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Introducing Stellar, an EasyA Consensus Hackathon Gold Sponsor
Recorded: May 6, 2025 Duration: 0:50:12Space Recording
Short Summary
The EZA Consensus Hackathon is set to showcase innovative projects and partnerships within the Stellar ecosystem, with significant funding opportunities available through the Stellar Community Fund. Key figures from Stellar emphasize the importance of community-driven development and the potential for growth in the DeFi space, encouraging participants to build exciting and impactful projects.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Hello, hello everyone.
How are you all doing?
It's a pleasure to be on this space this Tuesday, 6 May, wherever you're all tuning in from.
On this space, I'm absolutely thrilled to have Stella, an EZA Consensus Hackathon gold sponsor,
and of course, one of EZA's longest standing partners. We
recently hosted our Hack Meridian EZA and Stellar Hackathon in London around Stellar's flagship
conference right here in London. And it was an absolutely amazing event. We had so many cool
projects. And the success stories are still coming out.
We had projects where the co-founders literally met at the hackathon.
They won one of the prizes a couple of weeks later, headed out to the Philippines and started just literally building out their project together.
out their project together. And that was absolutely amazing. Like to see projects come out,
And that was absolutely amazing.
and then literally just start building, right? And now they're building on Starla.
You know, one of the team members was previously working at checkout.com,
obviously one of the most successful fintechs and most valuable fintechs in the world. And the other
one was previous engineer to YC bank startups. So
absolutely stellar team, I might say, and just so many success stories like that from last year's
consensus, we have team RMD, Ramme Daddy, who have been absolutely crushing it went through
JPU. And many others as well, who've been funded by Stella who came out of the EZA community.
Another one that comes to mind, based in London is Team BondHive.
They're absolutely crushing it right across the board.
And we recently had an EZA GigaBrain startup who
were backed by A16C who are now building on Stellar as well.
So that startup is Team Axel.
And I know that they are absolutely crushing it.
So that is really my introduction to today's space. I am so thrilled
to be able to have with us today, Stella. And of course, to be able to then dive into exactly what
makes this magic so possible. So with us today, we have Toma, and we also have Tyler. A lot of
you will have already seen these people around on Twitter. They are real titans
within the Stellar community. And so in terms of today's agenda, I can see that everybody is
filling in right now. So today's agenda, we're going to have in the start of this,
we'll start with just an introduction to our speakers. So that will be to Toma and to Tyler.
And then coming on into the meat of it all we're going
to talk about why you should build on Stella Stella at the EZA consensus hackathon of course
what the tracks look like and what Stella's looking for from hackathon participants as well
uh before finally rounding it out with what makes a standout project? So really, really excited to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak about what we're excited about.
And then finally, in the last section, we're going to come to what happens after the hackathon.
So at the start of this, I really kicked off with what happens after.
And I think that you could tell from what I was saying is that the hackathon is really just the beginning.
The hackathon is a launchpad.
It's where if you're coming to Toronto next week, then you're thinking about what happens after, right? This is the place
where I can really launch my startup. And I can confidently say that the Stellar Community Fund
through SDF is one of the best programs that you can be part of. I've seen it firsthand. I've seen
projects come out of the hackathons, get funded, take to the next level. So if you're listening on
this space now, you're going to have an invaluable experience listening to this space. Thank you all
for tuning in. And I think we'll get started. So with us, I can see that Toma and Tyler already have access to,
on the speaker controls here.
So we'll kick it off.
I think, well, we've got two T's.
I would say alphabetical order, but maybe I can stick with alphabetical order.
Maybe we'll start with Toma and then we'll come to Tyler.
Tyler and Toma, it's an absolute pleasure.
Thank you for coming on today onto this space.
For anybody who hasn't met you yet,
we'd love to hear an introduction.
Awesome, I think I can get started.
Can you guys hear me?
Yep, loud and clear.
Awesome, cool.
Hey everyone, I'm Tomer.
Work on products here at the Stellar Development Foundation.
Been around since 2017, so it's been a while.
Worked on a bunch of different things in the past few years,
really focused on our smart contract platform, aka Soroban.
I think we've seen a lot of success with EZA in terms of the quality
and of the teams and projects that are getting built,
so we're super excited about this.
I'm really excited about a lot of the coming innovative things
that are happening in the Stellar ecosystem. I think we're seeing a lot of the coming innovative things that are happening on the Stellar ecosystem.
I think we're seeing a lot of adoption of contract accounts and smart wallets.
I think that can be a huge focus area, solves a lot of user experience issues in crypto in general.
But overall, I think that Sorbonne is still relatively in its infancy, and we'd love to see more developer tooling.
We'd love to see more DeFi. We'd love to see more DeFi.
It's really a greenfield for innovation.
Fantastic. Thanks so much, Toma.
