The first Alephium Hackathon “Pioneers”, took place online between the 12th & 26th of February. After carefully reviewing all final submissions, the jury & partners (Bitmain, Blockflow Alliance DAO, Cetacean Capital & Dappnode) are ready to announce the winners.
The whole Alephium core-team has been blown away by the energy of participants and the quality of the submissions. It wishes to express to all participants its immense pleasure to see Alephium’s tools, languages & protocol used with so much creativity & dedication. The jury has taken its time to evaluate each submission on its own merit, according to the criteria exposed here.
Two weeks of intense building have ended up with 26 submissions from the 105 participants, for either the main track prizes or the bounties. Of these, 18 were qualified for the Main prizes (tooling, dapps & interoperability) and 8 were considered for the bounties. If you want to see a description of all submissions, head up here.
MAIN PRIZES
The Jury has slightly edited the prize pools, to adapt to the final submission layup. Main prizes have been significantly increased (especially the lower ones) & the total envelope for sidequests has been a bit reduced to account for slightly fewer bounty submissions than we were expecting. The total prize amount has not changed. And now, to the winners!
#1 Winner — Invariant: DEX with CLAMM mechanism — wins $15’000
Invariant has tackled an extraordinarily hard problem and solved it very elegantly. High-quality implementation of a high-impact project, very well executed, impressive within such a timeframe.
Invariant DEX is a permissionless AMM DEX featuring a concentrated liquidity mechanism. The team has focused on prioritizing smart contract development and testing the programming capabilities of Alephium VM along with the Ralph programming language.
#2 Winner — LinxOTC — wins $10’000
Linx has built a useful feature with fantastic frontend quality baked in from inception. On top of this great idea, executed with a high-quality code, its constant communication has been top notch.
LinxOTC is a platform for P2P trading and lending on Alephium. Linx Labs, a well-known contributor to Kadena’s ecosystem, is adding p2p lending specifically during the hackathon, an Oracle-free solution where people can lend and borrow from each other.
Links: Twitter Discord Telegram Video Presentation
#3 Winner — Alph.Pro Indexer — wins $6’000
Alph.Pro Indexer has built a powerful plugin-enabled subgraph-like system that wins the team’s applause because of its potential versatility and the wide use that can be done of that fully open-sourced code.
Alph.pro Indexer started as a simple backend for a specific dashboard, it has grown into an extensible plugin system where adding new ‘indexers’ for specific purposes (i.e. tracking ayin pool reserves) is quite easy. This info is exposed through a powerful rest API with swagger documentation with info about NFTs, tokens, users, and more. Serves as the basis for the Alph.pro dashboard.
Links: Website Twitter Video Presentation
#4 Winner — Donera — wins $5’000
Donera deserves praise for the powerful & original dApp it has been able to develop within a short time frame, and that displays both high code quality & good structure.
Donera is a crowdfunding app like GoFundMe. The MVP includes creating a fund, donating ALPH to it, finalizing and browsing active funds, and viewing and donating to an individual fund. The first funds exist already!
#5 Winner — Alephium Stats / Blockchain Visualizer — wins $4’000
The Blockchain visualizer has won hearts and minds by focusing on displaying something that is very Alephium-specific: its blockflow sharding algorithm. UI & UX are great, the front-end code is well structured, quite simple, and easy to use & it’s well documented!
The Alephium Blockflow Visualizer and Stats Dashboard is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance the understanding and accessibility of the Alephium blockchain.
#6, #7, #8, #9 in no particular order — each wins 2’000$
ABI2API & ABIExtractor are both tools built by a builder for builders, and even if there’s a lot of work ahead, the jury has recognized the value (and quality) of the undertaking.
Phoenix Finance has won hearts for its original idea, good execution & excellent testing.
Sezame too, with its Oracle project is tackling a very hard problem that will benefit the common good of the Alephium ecosystem when it comes to fruition.
Finally, Starfish Identity built an elegant system for DID, with a strong focus on quality UX, and we want to see what comes out of it!
PARTNER PRIZES
Alephium’s first hackathon partners have been extremely generous, tremendously expanding the prize pool for winners. On top of that, each has chosen one or more projects to give their Partner’s prizes to.
Bitmain’s Prize goes to Alephium Stats / Blockchain Visualizer — 2’500$
“Alephium’s first hackathon showcased the remarkable talent and enthusiasm within its community. We’re excited to highlight the Blockflow visualizer as an excellent representation of Alephium’s distinctive technology. This event has reinforced our confidence in Alephium’s bright future. Congratulations to all participants for their impressive contributions to this successful hackathon.”
BITMAIN is a global leader in digital currency mining servers and is committed to creating a better digital world. With cutting-edge hash-rate efficiency technologies, they drive secure, stable hashrate infrastructure, fueling innovation in the web 3.0 era.
Blockflow Alliance DAO’s prize is split between Invariant (1’000$), Donera (1’000$) & NGU.land (500$).
