Building On Zircuit, A Hackathon Introduction I Jan Gorzny

[Music] Hi. Uh, my name is Yan. I'm a co-founder and technical lead at Zirket. Hello. I don't know if you can hear this.

I hope you can. Uh, and today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about um, you know, being in a hackathon and building on Zirket. So, without further ado, uh, this workshop isn't that much of a workshop. Sorry for the misnomer, but I'm going to give it uh use as an opportunity to tell you about what it means to build a great project and how to win some of our prizes. I've seen a lot of other teams do this and I think this is more informative than just simply saying here's how to change the endpoint to my blockchain and you could connect even though I will also tell you that.

So we're going to talk about first uh great hackathon projects uh some quick start resources on zirkuit itself and then our specific prizes for this year at uh cans. So what are great projects? What are great projects that win hackathon prizes that go on to launch products that become, you know, the next biggest brand that ultimately come back to sponsor this place and then also give out their own prizes. Well, great projects typically solve a problem. No matter what you're doing here, you should be trying to build something that someone needs or wants.

And so these hackathon projects are always very broad in scope. And certainly we have some that are very broad, but always try to figure out what someone needs. And that doesn't necessarily have to be as broad or challenging as it sounds because um you know at the end of the day we're not here investing in a venture capital like capacity. We're not you know giving out a a ton of money to start to solve like world hunger or something large like this. But you can still use this time to build a project that addresses some sort of a problem.

The easiest way, the most commercially viable way is to build a product that addresses an untapped market. So, a bunch of people are doing something, they're doing it inefficiently, or they're not doing something at all, and you want to build a product to help make that easier for everyone. These are always a great fit. Often, you can do some really good stuff with this commercially. You know, you can build a product, make lots of money, maybe you can launch a to token, whatever.

There's a bunch of things where you can sort of launch a career. These are always a natural great fit. If you have an idea for this, don't sleep on it because someone else will figure it out for sure. You might also just want to solve a technical problem. Maybe you, you know, challenged your friend said, "I bet I could do this on chain."

And they said, "No, you can't because that's impossible." Or you just want to see if you can get a more efficient algorithm or a better, you know, trading algorithm than say 1 in or something like this. This is also worth investigating and worth trying to hack. Small um improvements make a big difference in a lot of cases and often what you'll find is that small improvements lead to large improvements and you'll really make someone's lives easier even if it's not a direct sort of commercially viable product. So you might build an SDK that integrates various tools or various chains including Zirket onto various things.

And while you know that's not necessarily going to make you rich, you're going to make a lot of people's lives very interesting and easier and your reputation will grow which is also good. And that brings me to the last possible challenge you could be here for. If you have none of those ideas, you're here because you want to improve yourself. You might just want to pick up a new skill. Whether that's learning circum for zero knowledge proofs, whether that's perfecting your solidity, whether that's trying to fuzz something or formally verify something, you're here to learn and experience what it means to build a solution of one of these kinds.

And so maybe your target audience is only you. Maybe the only thing you're trying to do is just convince yourself that actually I am a good fit for this ecosystem or I can be a product designer or I can be whatever role I want to be. And that's fine. At the end of the day, you should try to solve something though and you should figure out what you want to solve. My bullet point for what a good project should be at any of these hackathons, no matter what I see, are the ones I think about days or weeks or months later, right?

So, the projects that come here and they say I did something because I could. I mean, those are really, you know, interesting in the moment, but the ones that last over time are the ones I want to give a lot of prizes to. Now, that doesn't mean you should be optimizing for me remembering is the mic not working? I'm Is anyone else suffering from the mic issue? It's really bad.

Hello. Testing. Testing. Is that better? Worse.

I don't know how to fix this. I can also just try to yell more. Okay, I will just yell really loud and the mic will suffer. Is the mic Can you hear me from back there?

The speakers are not good. All right. Um, I'll just talk really loud then for now and we'll just get through this as best we can. And if you're online and all of a sudden the volume just went up. I am so sorry.

