Scrypto is as “smooth as vegan butter”
FooHACK proves anyone can be a Web3 maestro
What do you get when you mash the magic of Scrypto, the programming language developed by Radix, with the acclaimed musician RedFoo and 3 coding wizards?
A coming together of minds, an explosion of creativity and an amazing result that could only be achieved through the power of Scrypto.
When legendary rockstar, multi-platinum award-winning musician, rapper and beginner Web3 coder RedFoo invited developers to his home for a hackathon, it was an opportunity not to be missed. The Party Rock Mansion lies in the gorgeous tree-studded mountains above Malibu, California. The perfect location for a 3-day, vegan, raw cacao and pure ginger shot-fueled developer experience known as FooHack.
RedFoo has gone on an epic journey from creating the #1 single, Party Rock Anthem to falling in love with coding.
He shares his passion in both programming and coding, describing it as an incredibly important skill that anyone should have. He is passionate about how important the crypto space is, how important DeFi is going to be and how excited he is to be building with Scrypto.
“I play speed chess, two minute speed chess and it's like coffee, I mean it's thinking fast and feeling you’re on the edge and you've got to make the right move. It’s a visual 2D matrix and that's what got me into coding. I love logic and I can apply this logic to a system to build something, because with chess you're not really building anything you're just kind of exercising your mind”
“This hackathon that we're doing, and the fact that we're gonna do it with chess, is a dream come true. To make a chess engine and then to make it into something that is an application that you can then build financial rules around. That's crazy right?”
RedFoo’s team, the FooCrew, was a handpicked group of competition winners, enthusiastic and experienced programmers ready to take on the FooHack challenge: To build a chess engine capable of being run on top of a public ledger.
Ambitious? Yeah baby.
Could they do it? Hell yeah, go big or go home!
Of course, the Foo Crew were equipped with the right tools for the job. They used Scrypto, the framework developed to make Web3 coding accessible for anyone, and as RedFoo declared, “Coding in Scrypto is as smooth as vegan butter. It’s healthy for the soul.”
“Coding is as smooth as vegan butter”
The rules of chess would be enforced by the logic of a decentralized application, players would be able to run chess games against each other and whoever wins or loses, the end of the game would be enforced by the ledger. Finally, the end state of the board would itself become an NFT, so anyone watching and thinking, ‘what an amazing game’ could then join the auction and bid for the NFT of the game. An ambitious project to complete in only three days with a bunch of people who had never met before.
Contrast this with the student project from Technical University of Berlin. Over the course of an entire semester these university students struggled to make a chess game on Ethereum, with Solidity. A language that has a high entry barrier, is really difficult to use and the language itself is not similar to any other programming languages. They failed. Don’t be harsh, not all languages are born equal. Just because a coconut is hairy and produces milk, that doesn’t make it a mammal.
Solidity and Scrypto are two very different entities. Scrypto is Rust-based and is the first asset-oriented programming language in the world, specifically designed to easily build scalable Web3 & DeFi applications on top of the revolutionary Radix Engine. It is a game changer for DeFi developers, finally enabling them to create secure, reliable and powerful DeFi applications quickly. As RedFoo exclaimed,
“It makes so much sense the way Scrypto is doing things, with buckets and vaults. Resources in motion go in buckets, at rest they’re stored in vaults. I love that!”
“I want to inspire people to not just be the consumers in life but to be programmers and program your own destiny”
So, how did the FooCrew face their challenge?
The team was split into different streams of frontend, chess engine, auction components (built by RedFoo), NFT minting and then someone to stitch it all together. RedFoo had been introduced to Scrypto only three months earlier so this was a perfect opportunity for him to upgrade his skills and to start thinking in an asset-oriented way.
The FooHack clearly demonstrated how Scrypto makes it so much easier to build something that is non-trivial in a short space of time, that actually has a real-world application.
“I'm taking the biggest coding adventure of my life and I promise, man, you are gonna fall in love with it. The coding revolution levels the playing field. We can be in our apartment or at the coffee shop creating the next biggest thing because it's all code. You don't need a big office building to do it, you just need an idea. It's a new frontier.”
The outcome was enormously successful for everyone involved, achieving every goal Foo and the FooCrew set for themselves. It was also an opportunity for a Scrypto beginner like RedFoo to climb up the learning curve really quickly and see how much he could create in such a short space of time. By the end of the hackathon, a bunch of people who had been strangers only the week before had created a fully operational dApp in only three days.
We are all winners when we have a supportive community and we are there for each other. There is so much opportunity here but we all have to build to make it possible in the first place. This event showed the possibilities are real. With a little bit of application, a willingness to spend time and have your hands on the right tools, we all have the opportunity to make our ideas become reality. We have heard the stories of billion dollar projects that start as hackathons in people’s bedrooms.
As RedFoo said,
“If RedFoo can do it, then you can do it.”
It’s all about being curious and being playful. Just have a go. To begin with it doesn’t have to be serious, just learn about the new technology, learn what you can create. You can do that very quickly and build something fun and exciting.
“You don't need to grow up around programmers to get into programming. Just pick a project, pick something that you want to make. If you don't learn coding you're not going to be part of the future. There’s something wider happening right now in society.”
Scrypto is a game changer for DeFi developers. So get started on your own Scrypto journey, start now.
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