Announcement — HackAtom3 is Live!

The 3rd Edition of Hack the Cosmos is all about building useful validator tooling for Cosmos Validators

Submit here!

We are launching Cosmos HackAtom 3: The Validator Series. This is a call to arms to all those who dare to pioneer the space of the unknown universe. Do you have what it takes to participate in the Cosmos HackAtom, build infrastructure for the validator community that real validator businesses will use, and ultimately, take home the winning bounty? The validator community is growing, and they need your help. In preparation for the Game of Steaks, validators are looking to expand automation tooling to improve uptime, monitoring, alerting and defence mechanisms.

The competition is divided into two categories

1 Alerting & Monitoring Tools

Automated tooling to help validators monitor, alert and update their systems. A few example submissions in this category include, but are not limited to:

• OSQuery module to detect any attempts at key extraction from HSMs attached to a validator.
• Anomaly detection scripts for validator-specific metrics.
• Alerting conditions for various network metrics that require a validator’s attention such as notifications for upcoming governance votes or real-time notifications for missed signatures/blocks.
• An alerting system that hooks into a validator’s infrastructure to provide alerts on things like downtime, increased latency, process failure and/or specific log lines.

2 Security & Operations Tools

Attack mitigation and protection tooling to help reduce the overall risk to a validator’s system is paramount to the success of each validator. Additionally, any code that automates tasks which would otherwise be done manually will also be considered for this category. A few example submissions in this category include, but are not limited to:

• Auto-scaling of sentry nodes on any cloud provider.
• Architecture diagrams and any supporting Infrastructure-as-Code implementations for running a full validator setup. Some sample architectures are: cloud only, hybrid, or datacenter only. Security will be a major part of the judging criteria.
• Withdraw or bond block rewards automatically as rewards are paid out. (The protocol does not support auto-bonding of Atoms. This is due to the technical impediment of having rewards paid out in Atoms, so extra-protocol tooling is needed to support this functionality.)
• Patch and vulnerability management tooling and workflows.

Prizes & Conditions to Entry

Participants can submit multiple projects in both categories and there will be a total of 4 winners. The winners of each category will receive $10,000 in BTC and the runner-up in each category will receive $5,000 in BTC. After the submission deadline, links to all the projects will be shared and the panel of judges will spend a few days deliberating on the winners. We will reach out directly to the winners and publish a blog post announcing the winners.

Submissions for Cat 1: Alerting and monitoring

• 1st place prize: $10,000 in BTC
• 2nd place prize: $5,000 in BTC
• Deadline: September 26th
• Submission form

Submissions for Cat 2: Security and operations

• 1st place prize: $10,000 in BTC
• 2nd place prize: $5,000 in BTC
• Deadline October 2nd
• Submission form

Anyone can participate without providing identification. Winners, however, must KYC by providing a copy of their identity documentation.

Submit here!

Judges

Zaki Manian, Head of Tendermint Labs, advisor to Amino Capitol, and Executive Director of Trusted IoT Alliance. Zaki has deep expertise in cryptography and distributed consensus systems.

Jessy Irwin is Head of Security at Tendermint, where she builds defensive security programs that support and enable the needs of her organization, its people, and their code. She is an internationally recognized keynote speaker and writer who enjoys few things more than discussing security maturity, defense in depth, risk, and security culture.

Terry Brugger: Dr. Brugger is the founder and Computer Scientist at BuboWerks, a full-scope information security consultancy. He has two decades of information security expertise helping large and small clients across verticals improve information security programs, operations, code, infrastructure, and capabilities.

Jack Zampolin is an ecosystem developer on the partnership team at Tendermint as well as product lead for Ethermint, a fast Proof-of-Stake implementation of Ethereum built on top of Tendermint Core and using the Cosmos-SDK protocol.

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