Review of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer, Exploring the Infinite Possibilities of the Polkadot Ecosystem
In 2022, the Web3 industry went through a long and winding exploration. Even amidst the shadow of the bear market, do you have the courage to join us in braving the challenges and continuing to delve deeper into the Web3 world? Parity and the OneBlock+ community have decided to embark on a new journey in the new year, attracting more developers to join the Polkadot ecosystem, discovering the bright path of blockchain, and collectively becoming the future stars in building Web3.
Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer has set a new record since the 5 previous editions of the Polkadot Hackathon. The competition saw the highest number of registrations, participating projects, projects advancing to the preliminary round, and award-winning projects. A total of 324 developers and 80 participating projects registered for the hackathon, with 25 projects advancing to Demoday after the preliminary round. Among them, 18 projects were awarded on the main track and Bounty of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer. Let’s take a look back at this hackathon and highlight the exciting moments experienced by the organizers, participants, and audiences during the past two months.
Overview of the Hackathon
Hackathon Registration was Open with Online Team-up
On May 12, 2023, the registration for Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer was opened. The four main challenge tracks were announced, offering opportunities for individuals and teams to register for multiple tracks. There are a total of 16 awards in 4 categories, along with additional bonuses and honors (Four Major Challenge Tracks and Participation Process of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer). Participants registered for the competition by filling out their registration information and completing the Google Form. They were also invited to join the “Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer Group” for event interactions and communications.
On May 20 8pm, 2023, the opening ceremony of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer was held on a Twitter Space. Parity engineer Jun Zhou presented the latest developments in Polkadot for the first half of 2023. Substrate contributor Jimmy provided a detailed explanation of the competition rules for this Polkadot Hackathon. Participants had the opportunity to interact face-to-face with experts. On June 3, OneBlock+ launched the “Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer · Online Team-up” event. It aimed to assist individuals/teams with ideas and creativity in finding ideal partners to collaborate with and support the successful incubation of projects.
🚩Click to check the replay of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer opening ceremony: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1zqKVPaELeLJB
Announcement of Bounty Challenges and Judges
On June 1st, the hackathon introduced new Bounty challenges and rewards, with various major projects in the Polkadot ecosystem offering additional bonuses and resource support to participating teams. Acala, Manta Network, MoonBeam, Astar, Bifrost, Deeper Network, CESS, Gear Foundation, and other projects in the Polkadot ecosystem, along with leading cloud computing technology enterprise Alibaba Cloud, sponsored the Bounties. They proposed challenges related to developing interactive features for DApps, identifying the best use cases for Moonbeam precompiles, and creating innovative DApps utilizing DEP capabilities. These bounties incentivized participants to develop emerging projects with market potential (Announcement of Bounty Challenges | Additional Rewards for Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer!).
Meanwhile, the judging panel of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer has been announced, consisting of hackathon judges and sponsor & bounty judges. More than 20 professionals, including engineers from the Polkadot ecosystem, representatives from investment institutions, and forward-thinking observers from media communities in Web3, have been selected as judges. They will evaluate the participating projects from various dimensions, providing professional and fair judgments to discover and recognize innovative ideas and projects. This will contribute to the advancement of the Polkadot ecosystem (Judge Announcement | Powerful Casting of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer).
Mentor Q&A Session
Throughout the two-month period, top-gear tech experts have also engaged in a fresh approach, participating in the developers journey. Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer organizers have set up the “Mentor Q&A Session” event to offer technical, product, and business development advice to the participating projects in the hackathon group and office hour sessions.
The mentor Q&A team, consisting of Parity engineers and institutional researchers, conducted online meetings with the participating project teams on June 19. The teams introduced their project’s background, product development objectives, long-term plans, and resource needs to the guiding mentors. After listening to the team presentations, the mentors shared their own experiences to help the projects find breakthroughs and tackle various challenges. From the end of the centralized meeting until July 14, the mentors continued to provide online Q&A and guidance, supporting innovative projects to stand out in the competition and allowing the younger generation of Web3 builders to unfold their talents in the hackathon.
A total of 30 teams participated in the “Mentor Q&A Session” event. Many of the award-winning teams expressed that they made timely adjustments to their projects based on the advice provided by the mentors. It allowed their competition works to be implemented throughout the hackathon. The mentor for the event, Parity engineers Jun Zhou, Kaichao, Suvi Dong, and Substrate contributor Jimmy, also acknowledged the significance of pre-competition interactions and communication. They found that these interactions allowed them to directly engage with the progress of participating projects and provide support for their incubation journey from 0 to 1, witnessing the success of numerous projects!
