On the 24th of November 2017 we participated in the first ever Blockchain hackathon in Australia organised by https://twitter.com/bitfwdxyz. The goal of the Blockathon was to come up with a problem that could be addressed by Blockchain technology (Ethereum) and develop a prototype within 72hours.

Our idea was to develop OCTIO a lowest unique bid auction website where the lowest unique bid would win the auction in comparison to a traditional auction system. The problem with this sort of auctioning system is the verifiability of bids and that indeed the lowest unique bid has won and not the website provider (house). What might sound too good to be true (#scam) could now be verified transparently by everyone using a developed Ethereum smart contract.

If you're keen to find out more, have a look at our presentation that we presented to the judges: https://github.com/0x464c4f/OCTIO_BLOCKATHON/blob/master/Presentation/octio.pdf

It was an awesome event and a great community overall. We didn't get much sleep, but the satisfaction of coming up with an idea and functioning prototype for the demo in the short time frame was well worth it. It was also our first development/exposure to Solidity/Ethereum smart contract development and many lessons have been learned. One of the most important ones was how easy it is to introduce bugs that could have devastating effects as seen by many recent DeFi hacks.

Shout-out to the winners of the Blockathon at https://cryptocats.thetwentysix.io/ who came up with some of the earliest crypto NFTs (Australian original).