News
Challenge Task Winner Distributed Systems FS24
(03.06.2024) Congratulations 🎉 to the FS24 challenge task winner of the Distributed Systems lecture at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. In this semester, 22 groups participated in this challenge, with the requirement to design, build an implement, and scalable decentralized system. And the winning group is: Alice Glaus, Mischa Binder, and Nils-Robin Grob. with Co-Puzzle Web App, which is a collaborative puzzle using websockets, deployed interally at OST: https://dsys-puzzle.network.garden. For the load balancer they used Traefik, everything dockerized of course, for the frontend/backend they used React with next, and for the database, they used MongoDB. Congratulations, very impressive work!
Challenge Task Winner Blockchain HS23
(18.12.2023) Congratulations 🎉 to the HS23 challenge task winner of the Blockchain lecture at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. In this semester, 13 groups participated in this challenge. The winning group is: Manuel Metzler, Reto Furrer, and Sascha Häring (2nd time in a row!). Manuel, Reto, and Sascha implemented a dual deposit system that has a mutually assured destruction mechanism that discourages fraudulent activity from both buyers and sellers. For the backend they used Golang, in the frontend they used Rust that was compiled to WebAssembly. For the blockchain environment they used ICP where canisters (~smart contracts) were written in Motoko. Very impressive work!
Challenge Task Winner Distributed Systems FS23
(06.06.2023) Congratulations 🎉 to the FS23 challenge task winner of the Distributed Systems lecture at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule. In this semester, 28 groups participated in this challenge, with the requirement to design, build an implement, and scalable decentralized system. And the winning group is: Manuel Metzler, Reto Furrer, and Sascha Häring. Their web application, designed to share collections of pictures, featured automated tagging through PhotoPrism. For storage, they used ScyllaDB, a high-performance, fault-tolerant database compatible with Cassandra. Everything is self-hosted with their own Kubernetes cluster using MetalLB.
swissDAO workshop on The Graph protocol
(01.02.2023) swissDAO organizes the first developer-focused workshop, where https://twitter.com/schmid_si from The Graph will be giving a tutorial session on how to develop subgraphs to index smart contracts from blockchains. During the workshop, the participants will learn how to use The Graph protocol to index and query smart contract data, and how to create a subgraph, which is a set of indexed data that can be queried using GraphQL.
Challenge Task HS 2022 Winner
(24.12.2022) The challenge task winners of the Blockchain lecture Task HS22 are: Caspar Martens and Simon Kindhauser (2nd time in a row!). Caspar and Simon built a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), using soul-bound tokens (SBT) to vote on documents and its changes. They used Solidity with the OpenZeppelin Governor, for the backend next.js, PostgreSQL to store metadata, and to connect to the Ethereum, they used ethers.js.
Challenge Task FS 2022 Winner
(10.06.2022) The challenge task winners of the Distributed Systems lecture Task FS22 are: Caspar Martens, Simon Kindhauser, Lara Gubler. They implemented Amy Gdala, a web application to memorize information by talking about your day (writing a diary) and to search for all your stored information with natural language queries. Their techstack included GPT-3, Kibana/Elastic Search, Coqui-STT/TTS, Python for micro-services, Kubernetes, and Istio for gRPC load balancing.
Challenge Task HS 2021 Winner
(14.12.2021) The winners of the Blockchain Challenge Task HS21 are: Reto Ehrensperger and Christian Rutzer. Reto and Christian implemented QuoteNFT, a platform to trade NFT quotes. The trading happens on a smart contract and is fully decentralized. Their project uses Vue.js for the frontend, node and express with TypeScript for the backend, and MetaMask to connect to Ethereum. Their QuoteNFT platform uses Traefik as a reverse proxy and docker-compose to orchestrate the services.
Hackathons
(07.10.2021) There are currently two interesting hackathons that will start soon: Open Data Hack St.Gallen, which is co-organized with OST, starting on the 5. Nov. 2021; and #SBHACK21, the largest Swiss Blockchain hackathon in Zurich, Geneva and Lugano, starting on the 29 Oct. 2021.
Challenge Task FS 2021 Winner
(01.06.2021) The winners of the Distributed Systems & Blockchain Challenge Task 2021 are: Andy Pfister, Leandro Ceriani, Michael Brändli. Andy, Leandro, and Michael implemented MegaMeme, which is a voting meme platform with Svelte and Ruby on Rails. They used 3 locations to run their platform redundantly, used docker swarm, and for a unified filesystem GlusterFS. For the database they used CockroachDB.
Challenge Task HS 2020 Winner
(20.12.2020) The winners of the Advanced Distributed Systems & Blockchain Challenge Task 2020 are: Florian Bitterlin, Andreas Baumgartner, Pascal Schürmann. Florian, Andreas, and Pascal implemented a donation platform and used the blockchain to keep track of donations. They used Spring Boot with a PostgreSQL database and for the frontend React/Redux that connects via MetaMask to the Ethereum network.