Workshops of Pre-competition Instruction
The winning projects that successfully emerged in this hackathon not only relied on the creativity of teams and guidance from the mentors, but also benefited from concentrated technical knowledge sharing. Workshops of pre-competition guidance provides participants with fresh inspirations and insights. From June 10th to July 1st, four workshops were held live on YouTube, where more than 300 participants watched the live streams and interacted with the experts. These workshops offered valuable new ideas and inspirations for project development.
- Beyond Innovation: Exploring New Blockchain Tools and Technology Practices: Introduces how to build a decentralized ecosystem in blockchain and explore non-traditional applications in Web3.
- Build a safe and efficient Web3 custom chain and smart contract: Technical analysis and guidance with Substrate as the best tool to build a chain from 0, leading you to explore the best path to build smart contract applications.
- Polkadot: The Future of Blockchain Infrastructure: Show developers the ways in which Moonbeam is improving the multichain user experience, building on the success of DEP as a powerful Web3 innovation platform.
- Developing Applications on Polkadot: Explore with all developers the paths and techniques of developing applications in the Polkadot ecosystem.
If you want to review the highlights of the four workshops, you can click on the links to watch the replays:
🚩The first workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRMLKHlQw0s
🚩The second workshop: https://www.youtube.com/live/gX8om1MUYck?feature=share
🚩The third workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWBxNTH3-L8
🚩The fourth workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPSkW2PrXtc
After nearly two months of competition, on July 7, the list of advanced teams to the finals in the Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer was announced. Participating teams had refined their projects through a series of activities, including online team-up, four pre-competition guidance workshops, and mentor Q&A sessions. They demonstrated their unique Web3 projects with passion, creativity, and inspiration. Parity engineers Jun Zhou, Kaichao, Suvi Dong, and Substrate contributor Jimmy served as the judges for the initial review of the projects, providing comprehensive evaluations. Out of 324 participants and 80 teams, 25 teams successfully advanced to the finals.
💎Click the GitHub link to view the details of the participating teams：https://github.com/parity-asia/hackathon-2023-summer/tree/main
The initial review scoring for this competition mainly focuses on the technical aspects:
- Technical Difficulty (20%): The solution addresses challenges with a certain technical threshold and demonstrates a significant technical breakthrough.
- Project Completeness (20%): The project is fully implemented, not just a concept, and the Demo / POC presentation is comprehensive.
- Compliance (10%): The project is submitted within the specified time frame and adheres to the required guidelines.
In the final week of Demoday, OneBlock+ prepared a project pitching guide for the participating teams, enabling developers to showcase their projects with confidence on the day of the finals (Participants Guide: The Most Complete Hackathon Technical Resource is Waiting to Pick). This pitching guide offers a step-by-step approach to presenting exceptional project work, encompassing market pain point analysis, project product description, advantages demonstration, business value, team introduction, development roadmap, and other aspects.
Main Tracks and Award Winning Projects
From July 13th to July 14th, Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer Finals — Demoday was successfully held at Shanghai Hongqiao International Exhibition Center. Among hundreds of participants, 18 teams stood out and were honored in the competition, receiving support and prize rewards from the organizers and sponsors (Advancing Team Announcement | Congratulations to the Teams that Passed the Preliminary Round of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer!).
The final evaluation criteria for this competition mainly focused on the business aspect:
- Business Value (20%): It can address problems and can be applied in industry scenarios you are familiar with.
- Innovativeness (20%): It has a fresh concept, breakthrough elements, and challenges conventional thinking.
- User Experience (10%): This includes the intuitiveness and comprehensibility of the proposed solution for potential users.
The judges for the final Demoday were composed of hackathon judges and sponsor & bounty judges. They were:
Hackathon Judges：
- Helena, Head of Parity Asia
- Suvi Dong, Parity Engineer
- Kaichao Sun, Parity Engineer
- Jun Zhou, Parity Engineer
- Jimmy, Substrate Contributor
- Ray Xiao, Senior Director of IOSG Ventures
- Alan Li, Investment Lead of Ausvic Capital
- Yuxing, Investment Director of SevenX Ventures
- Stanley, Investment Manager of Hashkey Capital
- Yukun Hao, Senior Director of Wanxiang Blockchain
- Alvin Lin, Investment Director of Summer Capital
- Ian, Head of OpenBuild Developer Community
- Yaxun, Founder of OneBlock+
- Chloe, Brand Director of Foresight News
Sponsor & Bounty Judges：
- Bryan Chen, Co-founder & CTO of Acala
- Godot, Core Contributor of Manta Network
- Alberto Viera, Developer Relations Manager ofMoonbeam
- Lurpis, Co-founder of Bifrost
- Mingshi Song, Senior Business Development of Astar
- Bin Guo, Blockchain Lead ofDeeper Network
- Jessie Dai, Co-founder and COO of CESS
- Peter Volynsky, CTO of Gear Foundation
- Kevin Tsui, Head of Web3.0 Architecture of Alibaba Cloud Hong Kong Region
Building Parachains and Independent Chain
In this challenge, participants focused on using Substrate to build a custom blockchain. The goal was to develop any customized chain that participants deemed useful for other builders within the Substrate ecosystem. As a result, the Cybros Network, MatrixAI, and Nomocracy teams were awarded first, second, and third prizes.
