SALT at ETHDenver 2019

As SALT has developed the technology necessary to support our lending business, we have opted to build a lot of our supporting services in house. As you scoff at why we wouldn’t just buy something off the shelf, remember how new the blockchain ecosystem is relative to other industries. We like to think we’re rational and always properly weigh our buy vs build options. After exploring the options, and in some cases buying them (much to our dismay), we’ve had to rely primarily on our talented dev team to build the systems, services and applications necessary to run our business.

Through many conversations with other blockchain companies, we have come to understand that some of these services would be valuable to helping build their business. Our first effort at separating a service and making it available to the public was a blockchain address and transaction monitoring service called Meerkat. You know, because Meerkats are always on alert.

The service allows anyone to subscribe (and unsubscribe) to specific Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum (plus all ERC-20) blockchain addresses and transactions. Once you subscribe to a given address (or multiple addresses), you’re notified via your provided callback URL of transactions in or out of the address you’re watching. Subsequently, you can subscribe to a transaction so that you can be notified of its status updates (detected, mined, confirmed, etc).

To put this effort to the test, we chose to offer a $5000 prize at the 2019 ETHDenver Buidlathon (hackathon) for the best use of the Meerkat service.

There were some really creative submissions and we’re grateful that teams thought something we’d built could be useful to their project.

Ultimately, we picked Charity Watchdog as the winner because it supports the open and transparent ideals inherent to cryptocurrency. Their idea gives users the power and insight to choose whether or not to support a particular charitable organization. This is cryptocurrency at its finest. We hope Charity Watchdog continues their endeavor to bring transparency to charity spending. Below are some additional details about their project and a few other teams we want to give a shoutout to for creatively using Meerkat to BUIDL their project.

Thank you to each team for all of the creativity, hours and effort you put into leveraging Meerkat for your projects. We’ll see you all next year! In the meantime, keep watching via www.meerkat.watch.

Director of Product Experience Rob Odell answers buidler/hacker questions at the SALT table at ETHDenver.

SALT’S CHOSEN WINNER:

Project: Charity Watchdog

Team: Artem Kuznetsov, Peter Gao

Description: Charities are traditionally opaque with their spendings, with donors not knowing exactly where their money is being spent.

With Charity Watchdog, we bring accountability and transparency to charity spends by watching the transactions of charity wallets, and prompting the charities to provide receipt or some form of documentation as to where the money was spent within a grace period.

Any charity that is on the platform and does not provide proof of fund usage will be flagged for donor review. This gives users insight into charity spending and they can choose whether or not to support the charity based on its spending, proof of usage, or lack thereof. This helps put donors more in control.

How they used the Meerkat API: Charity Watchdog used Meerkat to watch and update their app as transactions were sent to various charities. It was the key component in being able to notify users in the app that a charity has spent funds. It’s then the charities’ responsibility to add the supporting evidence for transparency.

OTHER NOTABLE PROJECTS:

Project: Shares

Team: Mark Evans Josh Robinson

Description: Shares seeks to demystify the stock issuance process for startups by facilitating the creation and issuance of uncertificated shares in the form of ERC-20 tokens. You don’t need paper certificates, a spreadsheet, or a lawyer. Just five minutes and a wallet address!

The project used IPFS for hosting the dApp portion of Shares, which is responsible for creating an ERC-721 token (one per company) that represents ownership of their domain on DwNS (Decentralized Web Naming System) and provides an easy-to-remember URL (ex. acme.shares.dwns.io). Uncertificated shares are subsequently minted through an ERC-20 contract and are sent to a user-designated Ethereum address. The view layer for the dApp was made using VueJS. For the web app portion, they used NodeJS and Express and connected to the Twilio and Meerkat APIs.

How they used the Meerkat API: Shares combined Twilio and Meerkat to notify users via text message when shares were moved from a contract. The team passed the phone number into the callback URL so that any transaction alerts on the security contract would get sent via text message — an instant way to alert users of activity.

Project: ETH Dev Tools

Team: Aidan Musnitzky, Billy Rennekamp, Theo Ephraim

Description: ETH Dev tools is a chrome developer tools extension that acts like a swiss-army knife for dApp developers and curious users. The extension appears in a chrome inspector tab and comes with various modules that introspect the current dApp you’re using. The plugin is easily extensible for additional tools but already comes with four fully functional modules:

Logs — A network inspector that shows logs and details of all network interactions between your dApp and your RPC endpoint via the web3.js provider including request timing, parameter inputs and return values.

