#BUIDL with Clearmatics: ETHDenver Bounties

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clearmatics

5 min readFeb 14, 2019

In this post we share our ETHDenver bounties and how you can #BUIDL with Clearmatics at this year’s event.

We’re super excited about ETHDenver.

For those that don’t know, ETHDenver is the largest Ethereum based #buidlathon (aka hackathon) in the world for Ethereum developers. It’s a 36-hour marathon of talks and workshops given by the world’s top blockchain influencers and Ethereum experts. It’s a chance for our community to gather, learn and build… and hopefully make some new friends in the process!

This is our first ETHDenver, and with the event set to kick off on 15 February 2019 we wanted to provide an update on bounties for our interoperability framework, Ion. But before we do, here’s a bit of background.

Who are we?

We are Clearmatics, a London based startup designing, building and deploying Ethereum-based peer-to-peer platforms for financial market participants to transact seamlessly and securely without unnecessary intermediaries.

We’re combining cryptography, consensus protocols and economic mechanism design to push towards a future state of dFMI (distributed Financial Market Infrastructure).

We call our approach “decentralised automation”. Central to this is Ion, our platform-agnostic interoperability framework. We’re currently implementing use cases such as payment-versus-payment, delivery-versus-payment and beyond, and we need your help at ETHDenver 2019!

What exactly is Ion?

Ion is a system and function-agnostic framework for building cross-interacting smart contracts between blockchains and/or systems. It does not restrict itself to certain methods of interoperation and is not opinionated on what specific functions it should be built for and, as such, it is an open protocol.

Atomic swaps and decentralised exchanges can be built on Ion and facilitate the free movement of value across different blockchains. These are just two of the possible use-cases that can be developed on top of the Ion framework.

The vision behind Ion is for it to evolve into becoming a library of tools that developers can use on any system to build cross-chain smart contracts to interoperate with any other system.

What are we doing at ETHDenver?

This year we’re working on a bunch of projects that we hope we can #buidl with you all at ETHDenver. Specifically, there are two at the top of our list that we hope you can contribute to:

#BUIDL-ION — First, #buidling with Ion, our general interoperability framework, allowing interactions between any chain with the ETHDenver Community.
#BUIDL-AUTONITY — Secondly, we’re launching Autonity. Autonity is our IBFT geth-based Ethereum client. We want to explore how we can go about connecting the Enterprise Ethereum world with the public space.

Bounties up for grabs

We have 3 reward categories where you can demonstrate your creativity and technical expertise, with a total of $5,000 in cash up for grabs. You can submit to as many categories as you like — in fact, we’d love you to participate in all three!

1. $2,000 Bounty — #BUIDL The Ion Protocol

With this bounty, we want to see how you, the ETHDenver community, can evolve, enhance and further develop the Ion interoperability protocol.

To do this we need to write a lot of code, and we can’t do it alone. Suggestions include the development of new validation contracts for different consensus mechanisms and system-specific storage contracts not just for Ethereum based platforms but for many different blockchains and DLTs.

Additionally, we want to improve the Ion we already have and would love to see more general enhancements to the framework in areas such as efficiency or privacy.

2. $1,000 Bounty — #BUIDL with Ion — dApp Category

We want you to use Ion for any cross-chain use case. Whether it’s creating a decentralised exchange, a simple atomic-swap or getting oracle data on-chain the possibilities endless. You could also use Ion and our client, Autonity, to relay computationally expensive procedures on a side chain. Come up with your own use cases using Ion.

Here are some suggestions for Use Cases:

DEX
Atomic-Swap
Sidechain for scalability (Clearmatics’ Autonity client can be used)
Oracle
Dapp for state transfer visualisation

3. $500 Bounty — #WOW-Ion — Simply, WOW us

The Ion Interoperability framework allows the transfer of state between systems. The generality allows for many different potential use cases. With this bounty, we want you to amaze and surprise us in the way you’ve utilised the framework.

There are 4 prizes of $500, totalling $2,000.

Documentation and resources

Below we’ve provided all the documentation you need to get started:

Requirements

Link to the open source code
Short Readme/Explanation of Bounty Submission

Judging Criteria

We will judge bounty submissions based on the criteria used at ETHSF (Technical, Original, Ambitious, Design/UX) on a scale of not very to very.

Don’t forget to say hello!

We can’t wait to discover what ETHDenver has to offer. We heard so many great things about last year that we can’t wait for it to kick off.

We’d love to meet you while we’re in Colorado and hear what you’re working on! We’re also on hand to answer any questions regarding the ION framework, Autonity and dFMI.

Our CTO, George Ornbo has flown out from London to attend, along with some of our blockchain engineers, Youssef Azzaoui, Duarte Aragao, Chris Chung, Max Grabner and Andrés Monteoliva. We also have our product strategist, Sara Feenan, along with me, Christophe MacIntosh, communications and community lead here at Clearmatics in Denver.

So drop by our booth and let’s talk!

Cheers,

Christophe

Christophe MacIntosh, cmacintosh, Community & Communications Lead, Clearmatics

Tweet us @Clearmatics