Uh, so anyways, the point is build a project that someone remembers for a long time. And you know, if it's a really great one, everyone in this room is going to remember it, right? One in spawn at a thing like this and everyone knows who they are now. Uh, and that's really great, but not everyone's going to build a project that great. But if you build a project that you're really proud about and you're really thinking about the next two weeks or the next two months or the next two years, that's also really good.

Right? If you're practicing your solidity, take what you learned here and always build on it. You think about it and say, "Okay, I solved it that way using some ERC standard. Now I can solve it another way because I've evolved, I've learned, and think about this and always keep thinking about this. And if you think this project will live beyond the next 36 hours, it's worth solving or doing.

But with all of that in mind, don't overengineer." here. And it does sound like the mic is better. Is the mic better now? No.

Yeah. Okay. I'm hear I'm see. Okay. Uh the next thing you should do is don't overengineer it.

So all of what I said was really I think you know general and this is also somewhat general but you're going to hear a lot of buzzwords at any of these events like oh AI is really hot or you know in this case blockchain's really hot. Uh and I encourage you to use both of those technologies when they're appropriate and when they're useful but don't use them just for the sake of trying to say you use them in your project. They should have a real world application. If you have an AI that can be replaced by a regular expression, use the regular expression. It's probably better.

You don't need to train it. You don't need to, you know, do weird things. Now, you might have a harder time raising with that situation because, you know, you're not using the buzzwords all the investment people care about, but you'll find actually your solution will be able to grow and to solve its problem a lot more efficiently. And at the end of the day, you won't have to, you know, scrambling for a justification as to why you do something. In this case, of course, we're expecting to see a lot of web 3 blockchain based applications.

So really think about why that blockchain is more valuable than just a database or are you going B2B and signing a contract with someone say identify who you don't trust in your problem solution and figure out you know how the blockchain helps you overcome this beyond that listen to people I am giving you one opinion that I think is valid um other people will give you different opinions on what what they think is valid uh and not all of them are valid some people will disagree with what I am saying people will disagree with each other but a lot of times they will give you hints as to what problem they're trying to solve that's related or how you could help them even if you didn't think you could. So listen to everyone's ideas, but use your selective judgment to incorporate the actual feedback to do your own thing at the end of the day, right? Maybe they've misunderstood what you said. Maybe, you know, they want you to do something else. Maybe they're just trying to take advantage of you.

You don't want any of these situations, but oftentimes you will get hints and you will get improvements if you talk to people and you get collaborators. And honestly, most things take a village. You know, you can't do things on your own. So listen, but you know, be selective in what you do. Um, you're going to be at a hackathon, too.

So, you only have, you know, three days tops, right? It's less than that now. We're I don't know when the hacking officially starts, but we started this process. You probably started thinking about your ideas. Focus on making a single use case really, really well.

Don't overengineer that solution and get that thing done and working. So, you can show someone and you can pitch someone at the end of this event because, you know, if you want to win a prize, you're going to have to do that. But even if you don't, if you want to keep thinking about it two months from now, you have to figure out what did you solve, right? And you have to remember what you solved. And then of course, I'm here at Zirket.

It's a circuit workshop. The great projects are built on circuit. So build on circuit. Why? Well, we're a fast blockchain on our test net.

We're also cheap and free. We have faucets. I'll talk about that. Two second blocks, cheap transactions, all of that. We're EVM compatible.

Uh with our ZK EVM, we put in EIP7702. So there's, you know, all full EVM compliance there. Go try it. It'll be just as easy as Ethereum except faster and cheaper. And of course, we have unique features.

Uh we actually have an AR in our sequencer so that we can prevent hacks on our network. This is unique to Zirket. No one else is doing this. And we really think that's valuable. So if you hack together a DeFi protocol and you accidentally acrew a billion dollars over this next couple of days and you don't know how to secure that because an audit takes two weeks to complete, put it on Zirket and we'll help protect you with that.