ABI Explorer — This section keeps a list of all contracts the dApp has loaded and scaffolds boilerplate forms based on the ABIs of those contracts. The auto-generated UI gives you access to all contract methods ready to be queried with calls and sends — this is similar to what’s possible with Remix or a verified contract on Etherscan, but without the context switching or compilation.

GraphQL Explorers — A GraphQL explorer that comes pre-populated with Infura’s EthQL endpoints as well as all of the most popular The Graph subgraphs including Uniswap, ENS, Dharma and others. These endpoints come with sample queries ready to ping all the most relevant and highly available content. There’s also the option to add a custom endpoint for easy access to any other available datasets.

Watcher — A tool for monitoring activity on any wallet address or contract. This service is provided by a websocket proxy listening for webhooks from SALT’s Meerkat. It’s easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to this data with a simple UI and websocket support from an Heroku instance.

How they used the Meerkat API: The ETH Dev Tools team creatively added Meerkat to their ETH dev tools chrome extension to more easily help dApp developers subscribe (or unsubscribe) to an address or a transaction right from their browser. For dApp developers, this helps speed up the troubleshooting process when trying to monitor and notify users of address activity.

Project: Balanced Crypto Portfolios with built-in investment capabilities automation

Team: Anibal Catalan, Leonardo Lower, Manuel Garcia

Description: Automated balanced portfolios hedged against DAI with investment capabilities to get returns from loans repayments from AAVE.

Hedge your crypto portfolio and lower overall risk due to volatility and correlation behavior by moving out part of it into a stable asset: MakerDAO DAI.

Build a balanced portfolio, they will rebalance it for you.

Don’t stop there, invest some DAI into a fund which will invest by funding loans in EthLend based on clear rules (eg.: amount, duration, MPR, LTV, etc).

Get returns from the loans repayments.

We provide you with bots and brokers that will take care of rebalancing and investing on the right loans.

How they used the Meerkat API: This team used Meerkat to subscribe and monitor wallet activity. This is fundamentally important for projects in the #DeFi, or decentralized finance, space as the main pillars of this movement are accessibility, financial inclusion and transparency. Meerkat makes it possible for users to be notified of all payout and rebalancing activity.

Project: Battle Bombers

Team: Franky Aguilar, Mark Pereira, Drew Harding

Description: Taking the mobile crypto experience to where it should be.

The makers behind Battle Bombers are taking the concept of mobile-first crypto applications to users and developers. Battle Bombers uses an architecture that accesses the full native extensions in mobile ecosystems, which really stretches the capabilities of cryptocurrency on mobile. This application shows that app developers and designers will be able to fully express their creative abilities on mobile platforms without restriction.

How they used the Meerkat API: This team was able to use Meerkat to provide their users of push notifications with an alert regarding activity on specific addresses associated with the games they were playing on their phones. Once alerted of activity on an address, Battle Bombers sends that alert to the user in the form of a push notification.

Project: ETHBackpack

Team: Josh Forman, Peter Hendrick, Ron Stoner, Sean Martin

Description: Live, on main-net chain, IT certifications and degrees. Show you have certificates such as CCNA, AWS Certificate, Certified Bitcoin Professional with an ETH Wallet address.

ETHBackpack can allow companies that distribute professional certificates on the Ethereum blockchain. Contract deployed on main net.

Individuals seeking employment or contract work can show their credentials in a public, verifiable way. Employers seeking to hire professionals could potentially search for applicants that have the certifications they’re looking for and verify such certifications.

How they used the Meerkat API: This team used Meerkat to notify users and watchers of a specific address that it had been updated with a new certification or degree.

SALT is Looking Forward to Meeting You at EthDenver 2019!

SALT is proud to sponsor and participate in EthDenver 2019. Not only is the conference right here in our own backyard, but it’s one of the largest crypto gatherings in the world. It’s inspiring to see creators, developers, and crypto enthusiasts come together to hack and build something great — EthDenver creates an opportunity for that.

We know that some of the brightest people from across the globe — including Andreas Antonopoulos — will attend this year’s event and we’re excited to meet you all, especially those of you who we think could be excellent additions to the SALT team.

Speaking of the team, we’re excited to have multiple representatives from SALT partake in everything from speaking to judging to hacking. SALT’s co-founder and Chief Knowledge Officer Caleb Slade will be sharing his perspective and experience in the crypto lending industry on a panel titled, “Banking without Banks: Loans on the Blockchain.” He’ll also be serving as one of the judges for EthDenver’s Open track. Additionally, members of SALT’s developer team will have a strong presence at this year’s event. While some of them will be participating in the #BUIDLATHON, others will be judging SALT’s bounty project (stay tuned for details!).

Have we convinced you to join us? Maybe we have, maybe we haven’t — we’ll be there Ether way!