- Cybros Network is a blockchain-based async jobs scheduler, and introduces tons of classic Web2 features into the Web3 world in a native way. Combined with Web 3 composability, it could derive new product forms. In addition, Blockchain tokenomic could help reduce end-user fees and improve computing power providers income.
- EightFish is a newly developed framework for Open Data Applications (ODA) created by the Nomocracy team. It implements the Open Data Application Model (ODAM). Unlike most DApps that rely on smart contract blockchain technology stacks, EightFish has created its own blockchain network and does not depend on any other Web3 layer or service sovereignty.
Smart Contracts (and related)
Participants had the opportunity to develop smart contract chains, smart contract platforms, and ink! smart contract developer tools. Additionally, they were encouraged to create auxiliary toolkits to assist developers in writing secure and efficient smart contracts, such as quick-start and deploy contract testing environments, smart contract auditing standards, and tools, among others. In this category, the Polkadot Smart Account, Bahen, and CBIndex teams were awarded first, second, and third prizes.
- Polkadot Smart Account is the implementation of smart contract accounts in the Polkadot ecosystem. It refers to the EIP4337 standard, is based on the ink! contract language, and has been adjusted and optimized according to the architecture of Polkadot. In the future, it will also provide a Substrate pallet version for practical use. As an account abstraction project based on the Polkadot ecosystem, the goal of Polkadot Smart Account is to provide users in the Polkadot ecosystem with a more convenient and secure account management method.
- Bahen is a decentralized distributed machine learning solution that aims to provide developers of AI applications with a new solution for model training and application deployment. It also aims to create a transparent and open data trading marketplace for users. Computer systems with idle GPU computing power can connect to the Bahen Network, leveraging a global pool of unused GPU resources. This not only helps address the gap in computing resource supply and demand but also provides more cost-effective services.
- CBIndex provides various crypto investment tools built on the CBI protocol. It delivers a democratized ecosystem where anyone can effortlessly make crypto investment decisions by copying seasoned investors or participating in active and index funds.
Blockchain Products and Tools
Participants developed innovative blockchain products and tools by designing testing suites/operation and maintenance tools, Substrate pallets tools products, governance tools, and more. In this category, the Mimir, Dauth Network, and zkFuture teams were awarded first, second, and third prizes.
- Mimir is an asset management tool focused on user interaction, utilizing various Polkadot ecosystem pallets in a productized format. It supports not only single-signature addresses but also multisig addresses. Users can access various existing Polkadot ecosystem applications through Mimir using multisig addresses. Additionally, Mimir will also develop its own DApps, productizing Polkadot pallets for user convenience.
- DAuth Network is a trustless, anonymous protocol for social account authentication. DAuth has developed a Hybrid Zero-Knowledge (ZK) architecture that allows for real-time conversion of off-chain social account authentication into fully decentralized and privacy-preserving proofs that can be verified on-chain. This system is pioneering in its proposal of a Web3 native social account login method and two-factor authentication (2FA).
- Battleship is a foundational development tool that provides zero-knowledge proofs. The project demonstrates the capabilities and effectiveness of the development tool using a simple battleship naval combat game as an example.
Open Track
Participants freely explored and developed projects under open-ended topics, breaking mental barriers and designing highly innovative Web3 products. In this category, the DTIM, Trypto, and ChatDataInsight teams were awarded first, second, and third prizes.
- DTIM is a distributed instant messaging software based on the matrix communication protocol. The main functions include real-time communication and collaboration, integrating chat, voice / video conference and other functions, allowing interaction, sharing ideas and effective communication at any time.
- Trypto is a collaborative management system that enables secret sharing based on user-specific characteristics. It aims to provide a secure, reliable, and user-friendly way for users to share sensitive information in a decentralized environment while protecting their personal privacy and data security. The system can be used in various scenarios such as DAO tools, multisignature wallets, asset management, and company collaboration systems. It is expected to provide a more secure and convenient solution in the fields of DApps and digital asset management.
