December 3, 2021
Inside Clarity Universe Vol 5:
Clarity Careers and Creations
by Caitlin Eckvahl on December 3, 2021
The end of the first Clarity Camp is upon us. Recently, nearly 100 students graduated from the first Clarity Camp cohort, ushering in a new batch of Bitcoin builders.

Students were congratulated with a virtual graduation ceremony with a commencement speech from special guest, Muneeb Ali, the Founder of Stacks and co-creator of the Clarity language.

Clarity was created with the goal of making smart contracts for Bitcoin easy to read and easy to use. By coupling this development with the security of Bitcoin, this has paved the way for smart contracts secured by Bitcoin and thus many of the applications on the Stacks network.

As students move on to the next phase of their Clarity careers, there was still one more opportunity for them to put their skills to the test - a hackathon. Students were invited to create projects and applications that use Clarity smart contracts in new and novel ways. Let’s see what they came up with!
Cnry
The first place prize goes to Cnry! Cnry was created by Clarity student, the aviculturist, who applied their newfound Clarity knowledge to create a tool that helps publish and keep track of warrant canaries. A warrant canary is a method by which a service provider can inform users that they been served with a government subpoena despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena.

On the site, users can “hatch” a warrant canary by publishing a statement that is wrapped into a Clarity smart contract. Warrant canaries are only useful if someone is watching so users can call the watch function which will mint a “WATCHER NFT” that keeps track of any activity that the warrant canary reports back.

Cnry has the potential to fill the shoes of the Canary Watch, a coalition that was created by the EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, NYU Law, the Calyx Institute, and the Berkman Center but later discontinued in 2016. The EFF’s final Canary Watch report shows that the number of warrant canaries was steadily increasing and emerging in new forms such as PDFs, plaintext, HTML, and even images. With Cnry’s debut, warrant canaries can now take form as statements in smart contracts.

Tohyo
In second place, we have Tohyo, a decentralized voting platform created by Clarity student, Marc Cámara. Marc was inspired by Snapshot, a popular voting platform for crypto companies and projects to survery their users. Marc noticed that Snapshot didn’t have Stacks listed so he decided to build Tohyo, which means “vote” in Japanese, for users to vote on proposals within the Stacks ecosystem.

Users can create groups which serve as communities for crypto projects such as Arkadiko or ALEX, and they can submit proposals to be voted upon. Marc shared that learning Clarity was a challenge at first, coming from a background in object oriented languages like Ruby or Python, but after going through the Clarity bootcamp, it became clear Clarity smart contracts had some advantages over obect oriented languages. His contribution marks an important addition to the Stacks ecosystem as DAOs become increasingly popular.
Velocity DAO
In third place, we have Velocity DAO, a smart contract proposal system that allows users to submit proposals to donate to specific charities, created by Saad Tahir. Velocity DAO participants can create proposals in favor of their preferred charities and call upon their community for support via a voting system. If the proposal is approved, the charity will receive DAO tokens which can be converted to STX, providing a new way for the Stacks community to rally together for a cause.
Clarity Careers
We are proud of what our Clarity students have accomplished in such a short amount of time and we are eager for the next generation of Bitcoin builders to begin building a better internet. Clarity students now have access to Clarity lessons on Codeacademy as well as the full Clarity book authored by Clarity Universe instructor, Marvin Janssen.

There is a huge demand for Clarity talent at this time and in fact, there are more job openings for Clarity developers than there are Clarity developers. In fact, one Clarity Universe student was hired by Hiro Systems and two other students who started the course with no prior crypto experience, are now working on successful NFT projects.

The Stacks Foundation is seeking a Clarity educator and if you are interested in learning Clarity, Clarity Camp Cohort #2 is available for sign up here. Thus far, more than 1000 prospective students have signed up and we look forward to welcoming even more Bitcoin builders into our ecosystem.

Caitlin is the Communications Lead at the Stacks Foundation where she provides PR and communications support to Stacks builders. Previously, she worked as a communications consultant at Wachsman where she worked with prominent crypto and blockchain companies including Stacks, Rally.io, Rarible, Qredo, Value Technology Foundation, Status.IM, Binance Charity, and others.