Topic: Learning Ethereum’s core properties by building them, a four-day build school where each day takes one CROPS property through a workshop and a build session.
Katta is a Marathi(the language majorly used in Mumbai) word for the place a community gathers to talk, an open corner where anyone can sit down, argue an idea out, and leave knowing something they didn’t. That is the hub we want to run, in the state that gave us the word.
Summary of Proposal
A four-day builder’s corner. Each day takes one of Ethereum’s core properties - censorship-resistance, open-source, privacy, security and teaches it by building it: a morning workshop, an afternoon build, an by evening the builder’s leaderboard is showcased. Problem statements draw on Indian practice. We arrive with a cohort that has built together every weekend since August as part of our Road to Devcon campaign.
Motivation and Rationale
How would this Community Hub enhance the attendee experience?
Most people at Devcon can define censorship-resistance. Far fewer have written the code where the property either holds or quietly fails, the fallback that runs when the gateway is gone, the check that lives in the contract instead of the input field, the endpoint that hands a user’s address to a third party nobody audited. Developers Katta closes that gap in four days.
Someone can walk in on Tuesday having never deployed a contract and leave on the hub with small working builds and, more usefully, the ability to open somebody else’s repository and learn. Each day is roughly one third teaching and two thirds building, and every day ends with demos where people show what broke as readily as what worked.
How would it complement Devcon 8 India?
Devcon’s main stages will cover CROPS at the level of research and protocol design. This hub covers it at the level of a repository. The two need each other, a talk on privacy lands very differently for someone who spent that afternoon discovering how much their own app leaks.
The second thing we add is a route in. Loops House Builders is a global community of over 5,000 builders, and a large share of them are students and early-career engineers who have never attended a conference at this scale, since we curated the community by reaching out to the students from leading universities. A hub that runs all four days, come-and-go, with no prerequisite, is how that talent converts into ecosystem contributors rather than attendees.
Third, this year’s theme is Back to the Roots, and we have taken it in both directions at once. Ethereum’s roots are CROPS. India’s roots include long traditions of held-in-common resources, collective custody, and records kept in trust and those turn out to be unusually good teaching material for exactly these four properties. Our eleven-week Road to Devcon series has been running problem statements on this basis since August, closing on 30th October. Developers Katta is where that arrives in the room.
Why is this topic significant, and why is a Community Hub the best format?
Because these four properties are the part of Ethereum most often asserted and least often implemented. A build described as censorship-resistant whose frontend sits on a single host, or as private while leaking every address to one RPC provider, is the normal case rather than the exception. That is a teachable failure and it is only teachable by building.
A hub is the right format because the learning is cumulative and it is social. A ninety-minute workshop can show you a pattern, what happens next is builder actually build utilizing with the agent harness we provide for them to build with ease and participants get evaluation report for the project they themselves built, which no standalone session can deliver.
How would this hub support builders and their journey?
Everything we teach is published openly before the event and stays up after: curriculum, problem statements, reference repositories, evaluation rubrics. Participants leave with public Github repositories under their own names, which is the only portfolio that counts in this ecosystem.
We also do not treat November as the end. Our community has run continuous programming since September 2025 and will keep running it afterwards, so someone who starts at Developers Katta has somewhere to go on 7 November.
Have you organized a Community Hub at a past Devcon edition?
No, this is our first. What we bring instead is a run-up that is already underway. However our team was actively participated in previous 2 editions of Devcon and Devconnect.
Since 21 August 2026, Loops House Builders has run Road to Devcon: 11 Weeks of Ethereum Build Battles, eleven consecutive weekends, celebrating the 11 years of Ethereum, each a 48-hour solo sprint. Problem statements drop Friday night, builders submit GitHub repositories by Sunday night, and submissions are scored against automated checks on contract logic, RPC behaviour and front-end integration, with a public leaderboard. No pitch decks. The eleven themes: reading Ethereum, onchain identity, smart accounts and gasless UX, x402, AI and Web3, onchain gaming, prediction markets, privacy on Ethereum, funding the commons, decentralized storage, and art and culture. The series closes on 30th October, right before Devcon opens.
We are also not running it alone. We have brought together the hosts of Road to Devcon and universities, so the series functions as a coalition of student and regional communities rather than a single organiser’s programme.
What we have learned from three years of hacker houses and eleven weeks of sprints is the thing this proposal is built on: people learn this material by shipping something small and having it broken in front of them, not by watching a slide about it.