And yeah, we've seen so many successes come out of Stellar and EZA so far.
I can't wait to see what people build at Toronto as well.
Tyler.
Hello, hello.
How's everybody doing?
Doing awesome.
Fantastic. I'm a developer advocate director at the foundation. I have been around for about five
years at the foundation, but I've been building stellar apps for over 10 years now, which is crazy.
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the hackathon here in Toronto. I've actually never
been to Toronto, so that'll be super fun. Looking forward to seeing all the builders. We've spent
so much time working on our DevX stack to ensure that it's easy and seamless to get applications
on chain. So looking forward to seeing what folks are able to build with all the smart wallet stuff,
the gasless transaction stuff, all of the dev acts that we've put into making getting applications
on-chain simple. Fantastic. So it's a real pleasure to have you both there. I think for
anybody listening, you can tell that we have two people who have been in the ecosystem and know it pretty
much inside out 10 years tyler that's absolutely incredible um i actually would love to hear how
you first got into stella i always like to figure you know what is it that obviously you know the
question that we're going to come to in a second is why developers should build on stella um but
i'd love to hear your personal story about how you actually came across because 10 years like
10 years is pretty much um you know almost as much, I think pretty much as old as Ethereum.
Pretty much, right?
If we really look back in time, there's only a couple of blockchains that are maybe really that old.
I'd love to hear how you actually first got into it.
Yeah, predates Ethereum.
That was pretty much just Bitcoin back in the day.
There was a few others. But when I first got started, it was actually a few years prior that I first became familiar
with Bitcoin.
I was convinced it was a scam at the time.
I was storing all my Bitcoin on Mt. Gox because I thought Coinbase was a scam.
My goodness, how things have changed.
But Stripe, actually, I worked for a company that was doing business
analytics, did a lot of API stuff with Stripe. And Stripe had had a relationship with the
foundation way back in the early days. So when that came across my inbox, I was like,
huh, that's really interesting. I trust Stripe. They're an innovative financial company. Seemed
to be dabbling in crypto. So I should take a closer look at this.
So started entering their early days build challenges. There was a lot of
wallets. They had their decentralized exchange. They were kind of pioneering some of these like
path payments and stuff just seemed really interesting. And I know with Stripe, they had a,
I mean, especially if you're doing like microtransactions, a pretty hefty fee that would be prohibitive to a lot of the work that I was trying to do in like little startups I was making.
So like trying to grow an initial user base, didn't want to have to charge like $100 a month.
I wanted to find a way to do like microtransactions.
Stellar's cheap fees and emphasis on payments, kind of, I think, trying to solve some of the
ways that Bitcoin was getting used. It was just gravitating towards more store of value
and just relatively quite expensive. Stellar was really building a lot of payments primitives in
a decentralized way with low fees, was really drawn to that.
So entered a lot of their build competitions in the early days
and kind of went from there.
That's fascinating.
And there's actually so much to unpack there.
Obviously, the chief architect and founder of Stellar, Jed,
he founded, you talked about Mt. Gox,
he obviously created Mt. Gox before,
and then he obviously was acquired afterwards.
You know, but there
was, you know, I think
I remember reading that he initially, like
when he was just setting up Stellar, he was like
chatting with Patrick Collison,
and they both just aligned on
this vision, and Stripe
actually invested in
the seed round, which was pretty
crazy. So it's all, it all comes full circle, right?
Really, really exciting.
And yeah, I've used Stripe in the past as well.
It's like 30 cents literally per transaction that you want to make with a card payment
and for all these different things.
It completely changes the game when you have just just transactions that are just you know one cent
or even sub center in some cases as well uh but coming to the present day then you know since
we're you're already on this note tyler and you've sort of brought us up to speed on the history
um we'd love to hear your perspective on why you should build on stellar today and then love to
hear uh from tomra as well you know you obviously both on different um different parts of the team
and might have different perspectives from how you've come into the server ecosystem um yeah maybe we'll take it
with tyler first and then come on to stellar off sorry on to on to tom afterwards tomer is stellar
stellar um yeah my goodness there's so many reasons especially having been uh in the like
in the space for for 10 years uh's stable. It's been around.
You don't have this underlying concern of what's going to happen to the network
in a few years. It's a non-profit, not-for-profit organization,
which makes a huge difference when you're trying to talk about the future and how it's used. So
there's some fundamental organization of the project
and longevity of the project.
And then there's the actual tech stack itself
where it's very use case forward,
which is tough on the one hand
because we had so many competitors enter the space
over the past 10 years for a number of different reasons,
all kinds of things getting used
and a real emphasis on speculation, which I think can
draw away a bit from real world use cases and just makes things take longer. There's all kinds of
user experience concerns and issues. And like you may have this like, you know, web two versus web
three, but web two doesn't stop innovating. Like it continues to progress and build new things and move forward.
