With the Pillar Wallet fast becoming the wallet of choice for thousands of token holders and users this year, we held our first developer event on the 17th and 18th of January.
We are excited about collaborating with other blockchain projects on integrating their networks into our infrastructure. Two major goals of our first Pillar Hackathon were to build develop outreach, and to raise interest in the Wallet’s code.
We invited some of our closest friends from the crypto space to work with us, including solution architects from NEM and Radix, along with DigiByte, represented by DGBAT devs. Our unique hackathon, with its three different challenges, provided an opportunity for the soft launch of our developer community. Soft, but successful!
The first team to take the challenge was NEM, which got integrated into our blockchain explorer. The purpose of this exercise was to identify the limitations in the existing architecture and specify the requirements for Pillar to become a multi-chain wallet. Our work with István, NEM’s Solution Architect, was extremely useful and helped us understand how we can best integrate NEM and other Bitcoin-based blockchains.
We had an equally successful outcome with the DigiByte team. Adam from the US, Matthew from Canada, and our own Kieran and Partha, looked at both source codes and came up with an approach that will allow us to not only integrate DGB into the Wallet, but to build a foundation for adding more forks along with the original BTC chain.
The third team was focused on integrating the exciting new Radix network into the Wallet. The primary goal was to check whether the Radix SDK is compatible with our codebase. Alex, the Radix developer, together with our mobile team, created a bridge between both projects. By the end of the hackathon, he was able to generate a wallet in Radix format on our platform, and fetch a balance. Both teams of developers learnt a lot about each platform and gained helpful insights.
The event coincided with another important moment in our Project’s history — we opened our GitHub repositories. Participants and then the wider dev community have the chance to look at our code to start working on integrations, or entirely new ideas to build on top of it. We will share more of our experiences in ‘becoming open-source’ in one of our upcoming pieces.
We hope this event will be the first of many that Pillar will host or co-organise this year. One of the 2019 resolutions is to build awareness and get developers excited about building on the Pillar platform.
If you are a developer interested in integrated your system into the Pillar waller, do not hesitate to reach out to us.
If you want to explore your own idea and try to plug it into the Pillar code, contact us too.
If you want to team up with us or co-organise an event, we are all ears!