It’s been a busy Week 2, but not the way I had intended!

My intention for most of August is to work predominantly on Voyageur, a new security awareness learning platform for web3, and variations of it for hackathons. But since coming back to Japan, many opportunities have opened up that are not directly related to Voyageur.

The past week has still been mostly working on SHILLing activities rather than BUIDLing Voyageur. So this week’s post will be about how I am juggling all these new commitments and talk a bit about Voyageur: Prologue’s progress.

Bankless Japan

Although I’ve helped Bankless Japan a few times in the past, including designing their バンクレス shirt, I never really considered myself part of the IMN.

This changed after my experience working with them at WebX, as I detailed in my last post. I’m now a core contributor to their IMN and we have big plans that I want to help them get off the ground.

But this is a different set of priorities than what I had intended to focus on a few weeks ago. So I’ll need to be careful with my time allotment, to ensure that I can work to the best of my ability for both Bankless Japan and Voyageur.

One thing I have started to be more conscious about is time-boxing my work with Bankless Japan, so that I’m not always thinking about what I can be doing for the team at all hours of the day. It’s easy to dive deep into a rabbit hole when you first start something new and exciting with frens. But now I’m conscious of that and coming out of the hole to give time to my other priorities.

Hackathons

I’m currently in the Consensys NAVH. Unfortunately not much progress had been made since my last post. Besides getting most of the written content, wallet integration and HTML structure ready since last time, there is a long way to go to make what I have a functioning dapp.

While there is still close to three weeks before submissions are due, I have also registered for three other hackathons:

• ETHGlobal Superhack, which focuses on technologies built on the OP Stack, including Base, Worldcoin, Zora and many others (this hackathon has started as of today and is due sooner than NAVH)

• Ethcon Korea, which will be my first hackathon in South Korea and probably the first to incorporate quadratic funding into the prize pool (this will start on September 1st and is an in-person, 3-day hackathon)

• Permissionless II, which will be hosting their first hackathon for this year’s conference (I am still pending an invite due to technical issues on their end 🙏)

I applied for all four hackathons before my new commitment to Bankless Japan and thought I could make them all work out at the time. For the multi-week hackathons like NAVH and Superhack I may have to be more scrappy with my submission or join a team to help diffuse the workload but retain a high degree of learning.

Voyageur: Prologue

This is the dapp, or “hack”, I’m currently building for NAVH.

This hack gives security lessons in bite-sized pieces through UX similar to Instagram Stories or TikTok. There will be a topic, say “Why use 2FA?”, that is split up into slides meant to be viewed on a mobile device. After viewing all the slides, you are quizzed on what you have just read. Successfully passing the quiz enables you to mint a Proof of Knowledge NFT for that topic.

There is not much to show for this vision yet. But as I have paired down my schedule a lot in the upcoming week, I’ll be dropping some screenshots of what I will have completed for my Week 3 post.

Right now the tech stack for the dapp is pretty minimal:

• Next.js for the front-end, which uses React for the UI library and has server-side rendering baked-in (which is actually a bit annoying to work with for a hackathon project, so I’ll likely turn all of that off)

• I’m using Tailwind CSS for UI theming, but as I’m used to just writing raw HTML + CSS to get my UI looking the way I want quickly, I may throw Tailwind out

• NAVH necessitates using specific technologies to earn points for judging, so I integrated the MetaMask SDK for wallet integration and wagmi for improving the developer experience when interacting with wallets and chains through React

• I have not written the NFT contract yet, but it will be deployed to Linea Testnet and likely using thirdweb’s deployer

I will not be working on this idea for Superhack and my hack for that event may not be very security related. So I not only have to come up with another idea for that other hackathon, or join another team, but also work on both hacks in tandem. I will certainly be learning a lot through the experience. But I also need to make sure that I do not burn out.

That is all for this week!