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Overview

The Pillar Unconference was a week-long event hosted by the Pillar Project from 15 to 22 July 2018 at the Vilnius Grand Resort in Vilnius, Lithuania. It is recorded here among the early ecosystem events in the History of Radix, because Radix ran its first hackathon there.

An unconference has no fixed programme. Pillar booked the resort's 1,000-seat main hall, ten breakout rooms and several lounge areas, made all of it free to attendees, and let a meeting each morning decide what the rest of the day would look like. Talks were allocated space at the end of each day by vote, with the largest sessions going to the main hall and the rest to breakout rooms. The same week-long dates, 15 to 22 July 2018, are carried by the aeternity team's own thread on the event.

Radix at the Unconference

Three separate hackathons ran during the week, hosted by Unibright, Radix and Pillar itself. Per Pillar's scrapbook of the week, the Radix DLT team, "following the launch of their alpha, locked down a breakout room for three days of intensive coding", where developers "explored fully decentralized commercial applications using the Radix Java and JavaScript libraries". The same write-up places Piers Ridyard at the event alongside Pillar's David Siegel.

This was two years before Scrypto existed and three before the Olympia mainnet. The tooling on offer was the pair of client libraries that shipped with the alpha, radixdlt-java and radixdlt-js-lite, and every project built that week was built against them.

The First Radix Hackathon

Radix ran the tail event of the week. Writing on 2 August 2018, the Radix team recorded that "the Radix team held its first ever hackathon in beautiful Lithuania", with six teams competing for a prize of $3,000 and a handful of Ledger Nano devices. The brief was to "create a complete end to end business proposal with tech MVP utilizing the Radix network", judged by the Radix team.

  • Winner — Hack.Funding (micro-lending). A funding mechanism for hackathon projects after the hackathon ends, using micro-loans to spread funder risk. The team's argument was that fees on fiat rails and on other ledgers make micro-lending impractical, and that Radix's low fee is what makes it viable. Their MVP used radixdlt-js-lite on the front end and radixdlt-java to manage the lending contract.
  • Runner-up — RadiXign (immutable document signing). A Docusign competitor: sign documents onto the ledger without a trusted intermediary. Built in two days on radixdlt-js-lite.
  • Rad Property Raffle — a raffle that collects crypto from entrants and draws a winner once a minimum threshold is reached, demonstrated end to end across both libraries.
  • Podium — a decentralized alternative to Twitter.
  • Podiloto — peer-to-peer payment for bike hire.
  • Personal Data Locker — privacy-focused personal data management.

Radix and Pillar worked together again six months later at the Pillar Hackathon #1 of January 2019, where Radix took one of three integration tracks and built a bridge to the Pillar wallet. The next Radix hackathon of note was the Flexathon of December 2020, which Dan Hughes ran alone.

Pillar Unconference 2018

Pillar Unconference 2018

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