Cryptozombies Live Event Recap

2022-05-03

Last Saturday we ran the first ever Cryptozombies Live Event!

An introduction

This was the first event we’ve organized that had an instructor-led interactive coding session. The new class-like format is part of our plan to expand Cryptozombies to cater to different learning styles, in addition to providing secondary benefits to students like the opportunity to network and collaborate with fellow blockchain enthusiasts.

The event itself was hosted on the Happen Space Online & Hybrid Event Platform, with the Happen team graciously helping us organize the event, and troubleshooting last minute technical issues… which always seem to crop up regardless of how much testing you do beforehand :)

The instructor for this event was Ed Zynda, a full-stack developer with over 10 years of industry experience who specializes in Web3 and blockchain technologies. He currently works as the lead blockchain engineer at Li.Finance.

With the introductions out of the way, lets do a quick recap of how the event turned out.

Let there be… video… please?!

We had a dozen people show up at the agreed time and place — in the Happen Space Cryptozombies space. A pretty good turn out for our first event, and just the right amount of people for an intimate classroom session.

Unfortunately, everyone had to wait a little while for us to sort out some technical issues with Ed’s video streaming setup before the live coding session could begin. Apologies to all the folks at home, we’ve updated our pre-flight checklist to make sure these issues don’t crop up next time!

Building a trust fund

The main objective of the live coding session was to show how easy it is to build and run a trust fund on top of Ethereum.

You need a good IDE to write and debug smart contracts, so Ed started off with a brief introduction to the Remix IDE.

Then Ed got cracking, showing us how to handle contract ownership, how to implement deposits and withdrawals from the fund, and explaining how Solidity events can be used to notify the DApp front-end about state changes on the blockchain.

Finally, Ed walked through the steps necessary to prevent one of the most common attacks that are used to exploit smart contracts — reentrancy attacks. A reentrancy attack can occur when a function in your smart contract makes an external call to an untrusted contract, and the untrusted contract makes a recursive call back into your smart contract in an attempt to drain funds.

Any questions?

After the coding session was over, Ed did a short Q&A session in the Cryptozombies space and fielded a few interesting questions from the attendees. And that’s a wrap!

What’s next?

If you attended the event we’d love to hear your feedback on what you liked, and what you think could be improved. You can leave your thoughts in our Telegram channel

Many thanks to Ed Zynda for sharing his extensive knowledge of smart contract development with the students. In his spare time, he runs a YouTube channel called “What The Func?” that focuses on blockchain development and related technologies, so go check it out while we plan the next Cryptozombies Live event!

We’ll be announcing more live events soon, keep an eye on our Announcements channel!