To learn more about SALT, visit saltlending.com, or to check out our newest product launch, visit www.meerkat.watch. If you have questions or would like to connect before, during, or after the event, shoot us an email at [email protected]

Highlights from Davos 2019

The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) concluded this past Friday in Davos, Switzerland. Attendees included top business leaders, political figureheads, and a variety of well-known celebrities with topics ranging from international trade, shifts in regulation, and emerging technologies. Throughout the week, participants discussed technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain– SALT was there to focus on the latter. Here are some of the key blockchain-related takeaways from our week in Davos:

The blockchain fluff is largely gone — 2018 saw cryptocurrencies drop from a total market cap of $618.1 billion to $125.6 billion.* There were many projects built on the hype of 2017 and the crypto attendance at WEF last year was quite high. The “correction” has narrowed the list of blockchain companies involved, with only the more reputable projects in attendance.

Governments focused on blockchain technology — Various governments have been exploring ways to jump into blockchain technology and we are starting to hear some exciting announcements. One such announcement came from Bermuda, where Premier David Burt stated, “I’m proud to say that next week we’ll be making an announcement revealing that a bank will be set up in the country that will start accepting crypto and blockchain companies.”

Focus on the broad application of blockchain — It wasn’t all about crypto. In fact, a majority of the conversations focused on other applications such as healthcare, supply chain, and digital identities. Blockchain has the ability to provide an immutable, single source of truth — certainly an important attribute for industries dealing with sensitive data.

Blockchain companies are seeking regulation — We (blockchain companies) are not looking for loopholes in regulation or jurisdictions with thin legislation — it’s quite the opposite. We know that in order to grow as an industry and play a key role in society at large, responsible regulation is paramount. Throughout the week, SALT met with many government officials and economic organizations to help drive that conversation forward.

There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the last couple years in our space and we expect some meaningful announcements to be made in 2019. We believe blockchain technology is here to stay and look forward to discussing its progress at Davos 2020.

*Data pulled from coinmarketcap.com

Blockchain: The Path Forward

What began just over 10 months ago as high-level conversations around blockchain technology culminated this week with what was arguably the world’s most significant blockchain conference. Hosted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and designed for regulators and industry participants, the OECD Blockchain Policy Forum was the most important discussion around the deployment of blockchain in dozens of industries to date. The OECD is an intergovernmental economic organization committed to democracy and developing best practices across domestic and international policy that lead to improved social, economic, and environmental health on a global scale. As a premier sponsor for the event, SALT is proud to say that our Co-Founder and Director of Global Strategy, Benjamin Yablon, has not only served as Special Advisor to the OECD for the past year, but also that he had the opportunity to represent SALT this week as a company leading the global conversation around blockchain. According to Ben, the forum led to three major positive outcomes, all of which illustrate the promise of blockchain and the international community’s ability to work together to fulfill that promise:

Broad-based solutions and guiding principles: there are many broad-based solutions and programs that have been put forward by various entities, any one of which are valid and would be really helpful for creating greater alignment among industry leaders. Holding theBlockchain Policy Forum at the OECD has helped drive these ideas forward. It’s allowed a broad group of international industry participants and regulators to review and discuss proposed solutions and guiding principles.
Principles-based policy discussions: the event fostered discussions and achieved consensus that in order to continue ascending with blockchain tech, we need to hold principles-based policy discussions rather than regulation-based policy discussions. This makes it far easier to identify, agree upon, and discuss key issues, allowing us to address them almost immediately. For example, the majority of participants agreed money laundering and terror finance are top issues, and there’s been significant movement on these fronts in the past two days.
Recognition of the true potential of blockchain tech: a broader set of people have come to recognize that assets of all kinds are moving onto the blockchain; that representations of nearly everything of value will exist on blockchains; and that the power of this level of recognition crosses far beyond financial services. It also impacts areas such as supply chains, immigration, and healthcare. All of these conversations interoperate, and what were not previously considered financial instruments are going to begin to behave as such.