“Selecting the winning projects was a challenging task, as each one deserved recognition. Ultimately, we prioritized projects that not only have the potential to attract a new audience to Alephium but also provide significant value to our current members. This approach ensures that we support initiatives that both expand our community and enhance the experience for existing users, allowing them to delve deeper into what makes Alephium unique.”
Blockflow Alliance is Alephium’s first-ever community DAO, dedicated to boosting adoption & usage, expanding the community, nurturing development & promoting the Alephium ecosystem.
Cetacean Capital’s prize goes to LinxOTC — 2’500$
“We were blown away by the caliber of talent showcased in Alephium’s first-ever Hackathon! It just goes to show that great tech attracts great talent. Although it proved challenging to choose a single winner, our choice was Linx Labs. That being said, we were so impressed by some of the projects that we will be reaching out to many of them to provide additional funding and leverage our expertise to assist them in further developing within Alephium’s rapidly expanding ecosystem.” Raj, Cetacean Capital.
Cetacean Capital aims to be DeFi’s most loved, efficient, and profitable Investment DAO. As individuals, its members have incredible skills, experience, knowledge and contacts, in the crypto-space for many years.
Dappnode prize goes to Sezame — a home node i532–4N model
“At Dappnode, we’re excited to be part of Alephium’s hackathon as sponsors. These initiatives are crucial for cultivating the skills and talent of builders within the ecosystem.”
Dappnode is the self-owned infrastructure layer for a human-centric, data-sovereign, private-by-design internet. Dappnode lowers the barrier of entry for non-tech-savvy participants.
BOUNTIES
There have been two kinds of bounties: 6 submissions were self defined bounties projects, and 2 were bounties that Alephium proposed the participants to tackle. In the side quests category, the jury has recognized the following projects.
Alph.Pro Vending Machine — wins 2’000$
The vending machine has provided a lot of good vibes & fun during the hackathon, quickly ran out of beer and now stands almost half empty already! Joke aside, it’s a testament of how fast you can go from ideation to an actual functioning product on Alephium!
Fun NFT office snack dispenser for your next online office meeting. Buy any amount of each food offered as long as they are still available. As of writing, beer & popcorn & pizza are sold out!
Links: Website Twitter Video Presentation
Merkle Tree Proof for allowlist — wins 2’000$
This bounty has been completed flawlessly. It’s a very useful library for other dApps, with tests and demonstrations!
Merkle trees are essential in blockchain and dApp development, they facilitate implementations where the entire set of data can’t be stored on chain and a solution is needed to verify a set of data exists and is valid without having the entire dataset for verification purposes. The implementation is inspired by OpenZeppelin ETH library, in an attempt to provide a standardized reliable implementation of Merkle proofs on Alephium
Notrustverif’s TipAlph — wins 2’000$
The TipBot is all around a well-functioning product, working really well on telegram, allowing anyone to tip ALPH or any other token with a very simple UX.
TipALPH was built by No Trust Verify. It is a tipping bot for Telegram, similar to LightningTipBot for Alephium.
Links: Twitter Telegram Video Presentation
Alph.pro Defi DiscordBot — wins 2’000$
The Alph.pro Defi DiscordBot is a well thought one swiss army knife bot for Discord. It even includes a non-custodial tipbot that works really well and offers an interesting tool for payment!
Alph.pro Discord Bot is a bot aiming to be a ‘one stop shop’ for Discord helpers to provide token prices and details, LP info, and more. Try it out in What The Duck discord.
Links: Twitter Video Presentation
Noodle Token — wins 1’000$
Noodz has worked on one of the bounties (airdrop contract).
Description: Noodz has worked on 4 contracts: Airdrop Contract, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) contract, Coin Flip Contract, Pinko Contract. They have since completed their ICO and released their first token builder app.
SPECIAL PRIZES
The special prizes are the discretionary, additional pool, that the jury could use to reward projects at its discretion, on top of main prizes, partner prizes or bounties. Here’s the full list of special prizes:
Phoenix Finance gets 500$ for its exceptional test coverage and intriguing concept! ABI2API & ABIExtractor gets 500$ for the ambition & usefulness of its tooling. Rakku DexTools gets 500$ for leveraging partners in our ecosystem & using Flux to deploy their node. Alph Dabbler gets 500$ for his courageous journey into coding as well as his amazing thread & presentation.
NGU gets 500$ for their Discord tipping bot, and 250$ more for bringing so much $LOVE to the ecosystem with the richlist. Mereproof & ChronoSwap Dex also get 250$ each.
In the bounties, Alph.pro Vending Machine, Merkle Tree Proof for Allowlist each get a 500$ extra boost. TipAlph, Alph.Pro Discord bot, Use Toll, Simple DAO & Squirrel-SQRL get 250$ for their respective submissions.
CONCLUSION
We will be back with another hackathon! For core contributors, it’s awesome to see builders build & get inspired. A lot of awesome projects are going to come out of the hackathon, which are going to be important pieces of the growing, burgeoning Alephium ecosystem.
We thank you for keeping up with us, and we have heard your suggestions for the next hackathons. Next one will be different!
One thing we don’t want to change is that awesome community energy, nerdcore vibe and good, productive & welcoming ambiance!
Thank you!
