Today we kicked off Hedera20, our first fully virtual hackathon. Throughout the 6 week challenge, teams of up to 5 have the opportunity to build on the new Hedera Consensus Service (HCS), which brings a decentralized publish-subscribe architecture to any application. We couldn’t be more excited to see what gets developed and we’re thrilled to provide a few new developer tools that can help you build with HCS during and beyond the hackathon.
Building on new technology is often intimidating. We’ve been working with various members in our community, like HashingSystems, to develop practical starting points for building your decentralized applications. If you’re experienced with popular web frameworks like React & Express, we hope that you find these as good ways to get started.
We will be releasing various others throughout the coming weeks, so let us know if there are any other frameworks that you'd like to see. Also, if you’d like to develop one yourself, I recommend checking out the Hedera Heroes program, where you can earn at least $100 in hbar for creating helpful resources for the Hedera Community.
Note: these starters are not developed or maintained by Hedera.
An early preview of the Hedera DID specification demonstrates how to build Decentralized Identifiers that adhere to the W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) standard. Decentralized identity is a fundamental shift in how we architect systems, and HCS’ high throughput and low latency make Hedera a great choice for DIDs. This specification is still in a draft phase, and we’d love to get the community’s feedback on it throughout Hedera20.
Learn more about Decentralized Identity on HCS in this blog post by Paul Madsen.
View the official Hedera Hashgraph DID specification on GitHub.
As a starting point for making the DID spec easy to use we have open-sourced a new Java SDK. Making it simple to create and manage DID documents and verifiable credentials using the Hedera Consensus Service. This is a new SDK, currently in beta with limited documentation and we’d love the community to let us know their feedback.
View the Hedera DID Java SDK on GitHub.
Many existing users use Hedera to prove an event or transaction occurred. We’ve taken that concept and created what we call the “proof of action” microservice. This is an easy and opinionated way to deploy HCS architectures. It comes out of the box with a local database and REST API endpoints to easily verify whether a message has been logged in HCS.
View the Hedera Proof-of-Action Microservice on GitHub.
To demonstrate how you might use the proof of action microservice we’ve built a simple application, Pasteboard. In Pasteboard you can upload an image, we will hash the image, and log it onto HCS. After the image hash has been logged, you can look up the transaction ID or image to see if it’s already been logged into the network. Letting you check whether or not you were the first person to upload an image into a particular application or protocol.
View the Hedera Proof-of-Action Microservice Pasteboard Demo on GitHub.
Every application in the world needs to log data, whether it’s for internal systems failures, or just to be able to have observability into what’s going on. Apache Log4j2 and Logstash are two of the world’s most popular logging tools.
With the Log4j2-Hedera plugin, you’re easily able to log your application or infrastructure’s logs to the Hedera Consensus Service. In doing so, you will make it available to anyone in the world reading from the public ledger (or you can encrypt it to retain its confidentiality), and guarantee to have an unbiased party (the entire Hedera network) maintaining the order, availability, and content of those logs.
View the open-source log4j2-Hedera plugin on GitHub.
Similarly to Log4j2, Logstash is an easy and very popular way to manage events and logs for a variety of architectures. It’s able to process data from multiple sources simultaneously, and easily send it to your favorite “stash”. With the Hedera output integration, you can output these data logs extremely efficiently on the Hedera Consensus Service, for all of the great aspects of decentralized trust, transparency, and suitability one may want from a public ledger.
View the open-source Logstash Output Hedera plugin on GitHub.
We hope these tools and resources make it easy for you to quickly make progress in the Hedera20 hackathon and beyond. If you need guidance or run into issues, remember that we’re just a Discord message away.