JackBlock

Substrate blockchain for Polkadot

Comment 6

Inspiration

In Poland, were our team come from, a-Pot-like lottery has been called Duży Lotek ([duʒɨ lɔtɛk]). Back in the day, we would debate among friends and family whenever someone won some significant reward. In short, whoever did hit 6 out of 6 numbers (from 1 to 49) on their bet, they had a right to claim a main reward. Usually, a couple of million PLN. There were never-ending speculations if the lottery was manipulated in some way or not. And the truth is, no one knows. We have had to trust the organization running the lottery that everything is always A-OK. But these times are over, thanks to the concept of a Verifiable Random Function — whatever was the result of a lottery, one can only verify if it indeed was truly random and as presented to the public.

What it does

Jackblock is a lottery game build in Substrate for Polkadot ecosystem. Players can be rewarded with extra coins and dynamic NFT's with a unique image representation! hosted on IPFS. Jackblock testnet is available here: jackblock.network

How we built it

  • 3 Engineers
  • Kanban
  • Different timezones
  • Same goal
  • Using cutting edge tech like:
    • Polkadot
    • Substrate
    • Rust
    • JavaScript / TypeScript
    • Web3.0
    • React
    • Node
    • CSS
    • Docker
    • AWS

Challenges we ran into

  • Testnet blockchain on AWS
  • Generate unique NFTs
  • Off-chain workers
  • Custom substrate pallets
  • Cryptographic keys and hashing

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • 1️⃣ Meeting new people in the blockchain space who proved to be very helpful and patient while helping us answer many (really, many) question 🤝
  • 2️⃣ Shipping a functional blockchain solution into a testnet in less than 3 weeks 🚀
  • 3️⃣ Gaining quite fair understanding on WHY things happen the way they happen 🕵🏻‍♂️
  • 4️⃣ Being able to practically apply all the knowledge and techniques we have learnt during the Substrate Developer Academy we recently graduated from 🦾
  • 5️⃣ Understanding how many tools and applications are yet to be built in this space — it makes the challenges we have been facing worth each and every second that we spent over solving them 🙇‍♂️

What we learned

  • Off-chain workers give us possibilities that have been unheard of up until now;
  • Off-chain workers require a lot of patience from us;
  • P2P networking is not magical anymore — it's amazing to see nodes discovering each other thanks to common connections (just like people in real world);
  • Everyone should consider publishing their findings — this is still a relatively new space, and the tooling requires a lot of learning time. Please make sure to write in public about the problems (and the solutions) might have been facing while setting things up.

What's next for JackBlock

  • Become a polkadot parachain
  • Explore and expand with new concepts

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