The wonderful people over at the Loom Network will running a gaming-specific Blockchain hackathon in London the weekend 4-5th August; and along with Work On Blockchain I'm helping to organise it 💪🔥
Not that long ago, gaming and blockchain wasn't cool
Back in June 2017, I saw that Ownage (now Shard) were hosting a gaming for Blockchain hackathon in their office in London; excited by the prospect I signed up for it straight away. When the Saturday morning in June rolled around I eagerly turned up to their office (which they shared with the Colony team at the time). I introduced myself to the team (including Alex 'the Tuna' Amsel - creator of the successful game Eufloria).
After hastily upacking my laptop, connecting to the wifi and generally setting up, I sat patiently ready to meet the other hackers and get started. I waited... and waited some more.
Eventually, two other people showed up, but that was it - in the whole of London, the prospect of learning more about the implications of blockchain in gaming had attracted the attention of 3 people. This was several months before the day in late November 2017 when CryptoKitties launched. CryptoKitties set out with the aim of making blockchain more accessible and palitable to a more mainstream audience and I think that you can appreciate how big of an impact they have made if you even look back 1 year.
Loom Network
I have been a fan of the work that the team over at Loom Network have been doing for a while. They have been building interesting and beautiful project for the Ethereum ecosystem for a while now:
- EthDeploy - An AWS-esk platform offering a scalability solution for Ethereum using sidechains.
- DelegateCall - A StackExchange-esk technical questions and answers platform that runs on their 'DAppChain' blockchain; where the karma you earn is a token.
- CryptoZombies - A fun resource for learning how to develop on Ethereum themed around zombies.
- EthFiddle - A JS Fiddle-esk tool that allows you to write, compile, run and share Smart Contract code.
- SolidityX - A secure by default, language for writing Smart Contracts on Ethereum that compiles to Ethereum's Solidity.
Most recently, they caught my attention because they ran a successful gaming hackathon in Tokyo and put out the call for people in other cities that wanted to run something similar.
Specifically, the Loom Network team have been working on an SDK (that works in Unity and Cocos) to make it easy to create and deploy Smart Contracts onto their Ethereum DAppChains (sidechains). The games will benefit from many of the features of the Ethereum blockchain, but also be scalable.
Having been a little disappointed by the Ownage hackathon back in June 2017, I was determined to be part of a more successful gaming-specific blockchain hackathon in London, so I reached out to the Loom Network team.
After some emails and phone calls, everything was agreed and a date was set.
London Hackathon Details
So if you are in London, in the UK or perhaps in Europe and are interested in finding out more about how the gaming industry could benefit from Blockchain and how the Loom Network team are leading the charge on this front, then joining us.
If you are interested to join in then you can email team+hackathon@loomx.io, find out more details about the event in this Medium blog post and feel free to ask me any questions about the event in the comment section below. 👇👇👇