“The sheer fact that three heads of state attended the forum speaks to the fact that a broader audience is recognizing the value of blockchain technology,” said Benjamin Yablon. “This level of international participation is unheard of in this emerging space and I’m grateful to both José Ángel Gurría Treviño, Secretary-General of the OECD, and Greg Medcraft, Director of the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs of the OECD, for allowing me to contribute in an advisory capacity with a platform starting to address the OECD directorate in such a direct way. Our collaborative work is what made this Forum happen.” Ben is looking forward to continuing to serve as an advisor to the OECD, helping to shape the global narrative around blockchain, and execute on many of the ideas and proposals that came out of this week’s Forum. “There’s more interest and excitement around this topic than you can imagine, and the

OECD was the perfect conveyer to have this type of discussion, primarily because the global ecosystem values the OECD as a neutral standard setting body that is uniquely positioned to bring our voices together for the greater good — an environment that others just can’t offer,” he said. As Ben noted in his panel discussion earlier this week, achieving mass adoption of blockchain technology and digital financial assets will require the development of a taxonomy — an agreed-upon set of terms and definitions that will enable us to speak about these concepts in way that drives understanding and alignment among industry and governmental leaders. “Once we have a true taxonomy, principles-based regulatory frameworks will to start to exist,” Ben noted. It’s clear from this week’s forum that a lot of progress has been made in the past couple of days, but it’s even more evident that there’s still a great deal of work to be done. It will take years to bring this process to maturity, but as long as we have solid leaders in place to guide discussions, propose solutions, and make decisions, we can feel confident that we’re heading in the right direction.

OECD Blockchain Policy Forum: Maximizing the Potential of Blockchain will require LEADERSHIP

“The opportunities of the long-term developments of blockchain far outweigh its risks.”

These are the words with which Prime Minister of the Republic of Mauritius Pravind Kumar Jugnauth kicked off the OECD Blockchain Policy Forum. Not only did these words set the stage for the event, but they reflect the very sentiment of it — it’s not about whether we should take blockchain to the next level, but how we should go about doing so. Leadership was the recurring theme throughout the day’s discussions and, more specifically, how we as leaders have a responsibility to leverage blockchain technology in ways that benefit the greater good.

As Editor of The Economist and today’s emcee, Anne McElvoy, so elegantly put it, “At first we thought this technology was the engine of security, then it was thought to be the engine of trust — and it is all that — but I think of it as the engine of innovation.” While blockchain has changed the way we think about security and trust via trustless transactions, it now calls on us to continuously develop new ways to apply the technology to our everyday lives. How can we leverage blockchain technology to positively impact our societies and economies? How can we continue pushing the limits of innovation when there are still so many variables? What steps can we take as an international community to drive universal alignment and understanding as it relates to blockchain tech? Collaborative leaders — people committed to working together to effect change — will be paramount to pushing blockchain technology to its full potential.

As an advisor to the OECD for the past year, it was exciting to see SALT’s co-founder and Head of Global Strategy, Ben Yablon, foster discussion around these challenges during his panel, titled “Building a Global Policy Environment for Digital Financial Assets.” Of note, he touched on the need to develop a single lexicon as an initial step toward creating a framework around how we describe blockchain technology and digital financial assets. It’s an ongoing discussion, and I’m proud that Ben will continue to offer his leadership to the OECD on how to begin working through some of blockchain’s biggest roadblocks. While there were numerous panelists and speakers at the event, all with different expertise and perspectives, the underlying theme of all of them was the same — we must take it upon ourselves to ensure we are leveraging blockchain technology in the best ways and remaining open-minded as we think about the opportunity it creates for the world.

-Jennifer Nealson, SALT CMO

Recap: Australian Leadership Retreat 2018

SALT Lending attended the 2018 Australian Leadership Retreat, organized by the ADC Forum, in the Gold Coast of Australia. The four-day event hosted leaders from various fields including politics, academia, and financial services to discuss the current challenges facing the country. An ongoing shift in world
politics, along with advancements in technology, requires Australia to prepare for a new and uncertain future. Each session in the conference was followed by lengthy dialogue and welcomed thought-provoking questions. This was not a presentation on the solution, but rather an engaging discussion with a common goal in mind.

On the educational front, university leaders shared their thoughts on how best to prepare students for this new wave of technology, including areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. From designing new courses to exploring industry partnerships, educational innovation is of
utmost importance. A lack of proper schooling could leave students with misaligned skillsets as they begin their post-university career search. In addition to addressing formal educational programs, the city of Adelaide is planning to host a blockchain conference in early 2019 — one that is expected to be well attended.

The Australian Leadership Retreat 2018 in Gold Coast, Queensland
Despite being a relatively new technology, blockchain was met with receptivity and openness. Several panels were dedicated to blockchain-related topics, which were followed by many discussions filled with intrigue and support. There is a growing community of blockchain companies currently operating in Australia, providing a meaningful opportunity for the country to position itself as a leader in the space.

We at SALT Lending look forward to following the continued progress in Australia and thank the ADC Forum for an incredible event.

Disclaimer: Any opinions, statements, or views expressed in this video belong solely to the participants and do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or opinion of SALT Lending or any subsidiary entity.