Implementation
The standard Devcon hub setup covers most of what we need, the LED screen and HDMI for code walkthroughs, two whiteboards for architecture, the two cork boards, the work table, power, and the Ethernet line.
Additional equipment we will source ourselves:
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Power strips and extension boards, over-provisioned.
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Printed problem-statement cards, one per build session, in English, Hindi and Marathi, so someone joining mid-afternoon can pick up and start without a re-brief.
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The Katta Board. A four-day installation across the two cork boards: on one side Ethereum’s four properties, on the other the practices we draw our problems from. Attendees add their own, a tradition from their region that already encodes one of these properties. By day four it is a collaboratively built map, and it is what makes the space feel like a katta rather than a room with chairs.
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Facilitation kit — sticky notes, markers, prompt cards.
Programming
Possible speakers and topics
Sessions are led by our own organising team, each taking named days. We are deliberately keeping outside slots open rather than filling them now: we will run an open call on this forum for co-hosts, and we would particularly welcome a contributor with depth in security or cryptography for day four. Regional Indian communities and student groups are welcome to co-host any session.
| Lead | Days | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| Rishikesh Kale | Day 3 (Privacy), Day 4 (Security) | Selective disclosure, metadata leakage, access control on the mutation path, adversarial review |
| Sneha Kumari | Day 2 (Open Source) | Reading an unfamiliar repository, licence hygiene, first contributions, localisation into Indian languages |
| Rohit Shukla | Day 1 (Censorship Resistance) | Content addressing, gateway fallbacks, resolution without a single point of failure |
| Harsh Gupta | Mentor, all four days | Build-session mentoring, pair debugging, teardown clinics |
| Loops House Builders organising and educational content teams | All four days | Onboarding, newcomer support, staffing, demos |
How a day looks like (09:00–17:00, same rhythm all four days)
A returning participant knows exactly what they are walking into; a first-timer can join at any block.
| Time | Block | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–10:00 | Welcome and setup | Onboarding, dev environments, greeting newcomers. Deliberately unstructured. |
| 10:00–11:30 | Workshop, the day’s property | Live, follow-along, taught from the code up. |
| 11:30–13:00 | Build session, part one | Small groups take the day’s problem statement. Mentors circulate. |
| 13:00–14:00 | Lunch and open hours | Space stays open and staffed. |
| 14:00–16:00 | Build session, part two | Continued build, pair debugging, architecture whiteboarding. |
| 16:00–17:00 | Teardown clinic | We read real repositories together and locate where the property holds or fails and leaderboard is published. |
The four days
Day 1 (3 Nov) : Censorship Resistance: what survives when the host disappears. Content addressing, gateway fallbacks, resolution that doesn’t depend on one server, and why most “decentralised” frontends are not. Build: a community archive that no single party can remove, modelled on the problem of keeping a regional oral or folk-art tradition intact after the institution holding it stops paying its bills. India has lost archives this way; so has the internet.
Day 2 (4 Nov) : Open Source: contributing, not consuming. Reading an unfamiliar repository, licence hygiene, what makes a pull request mergeable, and the difference between forking a project and joining it. Build: a guided first contribution to a maintained Ethereum open-source project, from a set of repositories with live good-first-issues that we pre-select and confirm with maintainers in September. Translation and localisation into Indian languages is prioritised, real upstream value, and an achievable first PR. The frame is the commons: the shared grain store, the community fund, the irrigation tank. Systems maintained by everyone who uses them, which is exactly what an open-source dependency is, and exactly why unmaintained ones collapse.
Day 3 (5 Nov) : Privacy: proving without revealing. Selective disclosure, what a proof of a property actually looks like, and metadata leakage, the addresses your app hands to third parties without telling anyone. Build: prove an eligibility claim without disclosing the identity behind it. The rooted case is entitlement delivery, where people have routinely had to disclose far more about themselves than the decision required. That is a live harm and a clean argument for why “prove, don’t show” is not an abstraction.
Day 4 (6 Nov) : Security: break it, then fix it. The failure patterns, access control on the mutation rather than the route, state written before the external call, bounds enforced in the contract rather than the form. Build: adversarial. Teams exchange the contracts they wrote on days one to three, find the flaw, write the exploit, then write the fix and the test that proves it. The rooted frame is the committee fund and the joint-family treasury: custody arrangements that solved the multi-signer problem, and the missing-signer problem, generations before anyone wrote it in Solidity.
