This past week was an incredible time at Berlin Blockchain Week with the Breadchain team! On May 25, 2024 we had our very own Breadchain Launch Event in Berlin at the Moos Space (with Vitalik in attendance) and competed in the ETH Berlin hackathon where we created a website to help track donations to ETH Evacuations during the live interview at the end of ETH Berlin. Here’s a summary of some of the things that happened.

Breadchain Launch Event

For the launch event we hosted it at the Moos Space and with the help of our friends at Citizen Wallet to onboard attendees to buy and use BREAD through the mobile application which already has BREAD integrated. If you’re a supporter of Breadchain then we highly recommend downloading the Citizen Wallet phone app and you can find more on how to use the app from one of our recorded community calls here.

The full event included:

1. a real hands on sourdough bread baking workshop led by Edible Alchemy, the bakery at Moos, in which the bread that was made was eaten later during dinner

2. onboarding onto Citizen Wallet for people including a faucet and the ability to purchase BREAD with cash or via Stripe to make purchases in the in-person market setup including food and books or through the marketplace on the app

3. presentations from Breadchain Cooperative members and associated projects building out technology for scaling solidarity with BREAD

4. a gift economy solidarity dinner at Moos with the Palestinian Hosting Society to wind it all down

The event was a success where all of the right people came to listen and show their support. This included a brief visit by Vitalik himself where he received some BREAD through our event faucet!

We had presentations from Joshua Davila about the overall state and strategy of Breadchain moving forward, Xavier Damman from Citizen Wallet, Tara Merk and Nick Houde on their writing on Solidarity Primitives with the Other Internet, videos from Symbiota Coop and Labor DAO, and a presentation from the Crypto Commons Association. While we tried to record video of the presentations, this was planned only a couple of weeks in advance so there wasn’t much prep. We will share video presentations on our YouTube channel if they come out well.

“Great turnout. Quality people. Good conversations. Intimate space. Positive energy.”

After the event there was a dinner with the Palestinian Hosting Society in which we were able to express our solidarity toward the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine. We shared the bread that was prepared the same morning with those who came for the dinner which helped remind us about the real human purpose for why we are building solidarity primitives as an alternative to the exploitation we see today.

ETH Berlin Hackathon

At the same time as our event was the ETH Berlin hackathon which we decided to take part in. Since our time was limited (an entire day was taken away for our launch event) we kept the scope small and created a website for ETH Evacuations to track donations in near real-time. It even tracks donations in BREAD. If you attended ETH Berlin and want to vote for our project, you can find it here.

The website was a success and shown during the ETH Evacuations interview where attendees were successfully making donations during the conversation via the QR code on display. In the span of the interview we were able to raise another $1k for the project. While we weren’t able to complete the full set of features we originally outlined due to time limitations, we hope to continue improving the site and decentralize it so that it can’t be censored.

The ETH Berlin hackathon was an incredible experience and we give huge props to the organizers for facilitating such an event so smoothly. We found ourselves very aligned with their advocacy for privacy and for allowing a space for us to do this work in a safe environment.

Later on we were also honored to have Vitalik mention Breadchain as a project he’s keeping an eye on 👀

So What Next?

There were plenty of learnings from the event for us that we hope to take away from it all. Here is a non-exhaustive list of our learnings and next steps:

• We are hoping to have our first governance vote for Breadchain in the coming month where your voting power will be based on your holdings of BREAD from the previous month so be sure to bake some BREAD

• There are a lot of people in the crypto space hungry for something different than the status quo

• It would have been nice to have more than two weeks to plan the event but it was still possible to be pulled off thanks to the relationships we’ve been able to build over the years

• Citizen Wallet is a great tool for onboarding new users and we can create faucets for events that smoothen the process (Vitalik got some BREAD!)

• Our roadmap shown during the event will be released soon

We also hope to continue on the website for ETH Evacuations. Here are some of the additions we hope to make, please reach out if you’re interested in helping us hack on it:

• Add more chains to track in the display

• Add buttons for sending donations from the UI with a connected wallet

• Integrate options for private donations

• Decentralize the stack for censorship resistance and posterity

• Make it part of the ETH Evacuations main site

Thank you again to everyone who made it out to support us in Berlin. If you want to support us financially then you can always bake BREAD through the crowdstaking application or donate to our Open Collective. If you want to help out in other ways then be sure to join our community calls every Wednesday at 9PM CET / 1PM EST in the cryptoleftists discord server.