Of course, then you should do all the audits and do all of that anyways. But Zirk's got this unique features and it's fast and cheap. And of course, we have prizes. I haven't left out the prizes and we'll talk about that very, very soon. So, those are great projects and those are my general purpose tips.

Let's get into what it means to build this actually in Zirket in practice. In addition to anything I'm going to present to you here, there is a recorded de uh demo of how to actually connect to the network and install your first Solidity app and build with VH and other common tools that will be linked to in the prize guide on ETH global. So please also check that out because that will probably do it in a more um slow paced and fine grain manner. So first where do you want to start? Check out our documentation.

Our documentation describes everything from our RPC endpoint that you need to connect. Should be the only thing you really need to change if you're familiar with building on uh Ethereum. But it'll also tell you about other things. Our various networks. We have a test net.

We have a a mainet. Our current test net is called the Garfield test net. So if you see anything with a legacy test net, you can ignore that. It doesn't operate anymore. Uh unless you have funds there and you can get it back.

talk to me about how to do that if you're interested. Otherwise, check the docs. It'll also tell you about our unique features like this AI based security where you can try to figure out what we do differently and uh what makes us unique. Also, a lot of stuff for research. If you see any of the research there that you want to improve or you want to challenge, come talk to me about that.

Happy to talk. Once you get the documentation understood and you've sort of figured out that this is a place you want to build on, uh there's quick start situations um for your project and it's essentially change the RPC node. As I said, make sure your chain ID is the appropriate one for the test net or the mainet and then you know figure out what the chain ID is based on the docs which are here and get to it. That's basically it. We should be compatible with all the major tooling hard foundry and all of that.

Um we've tested it all. It works. If anything doesn't happen, come to our booth and we're happy to give you tech support for that. Um but it should be that simple. Uh we have all of this stuff for um both mainet and our Garfield test net.

Just check the URLs. We are a full-fledged block um blockchain and that means we have a block explorer. Ours is custom. We didn't go with etherscan for a couple of reasons. One of that is uh the ability to show when people when our AI does something uh regarding transactions that are hacks.

Others are, you know, just to be able to verify code in our own way and show various things that maybe yet haven't been deployed. But we have our own. It should look and feel like one that you're familiar with, but uh it's going to be a little bit better. Check it out.

And of course, we have a bridge if you want to bridge anything on. Um, we have a UI that supports multiple ones. It'll actually pick from thirdparty bridges as well, so you can take on funds from the cheapest possible source. Uh, and it'll, you know, preund or sorry, to pre-list some assets that you can transfer with ease. Uh, and if none of that is interesting to you or you want to do something really advanced, the documentation will also tell you how to make crosschain calls um, using sort of the smart contracts on chain and ignoring the bridge UI entirely.

Either way, check it out, play around with it. Again, any feedback welcome at any point. And then of course if you're building on a faucet or sorry on a test net, you probably want some Solia ETH to get started or some Zirket Garfield ETH to get started. Um we partner with ETH Global to provide this to you with their uh their um hacker pack. So you can go into the ETH global website, mint that go check out the faucets and we're listed there.

You get up to an ETH a day. If you also really need more than that, come check us out at the booth. We'll see what we can do. Um but this should be free and so you should have everything you need to get started. If you also want to deploy on mainet for any of the prizes, you're absolutely happy to do that, but uh you know, might cost you a little bit.

Not a lot, just a little bit. Okay, I feel like that was going fast even with the mic hiccup. Nonetheless, we're here at the prizes. So, I'll talk to you about the prizes and I'll have lots of time for questions. So, prize requirements.

This is the boring bor boilerplate one, but I want to make sure that no one loses a prize if uh they're eligible for one and they actually want to submit for one. And the first project uh first prize requirement is that projects uh submit a GitHub repo full of all the important stuff and when appropriate submit contracts to be verified on the block explorer that was linked earlier uh so that we can verify the source code that it actually matches. So essentially what we want to see in any case is a readme. It should say what you did, why you chose Zirket, uh what the team is and what you guys did. So tell me a little bit about yourselves, you know, doesn't have to be a full CV.

