Blockchains Are Still in Beta. My Experience After Winning a Polygon Hackathon

The first time I heard about crypto was in 2017, during the first Bitcoin bull-run. I was still very young, and didn’t have any personal money to buy some coins.

Instead, I looked at the behind-the-scenes. I started to understand how blockchain works. Why did the seem so revolutionary to others? How Bitcoin was distributing its blockchain? Is it like torrent, but for… finance? Many questions drove my curiosity, and they never stopped.

Even today, 5 years later, I’m still exploring and experimenting with new ideas on top of blockchains. Especially in the crypto world, when you think you have seen everything, a day later some new technology comes out of the bushes.

I’m now a DAO (it always feels weird to use these new words) contributor. I’ve participated in multiple hackathons for the Traxa.io project. The latest one was on the Polygon (MATIC) chain.

The hackathon

It was the “Road To Web 3” hackathon presented by ETHGlobal. The goal was to build any type of decentralized app on top of Polygon.

I came up with an idea for the project: building a decentralized map of markers. Essentially, every point on the map is an NFT on Polygon, self-minted by the user. The NFT contains its…