The Radix Team assembled from across the globe for our quarterly Team Planning Week at the beginning of this month. Nestled away in the Peak District, amongst the quaint hills of the North of England, we kicked off 5 days of in-depth strategizing and planning for our launch later this year. We dedicated one full day to an internal hackathon and had a lot of fun and pushed ourselves to create useful applications utilizing the Radix Stack.
We explored and discovered plenty of interesting use cases across 2 days (the morning after the hackathon we devoted to presentations, questions and voting on the best hack) and we’ll be sharing how we created these in more detail, along with the necessary code, in the coming weeks. The hackathon strengthened our view that building on Radix will be straightforward and we continue to focus on making this easy for anyone to do.
We split the team into 6 groups and tried to balance each with a good number of both technical and non-technical staff so that no team had an unfair advantage. The goal of the hackathon was to challenge ourselves and see what could be created using the Radix ledger in just 24 hours. Many teams worked late into the night perfecting their concepts in time for the big reveal the next morning.These were the projects we built:
- POS card system
- DecentraSign (a way to verify and sign documents via the ledger)
- Radix network visualizer (making atoms look cool on the ledger)
- Chess on the ledger
- Command Line Interface for Radix
- Radix Planner (surveys/polls on the ledger)
POS Card System
One of our hacks involved creating a Point of Sale (POS) card system. Kudos to the team for working very late and starting very early to get this one wrapped up! This project seems to be a community favorite and, as you can imagine, there are several use cases for businesses beyond ‘just’ simple payments, in particular, Store & Loyalty cards.
Store & Loyalty Cards have been popular for some years now as a mechanism to drive sales, gather data and encourage brand loyalty. But the current generation of store and loyalty cards are not without their pain points; transaction clearance and settlement are slow because there is a complex operational ecosystem, transaction fees can be high and, also, a third party often controls access to customer spending data.
So, how can Radix and its distributed ledger help? By introducing a card (or app) that provides almost instantaneous clearance and settlement, minimal fees and accelerates loyalty by allowing multiple uses for one card e.g Credit, Charge and Loyalty Card all in one, including access to the holy grail of customer spending habits.
What we were able to achieve with this in just one day is quite staggering and we can’t wait to share the full details and code with you - there are plenty of potential use cases for any payment system, be it fiat, tokens or just loyalty points. Stay tuned for the dedicated blog post on this project which will reveal more details.
Want to get involved with the project once we release the code?Let us know in our telegram channel or discord group. You can also stay up to date via our mailing list.
DecentraSign
Given the immutability of Radix’s ledger, verifying and signing documents between two people using a cryptographical hash and timestamp could prove very useful. An immutable ledger that could clearly prove who signed what, and exactly what time it was signed, is undoubtedly a powerful tool. Documents signed in this way cannot be forged or tampered with. They can be signed by anyone, anywhere in the world and furthermore, have a clearly auditable trail on the public ledger.
The current traditional systems are not without their flaws, for example, there is the risk of forgery and the high maintenance costs of centralized e-sign solutions.
Below are some screenshots of this app in action. We were successfully able to send and verify document hashes between 2 people and will share more of our findings and the code in the forthcoming dedicated Decentrasign blog post and on GitHub. Hashes and timestamps are the basis for a plethora of other interesting utilities for a public ledger - such as creating an identity database, copyright registry and much more. We hope this project will encourage the more legally-oriented in our community to develop this idea further and get building.
Want to get involved with the project once we release the code?Let us know in our telegram channel or discord group. You can also stay up to date via our mailing list.
Radix Network Visualiser
This project was inspired by several network visualizers on other platforms/blockchains and is a tool used to visualize the activity of atoms on the network and spot potential conflicts.As there are a limited number of nodes on the network currently, the full visual glory of this application has yet to be. As more and more nodes join the network, we are looking forward to seeing this concept evolve. Look out for some exciting GIFs coming your way soon! We will, naturally, deliver the code on GitHub, along with a blog post, providing a bit more detail on how this solution was achieved. We believe that our community can turn the visualizer into something much more grandiose!
Want to get involved with the project once we release the code?Let us know in our telegram channel or discord group. You can also stay up to date via our mailing list.
Chess on the Ledger
The aim of this project was to test simple interactions and restrictions on the ledger and what better way to do this than a game of chess? Of course, we are fully aware of the many game developers in the Blockchain and DLT space, including within our community.
The team managed to create an environment in which chess movements were restricted according to chess rules. Yes, we’re talking pawns only being allowed to move one space, bishops being restricted to diagonal moves and knights to their L-shapes. The game also rejected more than one consecutive move by the same player. Players could abandon the game at any point and return to it later, with the most recent state preserved perfectly on the ledger. Other people could also be invited to tune into the game and watch, adding a community dimension.
There’s a great deal of room for feature development - we are talking in-game chats, bets on results and more. We look forward to seeing what you can do to playing a plethora of games built on Radix in the not-too-distant future!
Want to get involved with the project once we release the code?Let us know in our telegram channel or discord group. You can also stay up to date via our mailing list.
Radix Planner
Stop and think about just how many votes, polls or surveys take place across the world every day. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands perhaps? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to create an immutable poll/survey within which you can manage the parameters, for example, to vote to achieve a consensus? Alternatively, it would be just as easy to build a notice board of sorts and enable people to upvote entries to identify the ones that mattered the most. It could even act as a company bulletin board, a full solution for remote team communication or a tool for managing/tracking bets or wagers.
What do you see as being the best use cases for this tool?
Want to get involved with the project once we release the code?Let us know in our telegram channel or discord group. You can also stay up to date via our mailing list.
WINNER: Command Line Interface on Radix
This project's goal was to create another way to interact with the Radix ledger. The Command Line Interface (CLI) currently gives people the ability to check wallet account balances or messages from a particular address, as well to send both messages and tokens.
The team in charge of this project showed us a compelling use of the CLI when they carried out a live demonstration of an automated payment chain. For example, Sophie would like to save 10% of every payment that comes into her day-to-day wallet and creates an automated payment chain which instructs this 10% to be sent to her savings wallet. When Sophie receives a payment £10, £1 (10%) is automatically sent to her savings wallet without any need for further intervention from Sophie.
This project won the most votes from all team members as the best hack and there are plenty of potential use cases for this tool, for example, sharing money to charities or a way of automatically distributing funds for trading syndicates or investment funds, for example.
Want to get involved with the project once we release the code?Let us know in our telegram channel or discord group. You can also stay up to date via our mailing list.
We hope that what we were able to create in one day at our Internal Team Hackathon can inspire you to start building the next game-changing Dapp on the Radix ledger. One of Radix’s core missions is to‘give the world the best tools to build decentralized applications, tools, and coins’and we look forward to sharing more code and content on this topic with you over the coming months.
Stay tuned for the blogs delving more deeply into each individual project which will be rolled out in the coming weeks!