So it's not this like replacement.
So you've got to kind of compete with the existing tech stacks that continue to improve.
But through all of that, Stellar continues to innovate and improve and listen to the market and see what people are building in other ecosystems, kind of taking the best and leaving the cruft. And for all of those reasons, kind of what you get at the end is a very mature,
very stable, very use case centric tech stack, which is why I certainly continue to build here
and remain optimistic for how it can get used in the future. Absolutely. I think it's probably the
most exciting time. And I think that Tomer actually alluded to why it's so exciting now more than ever to be building on Stellar. Tomer,
you mentioned Soroban, smart contracts on Stellar. We'd love to hear from you why you think that it's
so exciting now to build on Stellar. Sure. So I just want to take a step back for a second and
get back to your previous question, which is why kind of like in general to build a Stellar ecosystem.
And I think there are like these three big themes
that intersect with stellar i think first of all like tyler mentioned uh there's you know we're
very mission aligned uh you know there's uh creating equitable access for the world's financial
system is what we've talked about for the past 10 years and i think that everyone is kind of like
coming around to this idea that um you know at the end of the day, equity and financial inclusion really is the core
value proposition of blockchain.
And so Stellar has always stayed there.
I think that if you look at the companies
that build in a Stellar ecosystem,
the ones that are like super mature,
a lot of them are aligned on this mission.
So I think that's kind of like first and foremost.
Like Tyler mentioned, the technology stack is amazing. And like you mentioned, we just launched Soroban last year. And I think a really
interesting thing here is even though Stellar is super robust, been around for 10 years, an amazing
track record of robustness and performance, Soroban is a late addition. So we launched it last year
through two years of extensive research and development. And I think the interesting thing there is that we've had an opportunity to look at everything else that's in
the market and, you know, look at the EVM, look at Solana, look at NIR, look at Cosmoise and all
these different runtimes and basically pick and choose the things that work the best. And we
literally, you know, we got on a call with representatives from each one of these engineering teams,
learned from their lessons and built what I think
is the best fucking smart contracts runtime in blockchain.
And the developer experience is phenomenal.
I highly recommend it.
Everyone that comes in from any other ecosystem
immediately is amazed by how thoughtful, how batteries included it is, including very big
companies that I can't mention, but in private conversations, keep saying that. And so, you know,
technology is a big thing. I think one thing that we should also mention is the community. The
Stellar community is phenomenal people that are just nice. I was actually talking with one of the
auditors in the Stellar ecosystem not so long ago.
They work on basically every other chain out there.
And when I asked them how they like Stellar compared to the rest,
obviously they talked a lot about the engineering and the tech start,
but they all said, everyone's so fucking nice here.
How did you guys make it happen?
And I'm not sure.
I think it has to do with the first prop of mission
and having people mission aligned.
But the Stellar community is just so nice.
Like go on Discord, start a conversation,
you know, talk with builders in the ecosystem,
talk with any of the DeFi protocols,
talk with Lumen Loop with Stellar Global,
really amazing communities and builders
in the Stellar ecosystem.
I can vouch for that as well.
I think over the course of Meridians,
I think I've been to now two or three,
two or three Meridians now.
And each time I meet such amazing people,
so many cool people in the ecosystem.
And genuinely, I think that's one of the things.
It's like people actually just very, very friendly.
Some communities have for some reason
or whatever reason become pretty toxic,
but Stellella is always
there as being very very friendly everybody's super welcoming especially if you're new to the
ecosystem like a couple of years ago i didn't know anything about star and you know then i got into
it and i started also diving into writing my own uh sort of contracts experimenting tinkering with
some dApps as well uh one of the things that i will call out as being great is like the TypeScript bindings, for example, that can just get generated for your contract.
Absolutely love it.
And it's just like, that's just one example of some of the awesome tooling that's out there.
And I think I saw, Toma, your tweet the other day about StellarX, but being just such an amazing blog explorer.
100%.
Like, I absolutely agree.
I actually, I was on it the other day and I was like, whoa,
you know, there's actually so much going on here and so much detailed information that you can get
out of it. Absolutely fantastic. So what I'll come on to next is I'd love to ask the question of
what you want to see from hackathon participants. So this is a great question because, of course,
a lot of people who are listening to this question because of course a lot of people who
are listening to this space and we have a lot of people on here so what would you want to see from
hackathon participants because ultimately this is the launch pad right this is going to be not just
a hackathon where okay it's three days and you build a product and you present it on stage and
that's it we have real projects who are coming to launch and they are bringing these amazing ideas,
but often they need a little bit of guidance to see,
okay, what do you think is a good idea?
What do you think is maybe not so good?
I remember Tomo, we had a really,
really interesting discussion about this
at Hack Meridian in London,
together with Justin as well on the team.
