Solana Hacker House — Barcelona

Great food, amazing people, interesting projects, good vibes and overall unforgettable week in Barcelona with Solana Hacker House.

A Week in Barcelona

The hacker house was located 5 minutes from metro line / bus station or tram and it was ~20 minutes from beach by foot. So you can easily work on your projects, meet people, go for lunch and then visit the city center or go to the beach and enjoy Barcelona.

The first day we started with lunch and the welcome party. During the whole week there was a hackathon and you could work on your projects or meet new people. Afternoons were filled with presentations, talks and panel discussions — Neon Labs, workshops, Holaplex, Security in Solana and of course the office hours. All the food, drinks and merch were included and free. The last day we had a demo day where the projects and project ideas were presented, and a final party on the beach with amazing food, drinks, music and fun.

I didn’t face any problem through the whole week, everything was organized perfectly.

Demo Day

Each participant had a chance to share their project or project idea on demo day. Here I picked 3 projects that I, personally, found the most interesting.

If you are interested in the whole demo day and all the projects, you can watch it on YouTube.

GainForest

GainForest is a decentralized fund using artificial intelligence to measure and reward sustainable nature stewardship. They were talking about the Proof of Care concept which connects donations to the impact. If you want to donate money to a project, you don’t know where the money goes or if it has the impact.

If you use their donation platform, you will receive an NFT as a donation receipt. Everything on the platform is fully transparent, you can analyze the raw data, you have also access to wildlife camera, funding history and so on.

For me, personally, this is a very interesting project because in many countries, if you want to make big money, starting a foundation is a really good way. But here you can see everything is transparent and you always know where your money goes — you can see the impact which is awesome.

We all know Solana is cost efficient but also extremely energy efficient … Did you know that 1 Solana transaction is equal to 2 Google searches?

It was not the only project focused on environment so I recommend you to watch the whole demo day, if you are interested.

Listen to their demo.

Cupcake Protocol

If you want to send your first transaction, it can take an hour. You have to choose the wallet, fund the wallet with SOL, interact with the exchange and so on. With Cupcake you are able to send your first transaction not in an hour but in a few seconds!

You can easily create a new wallet using your phone number which is friendly for common users. There are a lot of people who don’t know what to do with their seeds, wallet address, there is a space for mistakes like the easy transaction approval (just clicking the Approve button), instead of bank transaction verification — SMS code or whatever, and so on.

I think this is a really good way how to introduce blockchain and crypto technology to general public.

Listen to their demo.

Trdelnik

Trdelnik is a testing framework for Solana programs developed by Ackee Blockchain — the blockchain security company. We are used to writing tests for our programs in Typescript but the programs are written in Rust. It is a bit problematic because you have to switch between these two languages during the development. Maybe it is one of the reasons why Solana programs don’t have proper tests.

Trdelnik is written in Rust and it allows you to write tests in it, so no more switching between languages! It provides a client for building and deploying an Anchor program to a local cluster and runs tests against it, a console to give a command prompt for a quick program interaction, and an explorer for exploring a ledger changes.

Here you can find example tests for the famous escrow program. Trdelnik is an open source project so if you are interested in it, you can start contributing.

Listen to their demo.

Conclusion

If you want to find a project or group of people to work with, Hacker House is the place to do it. It does not matter if you are a beginner or an advanced Solana guy, the most important is your motivation to build something and change the world.

If you have a project, it is a perfect place to discuss your idea with others and make sure you have a good vision before you start working on it — it’s the best place to get feedback.

So if you are interested, do not hesitate to visit next Solana Hacker House. We can meet in Krakow, Stockholm or elsewhere.