralised ecosystem, and our small but growing community is only a sign of the developments we can expect to see in the coming months.
On the final day, judges spent hours deliberating between 90 project submissions to crown 10 winning teams. All of which were amazing projects that provided blockchain solutions to decentralized finance, token swaps and even digital art galleries. The quality of the projects built over the weekend got us excited for the potential of projects that can be built within a month.
Meet the Torus Winners of ETH Berlin Zwei
Torus Labs hosted US$1,000 worth of bounties for developers who integrated Torus with their projects. The winners built their projects with the end-users in mind, and integrated Torus to provide seamless logins and usability to their solutions.
The Best DApp to Integrate Torus: Button Wallet
Button Wallet won their API prize by integrating Torus in an unconventional manner. The team used our email to wallet resolver to let users enter their email address to exchange Telegram’s GRAM tokens with ETH and vice versa.
An exceptionally innovative integration and use of Torus, Button Wallet allows any user, new or returning, to retrieve their ETH tokens from the exchange with just their GMail/G Suite email addresses.
The Runner-Up DApp to Integrate Torus: Bearrowing
Returning winners of our API prizes, the Crypto Maniacs team built a Crypto Borrowing Aggregator. They sought to solve an issue with the interoperability of the debts across lending and borrowing platforms by implementing the tokenization of positions.
Bearrowing implements a tokenization layer across the top lending and borrowing platforms to achieve tradable debts which allowed for the creation of smart contracts to refinance or manage debts.
An interesting concept and seamless login experience for new users, Crypto Maniacs have proven themselves through their many wins across the hackathons that we’ve seen them at this year. We are looking forward to the next project that the team will attempt to build at the next hackathon!
Congratulations to ETH Berlin’s Organizing Community
ETH Berlin’s organizing committee did an amazing job in putting up such a successful event. They thought of all of the developers’ possible needs and delivered one of the most exciting hackathons of 2019. Torus Labs looks forward to coming back to the lovely city of Berlin for ETH Berlin Drei in 2020!
Torus Labs on Social
For more exciting happenings captured from Berlin, please check out our photo album.
Join our social media channels to keep yourself updated on our latest news and subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch our after-movie rendition of ETH Berlin Zwei.
Documentation: https://docs.tor.us/
Telegram Group: https://t.me/TorusLabs
Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/4vNM65a
Twitter: https://twitter.com/toruslabs
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/torusprotocol
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/toruslabs
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/toruslabs
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkOWuKCEo1TLePtRw-ciCFQ
Blog: https://medium.com/toruslabs
Website: https://tor.us/