And we were talking about, okay, what is good to build?
What do we want to see?
Do we want to see B2B stuff?
Do we want to see a consumer? Do we want to see a mixture of things? And in good to build? What do we wanna see? Do we wanna see B2B stuff? Do we wanna see consumer?
Do we wanna see a mixture of things?
And in particular with that,
where do we sit alongside the spectrum of,
there's like the pump funds of the world,
but then of course there's Stellar,
which is really focused on real world DeFi
and you have so many awesome real world applications of it.
So Toma, we've chatted about this before.
We'd love to start with you
and then we can come to Tyler afterwards for what you really want to see people build at the hackathon.
Sure.
Happy to kick this off.
I think that, you know, first and foremost, like the because the DeFi ecosystem in Stellar is so new, there's a lot of opportunities for innovation there.
And so, you know, getting some inspiration from like DeFi and other ecosystems and then trying to figure out how this fits within the Stellar ecosystem, how to connect it,
because I think in Stellar, you have this, you know, amazing universe of RWAs, you have anchors,
which are these reusable on and off ramps, and you can actually connect these with DeFi in
innovative interfaces. So I think there's a lot of interesting design space there. I think in
general, trying to think about real world utility, trying to think about how this serves people
outside of our crypto bubble is kind of like the bread and butter of the stellar ecosystem.
We'd love to see innovation there. I think user experience is something that we've been talking
a lot about recently. Using smart contracts, invoking smart
contracts, authorizing invocations, doing so in a secure manner. These are all big issues in our
universe. And if we don't solve these issues, we're not going to get the type of mainstream
adoption that we want. So I think, first and foremost, bring value to the people,
the value proposition. User experience is great. It's not going to do anything by its own. I think, you know, first and foremost, bring value to the people, the value proposition.
Okay.
User experience is great.
It's not going to do anything by its own.
I think in the world of crypto, we like to talk about scalability and security, user experience.
All of these things are amazing.
Innovate there.
But the bottom line is what's the value proposition of this thing that you're building and articulate it.
Fantastic.
I couldn't agree more. Yeah.
Especially, I think my key takeaway from that is
to break out of this crypto bubble um yeah exactly yeah i'm tired i would love to hear from from your
end what do you want to see at the hackathon yeah i think i mean hackathons are always a little
tricky in in the sense that the time is limited uh and you don't like you want to allow creative space to build something fun.
And I don't think it's at odds with focusing on real-world utility.
I think those things can certainly be aligned.
But I do know I've been in a lot of hackathons, and people can get roadblocked trying to come up with a good prompt or application or entry
that they're not actually that excited about,
but they think would work for whatever prompt they're
going after.
So my encouragement is definitely pick something
that you're excited about that's fascinating to you.
You can really sink your teeth into.
And as a developer and somebody who spends a lot of time
tinkering, play around with something new, like really try and learn something new.
I know like MCP servers and AI is really big right now.
There's a lot of new like JS frameworks you can dabble in.
And now is a good time.
Hackathons are a good time to uplevel your own skill set, to pick something that maybe you don't get to do in your day job or that,
you know, I don't know, try something new. But also build something fun. Build something you're
excited about. Pick something that you feel like other people would be excited about. It's a lot
easier to pivot something that makes money if you are already enjoying it, if you're excited about it, if you're fascinated by the problem
space. So if you overemphasize building something that you think the world needs, but you don't
actually feel that need yourself, or you're not excited about the tech stack or the problem,
I think particularly in a hackathon, that's kind of a waste. So I would love to see people having
a good time and really excited
about the projects that they're building and the tech stacks that they're using and the applications
that they're serving up. So I know for myself, if I'm going to build something that's good,
it has to be something that I'm excited about, that I'm interested in. So that's certainly what
I want to see. And a lot of that is certainly things that move out of like what everybody else is doing, right? You have all of this. I don't know, I've spent so much time on like wallet UX and getting away from passphrases and downloadable, you know, extensions and all this stuff that just does not exist in Web2. Like the Web2 user experience is actually pretty good. And if we could bring the self-custody
and all the benefits, security of Web3,
of cryptography, blockchains,
bring that into the way that Web2 feels,
I would love to see that stuff happen.
So wallets you don't download,
these like web wallets,
that would be amazing to see.
Applications like just basic example applications
that feel really good,
but in the backend are taking advantage
of all of the benefits of Web3 tech.
That would, I would love to see more stuff like that.
Love it.
And I want to say actually on that point,
thanks for putting together those awesome articles
on Passkeys.
