DeFi Hackathon — The Top 7 Projects Changing the Game in Finance
The hackers who don’t believe the hype build it instead
Every year, the cryptosphere undergoes an existential crisis and tries to reinvent itself in a way that attempts to move the conversation ahead toward broader adoption. 2016 was the year of private, enterprise, and consortium blockchains. When that fizzled out, the following year became the year of ICOs, where the entire space saw a Cambrian explosion of every decentralized application imaginable. By 2018, in anticipation of the launches of EOS, Tezos, and Cosmos, Proof of Stake became the next evolution of what private blockchains in 2016 dreamed of becoming.
This year, that theme is Decentralized Finance, or DeFi as the Ethereans dub it. And DeFi only started to become a theme after MakerDAO launched DAI at the end of 2017, which carried through 2018 and into 2019, and ultimately led to the DeFi Hackathon.
Concurrently, the launch of Proof of Stake networks like Cosmos has spurred innovative incentivized testnets, which is starting to become a major theme on its own.
What do you wager 2020 will be the year of? [Insert your predictions in the comments below.]
Closing out San Francisco Blockchain Week, and in celebration of the spirit of “decentralizing all-the-finance-things”, we co-hosted the DeFi Hackathon with the organizers of SFBW2019, which was a 3-day weekend event that took place in the heart of SF. Bounty hunters and hackers the world over landed in hopes of taking home over $60,000 worth of prizes from sponsors, awarded to the most innovative ideas in the pursuit of building decentralized alternatives to a traditional financial industry.
Over 600 people applied to the hackathon from all over the world and over 330 of them made it through the application process, landed in San Francisco, and became a part of building history.
Alongside projects like Cosmos (sponsored by Interchain Foundation), were projects like ShapeShift, Terra, Kong Cash, Aavesome, Agoric, Chromia, O(1) Labs, Xpring, Waves Platform, Compound, Nervos Network, The Oasis Team, Squarelink, Zabo, and Matic contributed in making the hackathon possible, gave valuable workshops, literally made it rain money, and turned the overall vibe into a shared experience of financial rebellion.
The hackathon was completely free to participants, yet some of this year’s most groundbreaking DeFi concepts have potentially emerged from it.
All of the projects that were submitted can be viewed on [DEVPOST].
Recount SFBW19 & DeFi Hackathon by downloading all photos from [HERE].
Squarelink ensured that hackers were well-fed by supplying everyone with its pseudo-burner wallet, using Terra as the payment option for food trucks.
Terra Money, the food & drink sponsor, ensured that every hacker was properly fueled.
The Shwag
Cosmos supplied hackers with necessities like thermoses and drawstring bags.
Knowing that everyone will be doing over 24-hour stints of no sleep, Cosmos supplied everyone with restorative eye masks.
Speaker Workshops
All the slides that were submitted by the speakers who gave workshops at the hackathon could be found on GitHub: [WORKSHOP SLIDES]
Building Chains Quickly with Cosmos SDK, billy rennekamp (Tendermint)
Cosmos SDK Tutorials | Cosmos SDK GitHub | Workshop Slides
Microtick Decentralized Oracle, Kent Barton (ShapeShift)
Intro to Microtick Blog post | Talk Slides | Microtick GitLab
Coda’s Tiny API (GraphQL), Avery Morin (O(1) Labs)
Slides | GraphQL API Docs | Coda Testnet
Building on the New Agoric Smart Contract Framework, Dean Tribble (Agoric)
Talk Slides | Intro to Zoe’s JavaScript Framework Blog Post
Building Applications Using Fast Plasma Assets Swaps on Matic, Anurag Arjun (Matic)
Talk Slides | Docs for Swapping Assets on Matic | Matic Blog
The Walletless Apps, William Dias (Zabo)
More Workshops
Implementing DeFi Applications in Async Environment, Illia Polosukhin (NearProtocol)
Terra Stability Mechanism Deep Dive, Nicholas Platias (Terra)
Create Your Own Crypto Cash with Kong, Cameron Robertson (ARX)
Balancing On and Off Chain Architectures, Mitchell DeMarco & Anna Caroll (Dharma)
👩🚀 Title Sponsor: Cosmos Challenge 1st Tier Winners
The Cosmos Challenge saw the most competition, with 31 teams out of the 53 teams that submitted projects to the hackathon. Winners were broken down into tiers, with 3 teams coming in 1st ($10K in ATOM), 3 teams coming in 2nd ($5K in ATOM), and 5 teams coming in 3rd ($1K in ATOM).