Just want to know what uh your backgrounds are. uh instructions for running and testing it. As a judge for this bound or this prize, I really want to be able to test it and see that it works for myself in almost every case. And I'll tell you what case doesn't apply in just a second. And if you have, you know, a video or a pitch or a slide deck or something like this, always happy to see that too.

I understand in three days it might not be possible to get that part done, but uh you know, can be done. Either way, you can do it on either of our networks, our test net, or our mainet and get this to work. We have three prizes. I'm sorry. Three prizes uh this hackathon.

Um we have a best project. So this is a very broad category. I'll explain in a second. We have a best use of account abstraction. We support 7702.

I want to see some uh clever uses of primitives there or otherwise uh integrations with our chain and account abstraction. And then we have best app idea which I think is the most interesting one and I'm really excited to tell you about in two slides. But first best project. Best project is a very broad category. Okay, anyone can submit any functional c um hackathon project to this as long as it uses circuit in some way.

So it should be deployed on circuit or should read data from circuit or something like this. Uh and we need to see something that works. It doesn't have to you know solve everything obviously you only have a couple of days but some use cases should be well defined and the ones that are missing you know should be understood and clearly stated as this will come later or this is a you know future work or something like this. Um, new ideas are generally better than if you just improve incrementally on something. But if you take something from sort of like, you know, a one out of 10 type product and you make it an eight out of 10 or something like this where all of a sudden it's exciting, we're going to consider that too, right?

So, you don't always have to be super creative as long as you can make some improvements. And if you can do this and you submit to this prize, one person or one team rather will go home with $3500. The next one um is account abstraction. So EIP7702 came live on Pectra on on Ethereum in May, April or May, something like this earlier this year for sure. And uh we we were there we we also uh support this um EIP and so we have now um EIP 7702 based account abstraction.

So I want to see some primitives for doing this. I know a lot of wallet teams are working really hard to get their own pay master set up and to get you know various integrations done. They may or may not have uh integrated with circuit at this point, but we want to see you people build something with this 7702 on circuit. Now, that might mean a little bit of a challenge. You may have to use command line tools with Foundry or something else to get those 7702 primitives to work.

But would really like to see what you can do differently because at the end of the day, I also don't want, you know, the only people using 772 primitives to be, you know, two or three top wallets. I want to see more and I want to encourage this. So, if you submit with a good idea here, the best team will go home with $2,000. Finally, the one I think that's the most interesting. Three people, three teams will win, sorry, $1,500.

And uh there's first, second, and third, but it's maybe just an ordering. The prize value doesn't really matter. Um but here, we just want an app idea. I actually don't care about functional code. If you have functional code, amazing.

That's great, too. I won't say no to that. But we're looking for an app idea that's really, really, really well thought out. So, I want you to sit down, think about what you want to bring onchain to circuit, and say, "Okay, this is what I want to do. This is my target audience.

This is what I need to do to complete it. These are the the components I need to build. This is where the blockchain plays a part. This is where Zirket plays a part. This is where it all comes together.

And now if you give me more money or someone else gives me more money or at least more time, I can go build this out and I'll have this really killer app that all of a sudden, you know, will be the talk of the town of the next ECC. I think that's going to be really exciting. This means you don't need code here. It would be great to have, you know, um the other documents that were maybe more optional in other cases. So, what did you solve?

How are you solving it? Who's your targeted audience? Um you know, if this is sort of like going to be something you want to pitch to investors, you know, think about it like that. Build out those materials. That might be a bit of a challenge.

I don't know how to do that very well to be honest. Uh but anything that could convince us that you've thought of this idea, it's a good use case and that there will be uh other people interested in using this. So in this case, maybe the only, you know, people who don't want to do this is just people who are trying to practice, but even then, if you have a great idea, you might get somewhere with this. Now, if you do this or any of these, Zirket might also do a a bigger grants program later in the year. And so maybe you can roll this into your application for a grants with us later down the year and we can get you off the ground, but that's not public, so I'm not going to talk too much about that.