I was reading them, I think it would have been like several months ago actually when they
when uh stella first talked about the passkeys and you're putting together that stuff on like
you know first of all like what are passkeys put together a really cool demo app as well uh which
i absolutely loved uh and i think i remember actually seeing at one point um no yeah actually
this was this was in hong kong at consensus um bumped into one of our easy agigabrains who is actively using passkeys within
their dap right now and i believe actually ended up contributing as well to one of the repos um
jose jose tuscano yeah that's right yeah yeah he's super super active yeah yeah uh absolutely
fantastic i mean you make a good point though you make a good point though. You make a good
point about how it's quite scary building something that's new. And, you know, as an entrepreneur and
a founder, Dom and I, we co-founded two startups before EZA as well. And it's always really,
really difficult doing something that has never been done before. There's not necessarily somebody
that you can look to or a model that you can just look to and replicate so i think
at this point i would love to hear what you think would be good examples of teams that have done
that within the stellar ecosystem just so that we can have those inspiration points and this can
come from either of you tyler or toma or both which projects you think are doing this well that
developers can maybe look up and we
could even after this send out maybe a link to that project or they can even look it up
we're on twitter right now the people could look up the project on twitter while they're listening
to this space and see oh awesome that's a really really cool example of somebody who's doing
something a little bit different i remember seeing some really really cool ones like obviously beans
i've got the beans app on my phone and I remember getting a couple of free USDC.
I think it was like 10 free USDC at Meridian that we could then spend at the cafe.
And then also we could even put it towards savings and have like even a savings product in there.
Super, super cool.
We'd love to know which ones you think are great examples for developers to look at.
I can go first real quick. My general recommendation is to go to the communityfund.stellar.org
forward slash projects to look at projects that have come from the Stellar Community Fund. A lot
of those did start as either hackathon entries or at the very least,
I mean, they had to start somewhere, somewhere small with an idea. And there's just a,
there's reams and reams of applications that are built on top of Stellar in that directory.
So I'd spend time there. I would also, like, I don't want to call it any specific
projects. There's, there's, I don't want to show favoritism,
but you can spend time in our Discord,
especially if you're looking for things
that are continuously active.
And developers, I actually love to focus more on developers
than just individual projects,
because in this space, there tends to be so much pivoting
and it can be perceived as like failure. Oh, that project failed they they missed the mark well maybe they didn't maybe they
learned something and they'll take that code and they'll implement it into some next idea
um we shouldn't look at those those pivots and um like projects going under as it were as failures
really focus on developers and so to do that you need to spend time like on crypto Twitter
and spend time in discords where these people are talking and just watch them, see what they build,
see what they're tinkering on, ask them questions, where are they showing up? And over time, I believe
that good projects will come about. You'll observe like the code or the implementations or the
protocols that they build will show up in different places because they're always learning and they're fascinated
and it will go with them from project to project.
So maybe a bit of a dodge question,
but definitely go to communityfund.stellar.org
to find projects, specific projects that have launched.
And then on Discording and Twitter
to just like find developers and follow them
like celebrities and see what they do next.
I love it. So true.
So true about the projects versus developers as well.
Yeah, Tomo.
Yeah, happy to jump in.
I'm not going to dodge the question like Tyler did.
I think, obviously, lots of great projects
I'm not going to name everyone.
I do think like one thing that I really love talking about in our ecosystem is the blend protocol, which is a lending borrowing protocol.
But the interesting thing there is that it's kind of like a new take on lending and borrowing and blend itself is actually a building block and you can design your own lending borrowing protocols on top of it.
So I think both taking inspiration from this idea of,
you know, let's look at the world of DeFi
and let's break it down into building blocks.
I think that's like really a really great approach.
And the other one is just,
hey, you know, you can look at Blend specifically,
figure out how to build like a specific pool,
maybe build a, you know,
a pool for the hackathon itself,
like a transient pool.
So like Tyler said, you can have fun with these things.
We're not against fun.
I think one thing, and this is a shout out
to an EZA hackathon project,
I think Ramp Me Daddy is one of the coolest projects
coming out of EZA, I especially like its name.
Yeah, and I think they did a really interesting job
in connecting the universe of on and off ramps
that is prevalent in the Stellar ecosystem
together with like a Telegram mini app,
which obviously gets you a huge cam
that you get exposure to.
I think one other thing that I'd mention is,
you know, we've been working with the Open Zeppelin team on creating standards for the Stellar ecosystem.
They put out kind of like initial versions
of both a, you know, programmable fungible token
and a programmable NFT non-fungible token.
I think building on these things can be super interesting,
testing them out.
And so, you know, basically being like a pioneer and using these new standards and new tools that are available for the ecosystem.
I love it. I remember reading somewhere about even Blend and Beans coming together for just, you know, to compose all these things together.
But that brings me to another question.
So I think, you know, before we come on to what's next after the hackathon,
and I know we're right up on 30 minutes here,
but all these projects that you've mentioned,
they're a little bit further along.
Ramp Me Daddy is actually a great example
because anybody who's listening to the space right now
can see their journey from around this time last year
to where they are today, and they've made so much progress.