- ChatDataInsight is designed to be a user-centric platform that democratizes data analysis in the blockchain industry. ChatDataInsight uses an AI-powered engine then processes these queries, connects to multiple databases and service interfaces, and aggregates relevant data.
In addition to the four main track awards, Bahen received the Audience Favorite Award, Cybros Network received the Developer’s Favorite Award, and Trypto won the Best Innovation Award. Furthermore, this hackathon introduced additional Bounty challenges and rewards. Various projects within the ecosystem offered Bounty topics and financial support to participating teams. Several highly promising Bounty awards were selected, recognizing exceptional projects with great market potential.
- Alibaba Cloud ($56,000 worth of cloud services) : Chatdatainsight、Cybros Network、CBIndex、DeepDiary、Cyborg Network
- Third prize of Astar & Bifrost ($1000): Dandelion
- First prize / Second prize of CESS ($1500、$500) : MatrixAI/AIShow
- Deeper ($2000) : D-DNS
- Moonbeam($500): zkBatch
We Extend Appreciation to Supports from the Polkadot Treasury, the Bounty Sponsors and Judges
As the hackathon comes to an end, another successful Polkadot Hackathon has concluded. Throughout this journey, we would like to express our gratitude to the Web3 enthusiasts who showed their support, interest, and active participation in the event. We are also thankful to the expert panel of mentors and speakers who wholeheartedly contributed during the pre-competition guidance workshops and mentor Q&A sessions. Special thanks go to the following individuals for their invaluable contributions: Parity Asia’s Head Helena, Parity Engineers Suvi Dong, Kaichao Sun, Jun Zhou, Substrate contributor Jimmy, Ray Xiao from IOSG Ventures, Alan Li from Ausvic Capital, Yuxing from SevenX Ventures, Stanley from Hashkey Capital, Haoyu Kun from Wanxiang Blockchain, Alvin Lin from Summer Capital, ian from OpenBuild developer community, Yaxun from OneBlock+, and Chloe from Foresight News.
In addition, we extend our appreciation to the Polkadot Treasury and the Bounty sponsors (Acala, Manta Network, MoonBeam, Astar, Bifrost, Deeper Network, CESS, Gear Foundation, and Alibaba Cloud) for their generous support in terms of prize money, technical resources, and assistance throughout the competition. Your contributions have been instrumental in making this event a remarkable success. Thank you all!
Over the past few years, the participating teams in the Polkadot Hackathon have not only excelled in the competition but also experienced rapid growth and emerged as rising star projects in the post-competition phase. Projects like Parallel Finance, Manta Network, CESS, and others have continued to make significant progress in their respective fields after receiving the competition’s prize rewards, injecting new energy into the development of the Polkadot ecosystem. These standout projects achieve rapid growth after the Polkadot Hackathon can be attributed to the combined support of the competition’s prize rewards and the resources provided by project partners and investors. The funding and technical support from the Polkadot Treasury and the Bounty sponsors have been crucial driving forces for the winning projects in this competition, encouraging more Polkadot ecosystem builders.
We hope that the teams that have emerged from this year’s Polkadot Hackathon will uphold their belief and courage to persistently develop in the Web3 industry. Let the competition be the starting point for continuous growth, and become pillars of strength in the industry, bringing innovative project experiences to the public!
Conclusion
We hope that the participants of Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Summer will carry the initial aspiration of building the Polkadot ecosystem and exploring Web3. May they continue to propel their projects into broader technology markets, bringing users fresh and innovative product experiences. OneBlock+ and Parity will continue to focus on the Polkadot ecosystem and technological frontier, providing firsthand information about hackathon entrepreneurship, recommending the latest technology courses, and sharing information about online and offline industry events. Together, we will continue to cultivate the Polkadot ecosystem!
If you regret missing this Polkadot Hackathon, don’t miss out on the opportunity to embark on a new exploration journey in the Polkadot ecosystem! The pre-registration for Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Winter is now open. Hackers, please pay attention to the registration link (https://forms.gle/Xhqng822BSM39X4T6).
Details about Polkadot Hackathon 2023 Winter, including event information and schedules, will also be released through OneBlock+ official media. Stay tuned for more updates!
About OneBlock+
OneBlock+ is the first and the largest blockchain developer community in China. At OneBlock+, we provide full support for developers with their substrate studies and further set off their career paths. We host Polkadot Hackathons every season to attract top-notch developers to build and innovate for the prosperity of the ecosystem. As a greater China technology resource integrator, OneBlock+ also partners with developers, communities, business elites, and key media who have business insights and experiences in the blockchain industry to provide educational events, such as technical courses, webinars, AMAs, and offline events for the industry. Want to shape the crypto world together? Come and join us today!
