📡 Fall 2023 Semester Projects
⌨️ New Member Dev Team
This team will spend the 1st half of the semester learning and completing an onboarding project. The main goal is to help members learn the fundamentals of blockchain (on a conceptual and technical level) and spark your specific interest in the field.
The 2nd half of the semester will be focused on making a project to submit to a hackathon, teams can be smaller (2-3) and they can choose any area of blockchain to pursue. Main goal of leads here will be to provide a general, but structured timeline for devs to adhere to.
🤔 Explorative Dev Team
Devs have the opportunity to uncover different areas in Web3. The team will work with a Web3 start-up, FreshCredit, which aims integrate blockchain with the credit market. We’ll engage in a group-oriented mentorship broken into 3 different modules, where group members are to work with professionals in areas of research, development, and operations and complete project-based deliverables. The collab opens the door to networking and the corporate world.
Along the way we'll reach out to and learn from various Web3 enthusiasts as well as explore the idea of building on the Metaverse. Being labeled explorative, there's room to experiment and pursue ideas. The motive is to discover where blockchain can be used in a real-world setting and gain hands-on experience in the Web3 space. Learn More
💻 Corporate Dev Team
For those looking for more structured/ resume builder projects, we will work with a corporate partner. There will be a formalized project with an end-of-semester deliverable & corporate mentor to help us along the way.
Benefits of a team like this is good mentorship and real-world experience. Partnerships are also good networking opportunities.
💰 Investment Research Team
This team is partnering with DormDAO to invest & manage a fund of 25 ETH (~$40,000 as of 8/20/23).
🗳️ Governance Research Team
This team is partnering with a16z to help manage the governance of their portfolio protocols. a16z is one of the best venture capital firms of all time and has $7.6 billion under management for their crypto fund alone.
We’ll be managing millions of dollars worth of governance tokens.
✍🏼 Deep Dive Research Team
This team will continue to write their newsletter “The Block Party: No Math Required”. They dive into fascinating stories & trends in the blockchain space using stories, memes, & simple words.
🙏🏼 Events & Partnerships Team
This team grows our off-campus reach by hopping on calls with companies, applying for funding, and hosting a podcast with industry leaders.
It grows our on-campus reach by writing our updates newsletter, meeting with UIUC administrators, & hosting community events.
We’ve helped 15+ members attend conferences in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Lisbon for free. We’ve hosted community events with C-Suite execs, investors, & founders. And we’ve hopped on 75+ calls.
Blockchain Big Brain Podcast: Link
IB Updates Newsletter: Link
Event Reflection Posts: Bitcoin OG Founder, Investor, C-Suite Exec
📡 Spring 2023 Semester Projects
🤝 Lending Hand Dev Team
This team built a microlending platform that focuses on providing small, interest free loans to entrepreneurs hoping to build/ develop small businesses. One-time loans allow borrowers to create sustainable long term incomes that can be repaid and used to fund a new initiative. Loans are crowdsourced through small contributions made by lenders. Since the application is decentralized, it lacks the numerous intermediaries and permissions required from a traditional microfinancing firm and presents a lower barrier to entry for underbanked communities.
The team finished around 90% of the project (frontend & backend) in only a few weeks. We have since sunset this project.
Figma: Link
GitHub: Link
Tech: Typescript, Solidity
🛡️ Security Dev Team
Over 3 billion dollars were stolen in the crypto industry in 2022. Mostly due to vulnerable smart contract code. Since you can protect real people and make a lot of money due to the high-demand, we spun up a team to learn about web3 security.
The team had a 3 step approach. First, they studied the Ethereum Yellow Paper & wrote an in-depth explainer post to build a fundamental understanding of how Ethereum works. Second, they practiced audits & studied attack vectors using Ethernaut. Finally, they did an in-house audit of the Lending Hand team’s code.
Throughout the semester, the team was passively mentored by the CEO of OtterSec.