🏆 Liqui3D: Game of DEXes (Grand Prize Winner)
Devpost Submission | GitHub | Presentation Slides | Design Mechanics
TL;DR
Inspired by the “War of Attrition” game behind FOMO3D, Liqui3D allows for bottom-up emergence of liquidity, particularly among less popular cryptoasset pairs that fall in the long-tail of all traded cryptoasset pairs on a DEX.
For a deeper dive into the Liqui3D game mechanics, read their [RECAP BLOG POST]
This team won:
- $10K value in ATOM (Cosmos Challenge 1st Tier Bounty)
- $4K USD (General Category Grand Prize)
Everett: Reloaded
TL;DR
- “Staking Derivatives”
- Swapped out old [HackAtom Seoul’s] pseudo-IBC for the real thing
- Liquid Staking Position (LSP) NFTs, an additional token that has governance rights & receives rewards
- Tokenized Leveraged LSPs, allowing delegators to choose different risk & reward profiles (e.g. buy 3x leverage LSP tokens to receive 3x the rewards, while the money you lose when slashed also increases 3x.)
This team won:
- $10K value in ATOM
Neutrino Swaps
TL;DR
Compound finance’s volatility = bad; Neutrino interest rate swaps = good.
This team won:
- $10K value in ATOM (Cosmos Challenge 1st Tier Bounty)
👩🚀 Cosmos Challenge 2nd Tier Winners
ASC Protocol (Multi-Category Winner)
Active Smart Contract/Active State Change Protocol
TL;DR
Bounties for on-chain events; daemons on blockchains.
This team won:
- $5K value in ATOM (Cosmos Challenge 2nd Tier Bounty)
- 1000 DAI (AAVE Challenge 1st Prize Bounty)
- General Category Top 5 Contender
🦊 Agoric in MetaMask in Agoric (Multi-Category Winner)
TL;DR
MetaMask can now run non-Ethereum blockchains.
This team won:
- $5K value in ATOM (Cosmos Challenge 2nd Tier Bounty)
- $500 USD (Agoric Challenge 2nd Prize Bounty)
Burning Bitcoin
TL;DR
Burn Bitcoin by sending it to an unspendable address →receive new Bitcoin on a Cosmos chain = incentivized migration.
This team won:
- $5K value in ATOM (Cosmos Challenge 2nd Tier Bounty)
Side Prizes
For the sake of brevity (there were a lot of winners), only the 1st place winners in each category is highlighted.
Agoric Challenge 1st Prize Winner
indemDeFi: Indemnity through Decentralized Finance (Multi-Category Winner)
Read an in-depth recap of Agoric Challenge winners on the [AGORIC BLOG]
TL;DR
Streamlines distribution of benefits through an insurance market to victims of catastrophes.
This team won:
- $2500 USD (Agoric Challenge 1st Prize Bounty)
- $1K value in ATOM (Cosmos Challenge 3rd Tier Bounty)
Coda 1st Prize Winner
Cryptonomic
TL;DR
Graphical visual dashboard of Coda’s tiny blockchain.
This team won:
- $1500 USD (Coda 1st Prize Bounty)
Waves Platform Winners
Open Wallet & Waves OnRoll (DRAW)
Open Wallet Devpost | Waves OnRoll Devpost
These teams each won:
- 3500 WAVES (Waves 1st Prize Bounty)
Xpring Challenge Winners
Hugo + Web Monetization, Puma Browser Charity Mode, Kevin, WXRP (DRAW)
These teams each won:
- Choice between Nintendo Switch or DJI Oculus
Aavesome 1st Prize Winners
Ficient & ASC Protocol (DRAW)
Ficient Devpost | (For ASC Protocol details, see Cosmos winners above)
Read an in-depth recap of AAVE Protocol Challenge winners on the [AAVE BLOG]
Each team won:
- 1000 DAI (AAVE 1st Prize Bounty)
Chromia 1st Prize Winner
EI Agreement: Entrepreneur Investor Smart Contract
TL;DR
Reinventing seed investor agreement by switching to smart contract.
This team won:
- $5K in CHR (Chromia 1st Prize Bounty)
And that’s all folks!
See you next year, space cowboy/girl 👋
The views and details expressed in this blog post are those of All In Bits Inc (dba Tendermint Inc), and do not necessarily represent the opinions or actions of the Interchain Foundation.
