Just slightly more than a week ago, we wrapped up the $XSGD-ZRC 2 hackathon as a collaboration with Zilliqa.

The objective of the hackathon was to promote the growth of the Zilliqa and StraitsX ecosystem with over $10k worth of prizes in $ZIL and $XSGD for the best of the best.

We’ve had lots of brilliant entries to the hackathon, and it was inspiring to see various innovations with the XSGD token! As part of our initiative to further boost creativity within the Zilliqa and StraitsX ecosystem, we will be doing a showcase series about the winning submissions.

We hope that these will inspire you to #BUIDL!

To kick off the showcase series, we have with us Julian Sarcher — the brain behind the overall winner of the hackathon — Zilgraph!

Q: Congratulations on winning the $XSGD hackathon, Julian! Before we begin, could you provide an introduction, please?

Julian: Thanks for having me! I’m Julian, a blockchain enthusiast residing in Munich. My profession is actually in FPGA engineering and I’m currently working in the space industry.

The company I’m working for is building spacecraft for global navigation systems, Earth, and deep space observation.

If you don’t find me programming or designing space systems, I’m probably somewhere on the water, either windsurfing or on a sailing boat. ;-)

Q: That’s interesting! How did you learn about the hackathon?

Julian: I have been an active follower of Zilliqa since 2017. I have been staying tuned ever since and when I saw the opportunity to build on Zilliqa, I jumped on it.

Q: Now, on to your winning submission — Zilgraph. Could you provide a description of your project, please?

Julian: Zilgraph is basically a dashboard for Zilswap. Similarly, Zilswap is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) just like Uniswap but on the Zilliqa platform — which lacks the feature to have an overview of the historical and current data to the tokens that you wish to swap for.

With Zilgraph, it offers users daily and hourly candlestick charts for all tokens with historic data based on Zilswap’s executed contracts. Furthermore, it gives an overview of the current liquidity distribution of the tokens and total liquidity as stated on the Zilswap smart contract.

Q: Where did you get inspiration for Zilgraph and how did you come up with the idea?

Julian: Before the XSGD hackathon was announced, I worked on a trading bot to leverage on the extremely high volatility at the very beginning of the gZil token announcement. While I was fine-tuning my trading bot, it would have been way easier if there were token charts of the Zilswap pairs as a reference.

I felt that the need was obvious, and as the XSGD hackathon came along it gave me the perfect opportunity to execute on my idea.

Q: How did you prepare for the hackathon? What are some of the tools and resources that you’ve utilised in your project?

Julian: While I knew about Uniswap, I did not really have a solid understanding of the technical concept of Automated Market Makers (AMM) before the hackathon. Amazingly, the simplest concepts are at the same time the most innovative ones and open up a ton of new use cases.

For the purpose of acquiring token data, I used the pyzil python library with the Viewblock API. Based on the raw data acquired, I then calculated the OHLC chart data and stored them in a MongoDB database.

For visualization, I used the python bokeh library — which allows you to create interactive charts, graphs and, visualizations on a web page.

Q: How would you describe your experience throughout the hackathon? What were some of the challenges you’ve faced and how did you overcome them?

Julian: The thing is, I’ve started only a week before the submission deadline, so it has been an intense time with a lot of work but I was eager to finish with a working and useful product. Selecting the right visualization library was actually one of the more difficult parts for me as my expertise is not really in frontend design.

Q: What will you envision the XSGD ecosystem to be moving forward?

Julian: For the XSGD token, I hope it will be used for real-world payment applications on a broader scale. XSGD being blockchain agnostic is the right step, however, I believe that with the ability to be interoperable it would open up even more use-cases.

Q: What recommendations or tips would you have for a first-time developer using Zilliqa?

Julian: Having experience in programming smart contracts is huge. As a first-time developer to Zilliqa, one could start with the pyzil library. It is easy to use and can help you learn very quickly.

Q: Do you have plans to continue working on Zilgraph? If so, what are some of the updates that we will see in the near future?

Julian: There are some developments which I would love to see on the Zilgraph platform moving forward. One major step forward would be to have a dedicated Zilliqa Staked Seed Node on the Zilgraph platform. This would help reduce friction as Zilgraph would not need to rely on Viewblock’s API anymore.

There is much more work to be done which I have listed on the Zilgraph Github page here. The project is open to contribution and I would love to see community members help to bring Zilgraph forward.

There are also some smaller tasks available:

• Optimisation for Zilgraph on mobile devices
• Full-featured python Zilswap library
• Visualization of historic liquidity depth
• Adding trading volume to the price chart
• Use local Zilliqa node as a data provider for the Zilcrawler
• Visualization of other commonly used Zilliqa smart contracts (e.g. Staking Contract, Unstoppable Domains)

And that’s all for the showcase of Zilgraph!

If you wish to keep up to date of the developments of Zilgraph, you can follow the official Zilgraph Twitter account, @zilgraph.

The Zilgraph platform is also currently available at http://zilgraph.ddns.net.

We have many more projects that were part of the XSGD hackathon to showcase that we will be releasing soon!