Yellow Paper Deep Dive: Link
Lending Hand Audit✍🏼 Deep Dive Research Team
The deep dive team takes relevant news stories & puts them under a microscope to highlight an underlying idea. Then, they write an informative, entertaining newsletter post. Each member has full creative control over their post but must meet the team lead’s quality expectations.
In one semester, they wrote over 16 newsletters posts ranging from Jack Dorsey op-eds to blockchain health care use cases and DeFi trading tactics. They also gained over 40 subscribers to the newsletter.
Newsletter: Links
🔢 Data Research Team
The data team investigates interesting ideas, uses data to uncover patterns, and tells stories about those insights via visualizations.
This semester. they investigated layer 2 solutions and compared their characteristics.
Final Paper:
Layer 2 Breakdown (draft)💰 Investment Research Team
The investment research team studies DeFi companies and then writes investment memo’s or breakdown posts on their learnings.
This semester, they split into 2 teams. One team studied a metal decentralized exchange (DEX) — Mettalex. The other learned about a new and innovative automated market maker (AMM) — Velodrome Finance.
Mettalex DEX BreakdownVelodrome Finance Breakdown: Link
🙏🏼 Events & Partnerships Team
This team grows our off-campus reach by hopping on calls with companies, applying for funding, and hosting a podcast with industry leaders.
It grows our on-campus reach by writing our updates newsletter, meeting with UIUC administrators, & hosting community events.
We’ve helped 15+ members attend conferences in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Lisbon for free. We’ve hosted community events with C-Suite execs, investors, & founders. And we’ve hopped on 75+ calls.
Blockchain Big Brain Podcast: Link
IB Updates Newsletter: Link
Event Reflection Posts: Bitcoin OG Founder, Investor, C-Suite Exec
📡 Fall 2022 Semester Projects
🌐 Sap: Lending Protocol Dev Team
The SAP team worked on building an NFT collateralized lending platform. The team considered challenges other protocols faced and made variety of design decisions to create a safer platform for lenders. NFT prices move on a case by case basis, and thus can not be treated like typical collateral. So, the SAP platform is based on a bidding system where burrowers create listings with their ideal loans terms (parameters: loan duration, loan amount, collateral NFT, collateral valuation, collateral ratio, interest rate) and lenders can choose to fill those loans or make a counter offer.
The team finished 90% of the smart contract work and designed a front end. Next steps include building out a front end, figuring out liquidations, and rigorous testing.
Figma: Link
GitHub: Link
Tech: Solidity, Javascript
🛍️ Agora: Decentralized eBay Dev Team
We built Agora Marketplace, a decentralized peer-to-peer buying and selling platform that allows anyone from anywhere across the globe to use their crypto as a way to buy the products they need in their everyday life. In order to settle disputes on our platform, we also created a joint product, Agora Court, which is a decentralized arbitration protocol that any dApp can interface with to resolve conflicts on their own platforms.
We mainly focused on writing the Solana smart contracts using the Anchorlang library, completing a majority of the backend infrastructure semester and plan to continue development this semester.
This team eventually won $25k at a Solana hackathon!
GitHub: Link
Tech: Rust, Anchorlang
🪙 Bitcoin Node Data Transformation Dev Team
We set up a bitcoin full node and Neo4j server, both on AWS as we just needed some compute resources to get started quickly.We wrote an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process in Go to get blockchain data from the node and index it in Neo4j to allow us to do some interesting graph-based queries and visualizations on the data. We ended up getting the whole process working and now have a Neo4j dashboard we can play around with internally.
In the future, it would be cool to open up access to this Neo4j dashboard to students on campus, get a full node on campus infrastructure somewhere, and do a similar ETL process with an Ethereum node as there's much more data to work with.
GitHub: Link
Tech: Go, AWS, Neo4j
💼 Startup Research Team
The startup team was made to consult for web3 startups and help them grow. During the semester, the team helped 4 startups during the semester with product testing, content marketing, and business development.
