Buenos Aires release 0.3
By: Michael O'Rourke
Tags: Nft, Ethereum, Mobile, iOS App Development, Blockchain

It’s been a busy Summer so far for the Pocket team, and we’ve got some exciting updates including new additions to the Pocket family, and a surprise augmented reality Decentralized Application called BANANO Quest that we can’t wait to share with everybody!

BANANO Quest- ETH Buenos Aires

We had the pleasure of participating in the ETH Buenos Aires hackathon in late May. We felt it was a great opportunity to show what awesome stuff can be built using the Pocket iOS SDK and our Pocket Relay Node infrastructure. After not sleeping for almost 40 hours straight we hacked together a proof of concept app called BANANO Quest — a mix between Pokemon Go and geocaching. When you complete a quest you earn a limited and unique ERC721 BANANO token.

We believe that BANANO Quest is the first native (built with Swift) mobile app of its kind. It’s a serverless decentralized game, using the Tavern contracts we built at ETH Buenos Aires. We got such great feedback for it that we decided to spend the time to clean it up and release it on the iOS app store. We feel this can really show as an example for mobile developers outside the blockchain space on what they can do with the blockchain.

Not only that, but the application itself is completely open source too. You can see us build it on our Github here (documentation coming soon).

You can sign up for updates at https://www.bananoquest.com/. Our TestFlight implementation will be up within the next two weeks.

Tavern Contracts for BANANO Quest

We called the contracts we built at ETH Buenos Aires Tavern in the spirit of the gamers that built it. Tavern is a set of extensible contracts that allow developers to build their own version of a questing game that rewards non fungible tokens. We have abstracted the main questing methods, making it extremely easy for you to extend, so it keeps the data of everyone’s quest on the same contract instead of you having to redeploy it.

We’re also proud and excited to be using ZeppelinOS for these contracts as well. It makes it much easier to upgrade and keep safe for our ERC721 implementation.

Please check out our Tavern contracts on Github here.

Say hi to us at NIFTY

Pabel, Luis and Valeria will be at the NIFTY conference in Hong Kong at the end of the month. It’s perfect for BANANO Quest, as it’s the conference for gaming and non fungible tokens. Come say hi to us! We’ll likely be in bright yellow BANANO Quest shirts.

Pocket iOS SDK and Ethereum plugin

The first version of our Pocket iOS SDK along with the Pocket Ethereum plugin has been completed! This SDK abstracts all the difficulties of working with web3 for iOS developers and allows them to focus on the application they are trying to build. You can see the SDK here and the Ethereum plugin here.

Pocket Relay Node

The Pocket Relay Node is the first iteration of Pocket’s middleware layer that will allow anyone to spin up infrastructure and get paid in POKT when the protocol is live. For now, you can spin up your own or use http://red.pokt.network/ for ours.

We have documentation on our Github here.

Additions to the Pocket team:

Now let’s introduce our new team members: Tracie, Andrew, Simon, Ian, Shawn, all of whom are passionate about developing the Pocket Network into a wonderful resource for the decentralized developer community.

Tracie is working on the economics of the POKT token including minting, and allocation.

She will be constructing mechanisms for how the token supply will interact with the market cap, how much POKT needs to be staked per actor. She is developing all things cryptoeconomics, which is a mission critical aspect for Pocket.

Andrew is one of the leads on protocol design. He will be driving ideation from concept, to specification, into concrete implementation for the Pocket Network. He is also writing the white paper, along with assisting Tracie in the development of the economic model. Andrew is a developer at the core, and a jack of all trades when it comes to supporting Pocket’s build every step of the way.

Ian is undertaking content development for Pocket, keeping the community in the loop with periodical updates via blog posts, and spreading the good word about the team’s progress.

Simon is spearheading Pocket’s marketing efforts by reaching out to communicate, and develop relationships with press, influencers, and developers alike about new features, and the Pocket platform in general.

Shawn has been helping us with protocol development and has helped move everything forward significantly.

We expect the new Pocket Whitepaper to be released in tandem with BANANO Quest. We are extremely excited to be sharing Pocket’s vision of decentralized infrastructure for any blockchain with the world.

Ways in which you can help or find out more about us: