Polkadot Experience Beta — Arequipa

This tip corresponds to a 2-day workshop run with own funds and that did not receive funds from any treasury or bounty last year.

Polkadot Experience that I carry out to provide workshops to developers in various locations and that last year had its second edition, in this case this request corresponds to the Arequipa Peru edition.

Full details: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PqKg8msrsZp-EGkyakLoHPYLBDpYabxb/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117666172967964407937&rtpof=true&sd=true

Use of funds: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bxOuZtX-6zKmgXT8GLUW5kkPd0lBGCkw/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117666172967964407937&rtpof=true&sd=true

Photo album: 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GFat2ODkD3CuNGWAaR86vk1ebUhOleAB?usp=sharing

Quick context: Arequipa is the city in Peru with the greatest relevance at the level of software development in the country, for this reason it is preferred by technological giants to carry out recruitment and the Arequipeña community is known in Silicon Valley for annually organizing the Techsuyo conference. These were the reasons for holding 2 days of workshops there.

For 2 days (3 hours per day) a workshop was provided for developers where they were able to explore various resources available in the Polkadot ecosystem by completing theoretical and practical exercises.

Activity agenda:

Day 1

The workshop started with a basic introduction to cryptography. This covered:

• Hash functions

• Elliptic curves

We then moved on to a basic introduction to blockchains, covering:

• Blockchain evolution (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot)

• Decentralized application architecture

• Smart contracts explained

• Key concepts in Rust.

Workshop: Participants will be able to create interactive logic using Rust.

Day 2

On the second day, we focused on the Polkadot ecosystem and built fully functional blockchains using the Polkadot SDK:

• Introduction to Polkadot and its architecture.

• Solutions available in the Polkadot ecosystem

• Importance of XCM interoperability between chains.

Workshop: We learned and successfully completed a implementation about Substrate, the blockchain development framework provided by the Polkadot SDK.

This was the first time that this type of blockchain activities was carried out in Arequipa and obtaining great results among which the following can be mentioned:

• Massive participation during the activities.
• Inclusion of participants in official channels of the Polkadot ecosystem.

Reference: https://x.com/polkadot_per/status/1761799081591017946?s=52&t=xZwu9y0l8ACyMwWB7pH3Rg

It was possible to get interactions on Polkadot official Discord

• Additionally in June a hackathon was held in Lima, Peru where 2 teams made up of Arequipeños received scholarships from Polkadot Peru to travel to Lima and achieved first and third place in the smart contracts category with Rust, demonstrating the talent present in the region.

References:

First place repository: https://github.com/Space4Build/La-Causathon-Chaintrust

Post: https://x.com/Polkadot_per/status/1805601736897319361

Third place repository: https://github.com/Space4Build/La-Causathon-CLAMZ/tree/main

Post: https://x.com/Polkadot_per/status/1805601754156777526