Due to a lack of aligned incentives between startups and the club, we sunsetted the team.
✍🏼 General Research Team
This team helps beginners build a fundamental understanding of blockchain tech through in person jam sessions. Throughout the semester, members write about what they learn to gut-check their understanding.
In this semester, we covered consensus mechanisms, blockchain platforms, and zero-knowledge applications.
✍🏼 Deep Research Team
This team is an excuse for advanced members to follow their curiosity and explore a topic deeply.
This semester, the team studied how much countries were actually using crypto. They used 3 developing & 3 developed countries as case studies.
Crypto Usage Case Studies🙏🏼 Events & Partnerships Team
This team grows our off-campus reach by hopping on calls with companies, applying for funding, and hosting a podcast with industry leaders.
It grows our on-campus reach by writing our updates newsletter, meeting with UIUC administrators, & hosting community events.
We’ve helped 15+ members attend conferences in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Lisbon for free. We’ve hosted community events with C-Suite execs, investors, & founders. And we’ve hopped on 75+ calls.
Blockchain Big Brain Podcast: Link
IB Updates Newsletter: Link
Event Reflection Posts: Bitcoin OG Founder, Investor, C-Suite Exec
📡 Spring 2022 Semester Projects
🏦 DAO Starter Pack
We created the DAO starter pack to guide -curious newcomers knowing nothing to having a fundamental understanding why DAOs matter & where they are going.
Check It Out:
DAO Starter Pack🎒 Web3 Starter Pack
We created the web3 starter pack to guide crypto-curious newcomers knowing nothing to having a fundamental understanding why web3/crypto/blockchain matters, where it is right now, & where it is headed.
Essentially, we streamlined everything we learned in the previous semester into a straightforward guide.
Check It Out:
web3 Starter Pack🦑 Buoyant Protocol
For our external dev project, we partnered with Solana Labs to develop a base protocol for tradable on-chain subscriptions on their blockchain: Solana.
The idea is that a normal subscription to something like Netflix or Spotify could be a transferrable digital asset. Someone who wanted to unsubscribe after 20 days of a month-long subscription could sell it to someone looking for a 10-day trial for less.
We submitted to Solana's Riptide Hackathon, and ended up being included in Grape Protocol's final list considering open source protocols for a community prize. Deployed only to devnet currently.
Github: Link
Tech: Rust, React
🌐 IlliniDAO
Our internal dev team developed a student-organization DAO (aka decentralized autonomous organization) intended to appoint on-chain membership and handle funds for our club in a crypto-native way.
We adapted OpenZeppelin governance contracts to support ERC-721 tokens to enable what we call "seasonal NFTs" for us to effectively manage club membership given the temporary lifecycle of university students.
Currently deployed to Polygon Mainnet. Also showcased a Minority Game demo for UIUC's Blockchain Summit back in April.
We plan to work on it in the coming semesters as well.
Website: Link
Github: Link
Tech: Solidity, Foundry, React
Fall 2021 Semester Projects
🎨 NFT Mint Event
We onboarded 75+ people onto Ethereum with our first event as an organization by helping them set up their wallet, airdropping testnet ETH, and minting their first NFT.
We built a simple web app to make it easy for anyone interested in blockchain to get involved and start playing with the technology. We've done our best to design this so that you don't need to know much about blockchain to jump right in.
Website: Link
Presentation Deck: Link
Github: Link
✍🏽 Blog Posts
We read to collect the dots and write to connect the dots. Writing helps us solidify our understanding and helps newcomers learn more efficiently.
In Fall 2021 (our first semester), we spent a lot of time learning about the blockchain. It was difficult and inefficient. So, we synthesized what we learned about Bitcoin and Ethereum in an easy-to-read blog post.
In addition, we collaborated with community member Matt Brotnow to start a blog post series “The Future of Blockchain” to highlight outside industry applications of blockchain.
Check them out:
Bitcoin Under The Hood: How Blockchain Actually Works
