This September, we kicked off Avalanche mainnet launch alongside the inaugural MoneyDance to bring together crypto builders, enthusiasts, and industry experts. As DeFi rose in immense popularity, so did the innovations using blockchain and smart contract technologies.
Beginning on September 28, we kicked off the MoneyDance Summit and Hackathon as a celebration of DeFi and launch party for Avalanche. MoneyDance had high ambitions to provide highly-engaging programming for all, ranging from deep technical workshops to non-technical discussions about the future of DeFi.
Across the 6 Summit days, we had over 1,350 attendees come to watch the sessions led by speakers such as Kathleen Breitman, co-founder of Tezos, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, Mona El Isa, co-founder of Melon Protocol, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, and many more. To date, the recorded sessions have received over 7,000 views and counting!
Hackers Building Without Limits
Running alongside the Summit was the MoneyDance Hackathon, which featured 250 builders competing for many prizes provided by Avalanche, Polyient Games, Biconomy, and Quantstamp. Each prize had specific requirements to integrate the sponsor’s tech.
During the Hackathon, we were focused on making sure Avalanche continually improved with new features and stability fixes to ensure a seamless development experience. To bolster these efforts, we also launched the Avalanche Forum and brand new Avalanche Developer Documentation. A tremendous amount of discussion and activity has resulted thus far, and we’ve never been more excited about the future for developers building on Avalanche.
Our expert team of judges from projects like Polyient Games, Lemniscap, and Frontier Wallet evaluated and narrowed the submissions down to the top project from the inaugural MoneyDance Hackathon*:
reNFT — Renting NFTs
reNFT is a protocol layer that enables peer to peer renting of ERC-721 NFTs. It enables holders of NFT assets to put them to work by renting out gaming assets to use in blockchain gaming experiences, digital art, or any other NFT asset. A user can rent an NFT by staking collateral and paying the total rent amount for the duration.
How reNFT Works
Lending an NFT
When a lender rents out an NFT, it is transferred to the reNFT escrow smart contract to list it on the market. The NFT owner can specify the following when renting it out:
- Rental price — the daily borrow price that the owner will be compensated
- NFT price — This is the collateral a borrower must pay to rent
- Max Rental Period — The owner can decide the maximum number of days that the NFT can be rented
Renting an NFT
Renting enables anyone to borrow an NFT for a variety of experiences, which opens the opportunity for new NFT marketplaces. A borrower can rent an NFT with the following considerations:
- Duration — The borrower must specify the duration they would like to rent the NFT
- Total Rent Price — This must be paid and it is calculated by multiplying the duration and the set rental price
- Collateral — The borrower must also pay the full collateral price, which is stored in reNFT’s contract, which is returned when the NFT is successfully returned
The reNFT team’s mission is to revolutionize the ever-expanding NFT market by enabling owners the ability to generate revenue off their assets, and renters the ability to use a variety of NFTs in experiences without having to pay the premium of ownership. Keep up to date on their progress as they look to expand the growing NFT marketplace here.
As our first Avalanche-hosted event, we want to thank all of the sponsors, judges, experts, hackers, and attendees who made the event success. With over 1,350 total participants in this event and more than a few lessons learned in the process, we’re excited about what the future of MoneyDance holds for the blockchain ecosystem.
As always, stay tuned for more to come on our official channels.
Highlights from MoneyDance Summit
If you didn’t have a chance to make all six Summit days to learn from industry experts, we recommend you check them out in the complete MoneyDance video library. Some highlights include:
DeFi 2.0: Virtual Discussion with Emin Gün Sirer, CEO at Ava Labs, and Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink
- Learn their crypto origin stories
- What key technical issues aren’t being addressed
- Why they think DeFi could eventually overtake the global financial system
- What DeFi looks like a year from now
Panel: How to Grow a Decentralized Brand to Mainstream with Jason Yanowitz, Co-founder of Blockworks Group; Adelyn Zhou, Head of Marketing at Chainlink; Jay Kurahashi-Sofue, VP of Marketing at Ava Labs; Yelena Osin, VP of Marketing at Fireblocks; Claire Kart, Head of Marketing at Mina Protocol
- The challenges of marketing blockchain brands as a whole
- How to handle many different audiences and segments
- Nuances of communicating across multiple, disparate communications platforms and channels
When Will Institutional and Decentralized Finance Converge? Panel with John Wu, President at Ava Labs; Jamie Finn, President at Securitize; Ben Tsai, Founder of Wave Financial; Josh Lim, Head of Derivatives at Genesis Global Trading; Max Boonen, Founder of B2C2
- How asset issuers from traditional finance are exploring blockchains, including Avalanche, to expand distribution and liquidity
- Geographic differences in tokenization efforts, regulation, and investment
- Why recent bitcoin allocations by listed corporations like Square and MicroStrategy haven’t had as much of an impact as it likely would’ve in 2017, and how these firms are engaging with emerging prime brokerage services
- The challenges of measuring and appropriately pricing risk within DeFi, as technology and regulatory uncertainty complicate risk management
- Products within DeFi that remind the panelists of traditional assets
- Predictions for 2021
Corporations from the Future with Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder and CEO of Polychain Capital
- How software is eating the traditional corporate structure, which will push us further from the traditional financial system
- How scalable, foundational technology can support these organizations to grow even faster with smaller teams
- How the future of corporate structures can operate, and what they enable
Virtual Discussion with Kathleen Breitman and Emin Gün Sirer
- How they define decentralization and how they’re making the ideal definitions possible with Tezos and Avalanche
- What’s missing from the crypto, blockchain, and DeFi ecosystems & what key issues aren’t being technically addressed
- A dive into Kathleen’s work within the gaming and NFT space with Emergents
- The rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) efforts, and how these efforts will intersect with cryptocurrencies
- Advice for individuals getting ready to found their first projects in the crypto
RenVM, Bringing Interoperability to Avalanche with Loong Wang, CTO at Ren Project
- How Ren Project is working with Avalanche and how it will help the Avalanche ecosystem grow
- Ren’s role in enabling flexibility and interoperability of assets across networks — including assets like wrapped Bitcoin on Avalanche — so developers and users can choose the best consensus mechanism for their use cases while tapping into existing liquidity
- What excites Loong about Avalanche
*Final projects are subject to change; judges may still include additional finalists.
About Avalanche
Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized finance applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Developers who build on Avalanche can easily create powerful, reliable, and secure applications and custom blockchain networks with complex rulesets or build on existing private or public subnets.
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