But I know that when you're just coming to a hackathon for the first time, a lot of people
are thinking like, where do I even start?
And so my question for you is, what do you think a good project can do by the end of
of the three days right because from my perspective i'll maybe i'll start with my answer this from my
the three days?
Right?
Because from my perspective, maybe I'll start with my answer to this.
perspective it's not necessarily about what you are able just to code up during the hackathon
it's really about can you can you connect with you know what exactly you should be building like
what is the problem that you're solving and that's why i always view this as being a launch pad
right it's like okay it is three days it. It is a relatively extended period of time,
but in the grand scheme of things, it's not long at all, right?
It's three days.
And even if you don't sleep, that is not a huge amount of time.
And hopefully developers will get a little bit of sleep, a wink maybe.
But that's really all the time that there is.
And I think that Tyler, you mentioned this pretty well.
It's like understanding what this problem is that you're solving rather than just ideating the whole time
it's about connecting with okay what are we actually doing and i think tomah as well you
alluded to it about breaking out of this crypto bubble who are we actually solving problems for
in the real world is this something that your average person could use? Is it so complicated that nobody can use it?
Maybe it's maybe using pass keys like Tyler, you were talking about.
So I think it was all these different bits.
But yeah, either one of you, or maybe we can, yeah,
whichever one of you wants to answer this question,
what do you think projects should be doing?
If they're a good project, what have they done by the end of the three days?
What do you think they've really grappled with? That means, okay, you look at this
and you're like, okay, this is the next. I mean, you mentioned Blend, right? Or Toma mentioned
Blend. Like, this is the next Blend. This is the next project that I really, really want to see
succeed and I want to support coming out of the hackathon. Yeah, I can get us started. I was actually extremely surprised when we were at the EZA Hackathon prior to Meridian in London
to see so many projects actually, after just two days,
hit a point where they actually have a deployed contract that they interact with.
I was astonished, and that was amazing to see.
And so I think there isn't necessarily kind of like, there are different ways you can approach this, right?
And like Tyler said, like you don't need to obsess over an idea that will change the world.
If you have an idea that can change the world and you want to go with it, that's great.
If you want to take something from another ecosystem that is like some DeFi protocol that doesn't yet exist in Stellar and try to figure out what is the Stellar way to do it, how can you do it in the most Stellarelin NFTs. Sure. Go for that. And I think it's better to just start with something.
And then, you know, as you learn the tech,
maybe you'll figure out,
oh, actually there's this problem that I'm solving
that is not what I originally intended to solve,
but is a much bigger thing to solve.
Sure. Go for that.
So just, it's better to start doing something
and let it take you rather than to,
you know, trying to come up with like a life-changing plan to the get-go.
Absolutely. Yeah, love that. Thanks, Tomer and Tyler.
Love to hear from you.
Yeah, I mean, Tomer hit it perfectly.
Have fun.
Don't waste the time. Really learn the tech. I think if there was one thing that I'd really want to see people focus on, it's just getting inspired, getting hopeful about tech in general. a really really cool time in history where building things has never been easier where you can have an idea and actually get it live for other people to use at scale
it's never been easier to do with the advent of ai technologies so much stuff is is public and
open source the accessibility of even just internet with things like starlink i mean it is an amazing time
to be an inventor and a creator to have an idea to have a problem and go out and solve it
um i think we really need to recognize that as individual people um that we can build stuff now
and we don't have to learn quite as much as we used to we just need to have like the courage
and the inspiration and um to just go out and do stuff
and make things and solve problems. And that does require tenacity to actually see something all the
way through, but the tools aren't the barrier that they used to be, which makes me really optimistic,
but it also provides maybe a swift kick in the pants.
Like, let's, let's go out and get, get, get it. Like, yeah, learn the, learn the tech,
grab a heart of a, grab a hold of a hard problem, send it through an LLM, right? You get a contract from Ethereum and it's in Solidity or Viper and you need to convert it into Rust. You know, AI is
not going to get a perfect, but it'll get you pretty close. And then for whatever
you don't know, you just keep asking more questions. You go find somebody who knows
something. It's the information is so accessible in a, in a completely new and novel way that
actually like writes code for you. It's incredible. So if we combine some of these things together,
I think we're going to see a, an explosion of applications and problems getting solved in
new ways.
And I could go on and on, but I won't because I want you guys to be inspired and to get
things built.
And we'll see you in Toronto.
I love it.
Absolutely.
I think, honestly, I actually posted, I made a LinkedIn post this morning about how I am absolutely
thrilled to be living at this time point in time in history right now we were just at Harvard last
week um at Harvard blockchain conference we're at this one hacker house where one group of students
literally built um basically they've got this startup that they're working on and they're
undergrads at Harvard they have built this exoskeleton.
They can literally allow you to jump twice as high as normal people.
