ETHNY June 2022 — Connext Hackathon Winners

Another great hackathon has just wrapped up in New York!

With 1500 attendees and 251 project submissions, this was the biggest event for ETHGlobal this year.

It was fantastic to meet old friends and new people that learned and were mind blown by what Connext can do: upgrading a dApp to crosschain has never been easier.

Here is a recap of what happened.

Workshop: 🛠 Building Crosschain xApps with Connext

Layne, co-founder and head of R&D, and Luke (from the Nomad’s team) ran a workshop on how to build xApps, exploring crosschain transfers of tokens, how to perform xchain governance, and execute xchain tokenless data transfers in the most secure way.

You’ll be able to find it on the Connext Youtube Channel together with other videos and tutorials.

Connext Awards for the best xchain projects

Out of the numerous submissions we received, we decided to award CrossFader built by an anonymous developer and Jorge with the top prize of this hackathon.

Crossfader is crosschain transaction anonimizer.
We believe privacy is a key right of internet users, and tools like this help to promote a privacy-first environment across any blockchain.

The project leverages zk snarks and cross chain liquidity routing to initiate privacy preserving transactions on any chain in the growing EVM ecosystem. The Connext API is used to transfer tokens cross chain into a pool in which users can prove they are members of, without revealing their initial depositing address.

The potential for anonimous crosschain transactions is still untackled — we were impressed by the ability of the team to deliver an end-to-end working MVP, and their capacity to create the advanced cryptographic proofs to assemble the tool.

Note: the name of the project was changed after the submission

We also recognized the potential and awarded the following projects:

For the xDeFi category:

DEXcellence, for the potential of a new frequent batch auction crosschain DEX that promises more efficient and MEV protected trades: privacy is built-in by never broadcasting order data before transactions and settlements occur.

The team developed a frequent batch auction market with on-chain price discovery and on-chain transactions and settlements. Prices are set by call auctions off-chain. Orders are batched and executed at predetermined intervals, and are maintained off-chain without visibility to market participants to prevent front-running. The clearing price ensures that volume and fairness is maximized at each auction. This is in contrast to continuous order books, which are highly time-sensitive and therefore susceptible to front-running and price impact, and AMMs which suffer from high slippage and impermanent loss.Learn more.

For the xNFTs category:

Forest, a project focused on social impact that aims to gamify the use of carbon credits.
Players need to buy BCT (tokenized carbon credits) and feed treesNFTs, a representation of trees. The beauty of their NFTs is that they will be natively crosschain, allowing them to be seamlessly moved across different blockchains and potentially gamify also this aspect (find some special tools on specific chains only), together with the opportunity to tackle multiple NFT/GameFi communities. Learn more.

NFTBlender. A tool to combine existing NFTs into a newly minted one, generate via a ML algorithm that can combine the art of the parent NFTs.
The mint generates a crosschain NFT using NFTHashi, giving it the potential to freely move across any chain in a secure way.

We are extremely happy to see that projects born at previous hackathons like NFTHashi are now used as a base for new exciting use cases!

The crosschain-money-lego wave has just started.

About Connext

Connext is a network for fast, trustless communication between chains and rollups. It is the only interoperability system of its type that does this cheaply and quickly without introducing any new trust assumptions. Connext is aimed at developers who are looking to build bridges and other natively cross-chain applications. To date, over $1.5b in transactions have crossed the network.

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