Overview
Pillar Hackathon #1 was a two-day developer hackathon held on 17–18 January 2019, hosted by the Pillar Project as the soft launch of its developer community. Rather than a competitive prize event, it was structured as a set of integration challenges: teams from partner blockchain networks worked alongside Pillar's engineers to connect their protocols to the Pillar wallet, and Pillar opened its GitHub repositories to the wider developer community during the event.
The hackathon is part of Radix's history because Radix DLT — then an early-stage distributed ledger project — took part as one of the three integration tracks, marking one of its early cross-project developer collaborations. Pillar and Radix's paths crossed again later that year at the Pillar Unconference.
The Three Integration Tracks
According to Pillar's post-event write-up, three partner projects each pursued a distinct integration track:
- NEM — worked on integrating the NEM network into Pillar's blockchain explorer, in the process surfacing limitations in the existing architecture that a multi-chain wallet would need to address.
- DigiByte — developed an approach for wallet integration and laid foundations for adding additional blockchain forks to Pillar.
- Radix — built a bridge between the two projects (see below).
Radix Integration
The Radix track produced a working bridge between Radix and the Pillar wallet. Per Pillar's write-up, the integration enabled wallet generation in the Radix address format and balance retrieval from the Radix ledger — an early demonstration of Radix account handling inside a third-party consumer wallet, years before the Babylon network and the official Radix Wallet. It stands as a small but concrete milestone in Radix's early developer-outreach efforts.