There's this other team.
One of the other members of the team has built a flamethrower that he shoots from his hands.
They've got these incredible Web3 startups as well.
So yeah, you mentioned Starlink, Tyler, and there's so much that's going on right now.
There's so many AI tools as well that developers can leverage to do so much
more than could possibly have been done.
I mean, even just over the past couple of years, right.
Uh, I remember our first hackathon, there was no chat GPT, right.
And I remember when I was doing hackathons back in the day, things
like this just didn't exist.
So there's just, you know, there's so much to be done right now.
The tech is here and very much, I think we're going to see this Cambrian explosion in applications.
So I know that we have some time for questions at the end.
But final question before we come towards questions that people have sent in is after the hackathon.
So we're on this topic.
What are the opportunities to build on Stellar afterwards?
And I'm pretty familiar with things like Stellar Kickstart.
I know that's an awesome, awesome program.
I know that you've got things like the Build Award.
There's all sorts of ways to get funding.
There's also other cool opportunities like Ramp Me Daddy
went through Draper University
because Stellar was running an accelerator
together with them as well.
We'd love to hear what opportunities do you think
developers should be tapping into after they actually complete the hackathon.
Sure, I can tackle that.
Maybe to circle back, I mean, we've got a nice little prize pot for folks, right?
$45,000 worth of XLM across the first five places.
It's not even like winner takes all.
It's spread out.
So that's pretty fantastic.
I know we've got some travel grants for folks
that are committed to building on our track,
which is, I mean, that would have turned a maybe
into a yes for me.
So you might want to look into that.
Obviously, when you're finished with the hackathon,
there's ASCF, the Stellar Community Fund,
to look into if you want to continue building your project.
I mean, you'll want to for sure join Discord
and just get plugged into our ecosystem, to our community.
And then, I mean, this is not the last hackathon we're doing, right?
We're going to be in Istanbul for Istanbul Blockchain Week.
We're going to be there.
It's going to be a massive conference with a big hackathon there.
I mean, we've got Hack Meridian coming up in September.
So another place to go and work on projects.
You know, you're going to make a ton of friends.
Guess where they're going to show up?
More conferences.
So start looking to those.
And then I know that there's another hackathon
I think we're doing with you guys, right?
In Boston?
Oh, yeah.
In a few months?
Absolutely.
So all kinds of amazing stuff
to look out for in the future.
Watch this space, as they say.
Love it.
Absolutely.
Cool.
So there's so much going on.
Yes, there's an amazing, amazing set of prizes.
We have travel scholarships for the hackathon as well
to make sure that we can get everybody out
who wants to build on Stellar.
Final bit is questions.
So I was just looking through in the final couple of minutes
and first question that comes up is best place to learn about passkeys.
So if you go to our developer docs,
I think you can just look up,
it's either smart wallet or passkeys.
Yeah, passkeys, just search passkeys.
I don't know, can I drop in links?
Probably not.
But if you go to our docs, developers.stellar.org,
and then just command K, search the keyword passkeys,
there's a page there that's just got buckets
of links and information.
I'm also going to be in Toronto.
So I don't know, I don't wanna toot my own horn, but I'm kind of something
of an expert now on Passkey Wallet, Smart Wallet. So definitely want to ask me some questions.
I've got all kinds of links. I work on this page. So that's why you'll want to go to kind of a
kickstart, the hub for all of the spokes that go out of things to learn.
Fantastic. You are the Bible of fast keys. Next question that we've got is
small contract NFTs versus assets that are issued on Stellar before smart contracts.
So I think this is getting towards like how they interact with each other or yeah, how they're the difference between them.
Sure, I can I can take this. So, you know, as you know, Stellar has had baked in assets since day one, since 2014 when the protocol launched.
And so these assets can be used in a variety of ways. We actually have an amazing NFT marketplace in the ecosystem called Lightment. And the way that Lightment operates is it basically issues these like one stoop. Stoop is like the minimal worth of an asset and then introducing some metadata.
And so I think that's awesome.
And I'm encouraging everyone to go to LightMint and experiment with these.
What OpenZeppelin created recently is a smart contract version of that.
And in that case,
you could basically experiment more with with arbitrary code
that you can have in your NFT.
You can also experiment with
kind of like programmatically issued NFTs.
So basically like a smart contract that issues an NFT
or NFTs or NFT collection.
You can also have situations like, you know, you can have a DeFi
protocol that represents a specific property of that protocol as an NFT. For example, you can have,
we have something called Sorbonne Domains, which is kind of like the Stellar's version of ENS,
and a future version of that or an alternative version of that might have individual domains represented as NFTs.
You can have a DeFi protocol in which positions are represented as NFTs, similar to how Uniswap
v3 or v4 works.
So there's a lot more room for experimentation.