Stage session — “Learn from who actually built”
Here we would invite the top performers for a candid chat and give them a platform on what they learnt and what usecases on each topic they want to build and share ideas.
How this supports Ethereum’s core properties, open-source ethos and bridge-building
The hub is not just about CROPS; it is four days of building them, one property at a time, with the code as the evidence.
Beyond that: day two produces real pull requests to real repositories, not exercises. Our own curriculum, problem statements and rubrics are published openly before the event and stay available afterwards. Nothing taught requires an account anywhere, participants build in their own repositories, on their own machines, with tooling they keep. And the localisation work on day two connects Indian-language communities to upstream Ethereum repositories, which is a bridge that keeps carrying traffic long after November.
Audience
Who this is for: builders who can code but have not built on Ethereum; students and early-career engineers; developers who have shipped dApps but never audited one; and anyone who can define these four properties and wants to learn to implement them.
We have designed for two entry points on purpose. The morning workshop assumes very little. The afternoon build and the teardown clinic reward people who arrive with experience. Both groups are in the room at once, which is the point, the fastest way to learn day three is to explain day one to someone who missed it.
On being based in India: Our organising team is India-based, while the community is global but densed in India region. Loops House Builders began in September 2025 with thirty builders under one roof in New Delhi, and we have since run hacker houses in Buenos Aires and Shanghai. That gives us something specific to offer Devcon 8: we can bring international builders from our Buenos Aires and Shanghai cohorts into a room with Indian students, which is precisely the cross-pollination the hub format exists for.
Team
| Person | Role | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Rishikesh Kale | Hub lead; Day 3 (Privacy) and Day 4 (Security) | Founder and lead of Loops House Builders. 21-time web3 hackathon winner. Teaches blockchain at RBU, where he has set university curriculum and examination papers on Ethereum. Leads the Road to Devcon Builder’s Challenge programme and spoke at ETH Pune’s Road to Devcon. |
| Sneha Kumari | Day 2 (Open Source); onboarding and newcomer support | Community educator. Created and led 30 Days of Solidity, run for a global cohort rather than an India-only one. Has led community programming across Loops House activations. |
| Rohit Shukla | Day 1 (Censorship Resistance) | Blockchain developer at T-Systems, 8+ years in the space professionally. 6-time hackathon winner. Speaker at multiple universities. |
| Harsh Gupta | Mentor across all four days | Blockchain developer, 12-time hackathon winner. He joined the team as a participant and his willingness to share knowledge got him as a core team member of our community. |
| Loops House Builders organising team | Operations, staffing rota, setup | Ran hacker houses in New Delhi, Buenos Aires and Shanghai, and eleven consecutive weekend build sprints. |
| Loops House Builders educational content team | Curriculum, problem statements, printed materials | Authored the eleven-week Road to Devcon curriculum. |
Why this team. We have spent eleven straight weekends running exactly this format, teach a concept, have people build it, review the code that comes back. That is an unusual qualification for a four-day build hub and it is the honest reason we think we can staff one well. The team also spans the two audiences we want in the room: a university teacher who works with students every week, a corporate engineer with eight years of production experience, and educators who have run programmes for a global cohort.
Neutrality, and our affiliation. We should state this plainly rather than have it discovered: our organising team comes from Loops House Builders, the community behind the Loops House platform, and Rishikesh founded it. We started with the Hacker House and thought of providing a permanent House for every builder and that’s what the platform is about. Concretely:
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Every workshop uses open-source, self-hostable tooling. Where a hosted service is genuinely unavoidable, we name at least two alternatives and explain the trade-off rather than defaulting to one.
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Curriculum and rubrics are published openly before Devcon, so anyone can check them for product placement.
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No tokens are discussed, promoted or distributed. No sponsor logos in the space.
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Participants build in their own GitHub repositories. So it always stays with them.
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An organiser is present during all opening hours and the guidelines are posted on the wall.
Connection to the communities this hub serves. Loops House Builders is 5,000+ builders and has been running continuously since September 2025 — three hacker houses across three continents, an ongoing weekend build series, university curriculum work at RBU, and a Road to Devcon coalition of student communities and their universities. The people we want in this room are people we already work with every week.
Languages. The team has members who can speak English, Hindi, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Chinese. Problem-statement cards printed in English, Hindi and Marathi.
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