East Meets West
Based on the success of ETHGlobal Tokyo, we were even more ambitious for our next venture which involved extending our reach beyond Japan by travelling further from our home base, sponsoring larger prizes, making improvements to our core product, and doing more creative giveaways than we’ve ever done before.
Company Updates
Our engineers have been working diligently to deliver a better user experience on MultiBaas, just in time for Devconnect and ETHGlobal Istanbul. Since the relaunch of MultiBaas, we’ve rolled out major upgrades which include:
- The introduction of webhooks
- A UI makeover
- Pricing changes with a free tier added
- Additional network support
- And much more!
More developments to come for MultiBaas. Stay tuned for a full update.
Web3 Events Galore
Devconnect Istanbul was the first Devconnect event we’ve all attended and it was nice to travel outside of the country once again. The weather was a good mix of sunny and rainy days, and we got to experience authentic Turkish cuisine and even take in a couple of sights. Our team spent a good amount of time at the coworking space at the International Conference Centre (ICC) which was organized by the Ethereum Foundation. It was a great place to network and get some work done in between events.
Some of the events our team attended included Avalanche House, ZK Accelerate, Solidity Summit, EVM Summit, Datapalooza, and Abstract Istanbul. The various organizers spanned the state of the Ethereum ecosystem, covering hot topics such as hardware acceleration for Zero-Knowledge Proofs, the rise of L2s and the creation of custom VMs, as well as the future of AI, DAOs, and NFTs. There were a great number of keynote speakers, and attending these events allowed us to expand our network even further.
Curvegrid’s Participation
ETHGlobal Istanbul took place from November 17-19, 2023 and it was our second time participating as a sponsor for ETHGlobal. There were 12 projects that competed for the Curvegrid prizes. We were pleased to award $5,000 USD total worth of prizes amongst the following 3 winners:
- Adventure Runner: Adventure Runner is a traditional runner and level-based game that uses MultiBaas Cloud Wallet to easily onboard non-web3 users.
- DirectHelp: DirectHelp’s on-chain dashboard easily automates the distribution of funds for disaster relief, powered by MultiBaas.
- PixelPals: PixelPals is a decentralized geolocation-based game where players can collect, battle, and trade pixel companions. Querying was made possible with MultiBaas integration.
Overall, we were thrilled to take part in ETHGlobal Istanbul. Congratulations to all of these outstanding projects, and thank you to the event organizers and everyone who tried out our software or came to say hi at our booth.
Winning Projects at ETHGlobal Istanbul
This hackathon was bigger than ever before and was a huge hit. With 90 countries, 48 workshops, 427 projects, and a massive prize pool worth $600,000 USD, we had a productive 36 hours to network, build, mentor, and judge. Our cofounder Jeff, who also participated as one of the main judges, chimed in on his experience:
“Amazing to see all of the innovation with L2s, ZKPs, and decentralized social. AI is firmly here to stay, with many of the hackers incorporating it either directly, or as a tool to build further and faster. It's always great judging diverse projects, going from looking at a mobile app one minute to deep technical ZK scaling code the next. It was impressive to see how many hackers were up early (or still up) first thing Sunday morning!
On the Curvegrid side, we got some great feedback from hackers building on our MultiBaas blockchain middleware. We even got a PR to upgrade some dependencies in one of our open source plugins mid-hack!”
There were 10 winning finalists determined by the ETHGlobal judging committee:
Check out this thread from the official ETHGlobal account for more information on all of the winning projects!
Overall Takeaways
Istanbul has been a fulfilling journey, and we’re glad to have been a part of this enriching experience. We brought a taste of Japan’s tech scene out west as we donned our signature red coveralls and repped our Maneki Neko (lucky cat) t-shirts, designed exclusively for this event. The swag we handed out was well-received as our merch and stickers ran out in minutes!
We also initiated a postcard service, where attendees could bring a handwritten postcard to our booth and we would stamp and mail them on their behalf. As of this writing, all of the postcards have been mailed and delivered!
Lastly, we introduced a Maneki Neko NFT stamp rally with our partners at Callback, a no-code NFT platform also based in Japan.. Attendees had the opportunity to collect a complete set of 4 lucky cats in red, blue, green, and pink – adorned with different symbolic meanings. This could be achieved by scanning QR codes distributed by our reps post-interaction. We used our MultiBaas Spreadsheets, a Google Sheets add-on that allows for easy read-write access to the blockchain, to develop a real-time leaderboard. The red Maneki Neko NFTs saw the most widespread distribution. Participants who collected all 4 Maneki Neko NFTs were airdropped a commemorative gold Maneki Neko NFT!
What’s Next for Curvegrid?
We’re excited to see where the future is headed for the Ethereum ecosystem and Web3. Our team is committed to building quality middleware solutions for enterprises as well as individual developers. Attending in-person conferences has allowed us to network with developers from all over the world to gain more insight into how we can support their projects. We’ve had an amazing run in 2023 and we’re working hard to deliver better, bigger, and faster solutions.
If you would like to get in touch with us, join our growing Discord community: https://discord.gg/5fvS6KGcFJ
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