But again, the Light Mint version is definitely awesome and works.
And if you can fit an NFT like that,
it's much cheaper as well
because transaction fees on smart contracts are higher.
So I definitely recommend everyone take a look at Lightbend.
Really an awesome protocol by Fred,
one of the veteran ecosystem members at Stellar.
Very cool.
Thanks very much, Toma, for taking that one.
And next one is actually related to that. Are there limitations on smart contracts on Stellar at the moment
are there limitations how do you answer that question you know obviously there's a
Soroban has a multi-dimensional fees and metering system. So unlike other systems,
which kind of like, you know,
fold all the computational resources
into one dimension,
like the gas and EVM or the networks,
Stellar has like dedicated limits around,
you know, write, read,
how many entries I can write and read,
transaction sizes, compute, memory,
and so on and so forth.
For the most part, these are very accommodating to most DeFi use cases. I think that if you have some adventurous things that you want to do in crypto that is not yet supported by Mainnet,
that is still an option.
You can pretty much prototype these, run them on local tests or even on a local
unmetered network. And I think that's still a very great prototype project to have. And I think
something cool about these prototypes is that they can actually advance the state of the ecosystem.
So you can basically say, hey, you know what? There's this thing that is computationally too expensive
to do on Stellar Mainnet, how can we bring this to Mainnet?
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The MoneyGram integration is not permissionless.
You still need to basically coordinate with the MoneyGram folks.
You can prototype something that connects to anchors.
You can even use the anchor platform project which which is
a kind of like a turnkey solution for anchors and I think that's another like area for innovation
on stellar given that anchors are so prevalent in the ecosystem and on and off ramps are so
meaningful and so you know you can use the Anchor platform directly.
We also have kind of like a demo wallet
that integrates kind of like a demo Anchor.
And so there are a bunch of ways to prototype this,
but in terms of like going to production,
there will be a step of kind of like coordinating
with MoneyGram.
Cool. Fantastic.
Well, I think to wrap things up,
I've got a final question, which is final piece of advice for builders who are coming. I would like to wrap up with this question because I think everybody has a different take on what developers should be focusing on at the hackathons, what advice they should be getting as well before they come. Yeah, we'd love to hear what your advice would be for developers in the run-up to the hackathon.
I'll get started.
Two pieces of advice.
One is, and I'm stealing from Tyler, just have fun.
The other is, you know, it's better.
Yeah, like good is better than perfect, basically.
So, you know, just have something.
Fantastic.
And Tyler?
Drink water, not just coffee.
That's a good piece of advice.
Very simple, but I think people can follow that one.
No, I'm serious.
You'd be surprised.
Brains don't work well
if they don't have water.
That is good.
And also caffeine dehydrates, doesn't it?
I think so.
Very good.
Fantastic.
Well, it's been an absolute pleasure
to have you on, Tomer and Tyler.
And I can really vouch for everything
that Tomer and Tyler have just said.
We've got a lot of listeners
on this space right now.
We have a couple of hundred
and a couple of hundred who've been tuning in
throughout as well.
So for everybody who stayed right through to the end,
this is gonna be an incredible hackathon.
Stella have been an amazing partner of ours over the years.
And genuinely, we have seen incredible projects
come out of our hackathons together.
And it's not just enough for us to
bring, you know, amazing people for you to be amazing people coming to these hackathons.
The fact is that it's about the support you get afterwards as well. And literally over the course
of this space, we've talked about team members who have come from those hackathons. Toma mentioned
Ramidadi, who are an amazing team, they first pitched an EZA Consensus hackathon,
well, the EZA Consensus hackathon last year.
And just a year on, they are absolutely crushing it,
building something very, very innovative.
They've shown me their Telegram wallet in person, and it is absolutely fantastic, all built on Stellar.
Tyler, as well, is working on Parsky's,
and one of the developers from our hackathon
just before the turn of the
year in london at hack meridian jose is now actively contributing to passkeys i've seen
him on the github repos and they are building their own project literally met his co-founder
at an easy hackathon so there's so much magic that can happen and so just to echo
tomra and tyler's Stellar is an amazing ecosystem.
You'll find welcoming people all over and hope that you've also taken that
away from this space as well.
You've seen that Tomer and Tyler have so much knowledge to share.
And so Tomer and Tyler, I want to send a big, big thanks from everybody who's
on this space right now for you, for taking the time out of your days to
answer these questions that people have sent in and also just to help inspire everybody so thank you very much um for being on the space today
thanks for having us it's fantastic looking forward to seeing everybody fantastic thank you
so much and we'll see you in toronto next week thanks so much tomer thanks so much tyler and
yeah have an amazing day everybody we. We'll see you in Toronto.
Dom and I are going to be heading out tomorrow.
So we'll see everybody very, very soon.
Enjoy the rest of your day, everybody.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
