AlphaVHack Hackathon Winners Announced!
From May 29 — May 31, nearly 100 software engineers, financial advocates, beginners and experienced alike, entered the Alpha Vantage first virtual hackathon.
It was a fast-paced 3 days, where beginners and experienced engineers alike threw themselves into the world of fintech, looking to build something innovative.
With valuable prizes up for grabs, and a ton of workshops to help the engineers, there was a lot of support to give them the motivation and tools they needed. Some worked tirelessly without any sleep for the weekend, to build an interesting use case for themselves and the judges.
Here were the winners of each category!
Blockchain track winner: Blockaxis
They also won a judges award!
BlockAxis is a blockchain-based hybrid trading platform that enables users around the globe to gain access and trade in the foreign equity markets. The economic signal for investing in equity (stock) markets is a strong one in the COVID-19 era. A recent economic review article observes that “The COVID-19 pandemic has created the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unsurprisingly, 2020 has so far been a rollercoaster ride for investors in the public equity markets. Despite the higher volatility, it is still as important as ever for individuals to be invested in the public equity markets for their long-term financial health.” Under the macroeconomic backdrop, BlockAxis mixes the elements of both centralized and decentralized exchanges and reaps their benefits. Instead of using fiat currency as the medium of stock purchases, it uses stablecoins such as DAI which are primarily designed to maintain its stable price and avoid market volatility unlike traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Along with a beautiful UI, the team of Saffat Aziz, Thomas Hai Li from the University of Ottawa, High school student Mihir Kachroo, and Arianne Ghislaine Rull of L’Amoreaux Collegiate Institute worked day and night to build this project that won both a grand prize and judges pick award, bringing their total prize up to 75LINK token. Congratulations to all!
Fintech Track Winner: Nick’s mega-cap momentum trading strategy
This is a trading simulator with one strategy built-in. Other strategies could be added and run against Alpha Vantage data to find more patterns and learn more about the markets. The strategy uses a reverse head-and-shoulders approach to predict the momentum of securities and assigns alpha to them based off their movements.
Nick came into the hackathon knowing little about fintech and how to code it with python, and ended up leaving winning a 6 month 120 API call/minute key! The judges were impressed with a backtested (albeit a relatively short timeframe) trading strategy built from scratch in just a few days.
Built with python, his code is on Github if you want to try it out yourself, suggest improvements, or fork it to do whatever you’d like.
Judge’s Pick: SmartHealth
Also the rookie award!
SmartHealth is a smart contract in which its owner can create a mapping for both doctors and people of the country. Respectively, a specific doctor will be assigned to a specific person. Built entirely with solidity, this ETH based medical system could be used to store patient information on-chain, solving the issue of losing patient data and making patient data easier to share with other hospitals, while still keeping it private.
The most robust solidity contract in the competition, Sumit Banik of the Siliguri Institute of Technology proudly presents one of his earliest dives into the Ethereum and blockchain world and happily won two prizes over a thrilling weekend.
Judges Pick: VC Links
VCLinks connects entrepreneurs to venture capitalists looking to provide financing and expertise for projects. Entrepreneurs can easily create listings that describe their venture and their areas of interest, along with a recorded pitch and contact details. Additional details such as the amount of funding, type of funding, and financial details are provided upon further request. Venture capitalists can also express interest in certain industries or projects and will be required to complete a profile to facilitate our advanced tag searching features.
VCLinks can empower VC firms and entrepreneurs to meet in an easy, fun, interactive way. Powered by Edward Lee, Eli-Henry Dykhne, Kelvin Chen, and Ashmita Rajkumar, this is their team's first hackathon win and they are so proud of it!
I’d be sure to watch out for all these engineers in the future, as they have some great ideas and a lot of hard work to get them places.
Congratulations to all again!