Hit me up on Twitter later for that. Anyways, I think that's it. Uh, so if you do have any questions, feel free to email me. Check out the docs. There's a Discord link somewhere in there.

Go check Discord. We're going to have people responding to Discord for technical questions. I also have a booth just outside to the left. Go ask me or any engineers or anyone else who's there for help. We're happy to help you through this.

And otherwise, hope to see you at the judging ceremony where you all become finalists building on circuit. I guess I have time for questions. So questions.

So if I go for the idea part, uh so problem solving part, a pitch part and maybe a mockup UI front end.

Mockup of UI is great. Um other things that might be helpful are like system architect diagram. So you have a database over here. You have a blockchain here. what data and a high level needs to go in between.

something that really con convinces me that you know if I said okay now you have two months to do this not two days you know can you get a PC in that amount of time set up and I think in order to do that you need to have a rough understanding of where the actual data will come and go um in addition to you know a well understood market fit and you know UI

okay thank you

you mentioned that you are kind of more technical person right

so do you care about the complexity or like greatness of the idea or more of a technical architecture. So for instance, I pick some small projects but it will be like really technically advanced in all the architectural UML diagrams or everything like this. So what what's most important for you?

So so the question here I think is is it technical complexity or usability that's going to win? It's more like a greatness of the ideas that like maybe life changing things like something.

Uh it's a hard question to a to ask or to to answer really because uh for the ideas one it's probably going to be you know something that people many people are very interested in using. Now that might come from a very small technical change but it may also mean solving something brand new that no one's thought about. So in that case I would say it's probably not going to be a technical but it could be. I'm not going to rule it out. I'm never going to rule it out here.

For the other ones, I would bet more technical sophistication is going to impress the judges more. Now, that may not strictly be true. You come, you know, with a very simple smart contract and you have a killer app that, you know, just like, I don't know, Cryp CryptoKitties 2 and it's better in in whatever way. And that's not like very advanced technically, but it works. It's fun, whatever, that's going to work, too.

So, the short answer is I don't know. Um, but I will not rule out like very small technical changes. If it overcomes a problem that you can convince us is real, right? So, if you just tell me it's only 10 codes and you're the only one having that problem, I'm going to have a hard time. But if you can tell me everyone has this problem and these 10 lines of code will solve it for them, then maybe that's really really valuable and, you know, that's going to win.

So, I don't know. But, you know, lean into your strengths.

Yeah. Thank you. Uh uh you said you mentioned you use ZK UM right?

Uh which one?

So currently we're a ZK EVM. So we have a Halo 2 based proving system. In the future we are going to go towards something that's a ZKM but I'm not telling you which vendors we're going to use for that just yet. But uh explore it use cases with it and you know just for now try stuff on our mainet network or test net that use these um Halo 2 based provers.

Okay. Uh second question is about the AI.

Mhm.

Yes. You mentioned like is uh the AI only apply to like a filters scam transactions right?

Yep. Yeah. So, so the AI and our sequencer on the on u both our mainet and test net looks for sorry looks for smart contract exploits and other um you know scam and fishing attacks on these networks and attempts to remove these from the network. It's quite effective at this you know stop stopping 99.999% of all exploits that we've seen and back tested it on um which means we don't want any hacks on our network at all.

That's the goal.

Any more questions? Okay, let's follow a question about that AI filter.

Sure.

If I can really like uh perform an attack like bypass the AI filter,

would that mean a bonus?

Uh I don't know if that's a bonus, but we definitely be very interested in it. Uh it might depend on the sophistication of the attack. Uh I don't know. If you can get one, buy it. Let me know and uh I'll decide what we do in terms of reward for that.

Well, good luck. And please don't steal real funds. Like, like if you do this on mainet, please do not attempt to steal anyone's funds. I feel like I have to say that. Do not do

Sorry. Push some honey pots as you're saying. That's not a bad idea, actually. Okay. Okay.

All right. So, any other questions? I'll just give the room back so people can chill and you know, I'm at the booth. Happy to chat and good luck. [Music]