Unchain or Block the Hype?
(05.09.2020) Cesare Pautasso, Olaf Zimmermann, Liming Zhu, Thomas Bocek, and Xabier Larrucea discuss in the IEEE Software journal decision drivers, success factors, and blockchain adoption.
Beratungswoche FS20
(04.08.2020) On the 04.08.2020, 08:10 - 09:50, we will have the "Beratungswoche" online via Microsoft Teams. The access code for this session is: wdfade1. In order to enter the code, click join or create a team below your teams list and look for the Join a team with a code card.
Challenge Task FS 2020 Winner
(26.06.2020) The winners of the VSS Challenge Task 2020 are: Dominic Klinger, Lukas Leuenberger and Jan Ruch. I was impressed by their setup, which uses an ActiveMQ message queue, the Eureka service for service discovering, Kibana for visualizing data and they used docker compose, which makes the setup of the project straight forward. On top, they are hosting their own gitlab.
Online Lectures
(22.03.2020) Due to Coronavirus, the Federal Council declares 'extraordinary situation' and introduces more stringent measures. In the announcment from the 16.03.2020, the Federal Council announces school closures until at least 19.04.2020. Thus, the VSS lecture will be held online. Details of this lecture can be found here.
Challenge Task HS 2019 Winner
(18.12.2019) The winners of the DSA Challenge Task HS 2019 are: Marco Keller and Martin Iten. I was impressed by their simple yet efficient design. Their blockchain-based four-in-a-row met all the requirements and showed how a truly decentralized solution could be built. The players can bet their stake, while the platform provider gets its share as well. This game was implemented on Ethereum with web3.js and WebRTC. More details can be found here.
Superlight - A Permissionless, Light-client Only Blockchain with Self-Contained Proofs and BLS Signatures
(17.09.2019) An updated version of our current research paper Superlight - A Permissionless, Light-client Only Blockchain with Self-Contained Proofs and BLS Signatures has been published. The new version includes an alternative to the 3 party interactive protocol and details on the perfect Bloom filter.
3 Days Left to Register for the Largest Blockchain Hackathon in Switzerland
(21.05.2019) The largest blockchain hackathons in Switzerland will have price money worth more than 350k CHF. HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil is an academic partner of this hackathon. Registration deadline is on the 24.05.2019!
Monitoring Supply Chains with Blockchain
(23.04.2019) The following article was just released (German only): https://dievolkswirtschaft.ch/de/2019/04/bocek-05-2019/.
Switzerland to Host Blockchain Hackathon in June 2019
(27.02.2019) One of the largest blockchain hackathons in Switzerland will take place in June 2019. HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil is an academic partner of this hackathon. It will take place at Zurich’s Trust Square blockchain hub with the goal to help turn the promise of blockchain into tangible business applications. (more).
Challenge Task HS 2018 Winner
(19.12.2018) The winners of the DSA Challenge Task HS 2018 are: Dumeni Vincenz, Fabio Rosetto, and Alessandro Bonomo. The jury and students were impressed by their innovative solution to use the IOTA blockchain as a signaling layer for WebRTC. Their chat application met all the requirements and showed how a truly decentralized solution could be built. The details can be found here.
Bazo Workshop, 28.11.2018, 13:30 - 18:00
(22.11.2018) On the 28.11.2018, the UZH/Aduno/HSR Bazo Workshop will take place at the Trust Square, Bahnhofstrasse 3, 8001 Zürich. The event details can be found here.
NEO Blockchain Hackathon
(30.10.2018) On the 03.11.2018 - 04.11.2018, NEO is organizing a hackathon in Zurich. First prize is 500 NEO, second 450 GAS, third (3 teams) 300 GAS. Register here and meet other blockchain developers for a weekend full of learning, sharing and networking. One of the judges will be Erik Zhang co-founder of NEO.
Blockchain Tutorial @CNSM in Rome
(09.10.2018) On the 09.11.2018, Roman Blum will give a blockchain tutorial at the CNSM in Rome. The program can be found here. Roman Blum is a blokchain researcher at the Distributed Systems and Ledgers Lab at HSR.
Open House at Trust Square
(17.09.2018) On the 20.09.2018 from 14:00 to 18:00, TrustSquare invites everyone to see what 40 tenants are working on at Bahnhofstrasse 3. HSR Rapperswil is a partner of Trust Square.
Launch of the Distributed Systems and Ledgers Lab at HSR
(16.09.2018) Today is the official launch of the Distributed Systems and Ledgers (dsl) lab at the HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil, University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, Switzerland.