IPFS Ethereum Hackathon Results

It’s time to announce the results of the IPFS Ethereum Hackathon 2017, as hosted by MetaMask and The Seattle Ethereum Meetup and sponsored by ConsenSys!

The week kicked off with an amazing series of talks from some of the biggest thinkers in the decentralized web. You can watch the whole thing here (edited videos coming soon on the MetaMask YouTube channel):

The Goals

The goals of the hackathon were simple: to bring a number of decentralized-web teams together to share their work, put their heads together, and open an invitation to a wider audience to participate.

The open hackathon was a call for working projects that used both Ethereum and IPFS. You can see the scoring rubric here.

The prize was simple but honorable: a podcast interview with Sir Arthur Falls of The Ether Review Podcast.

What We Built

While the participants were hacking away, the hosts were too! The host projects were:

• EipSignal: A series of pieces that can be used to manage a decentralized standards body by Dan Finlay from MetaMask and Casey Detrio from the Ethereum Foundation. EipSignal could eventually light a path for evolving the web3 provider protocol in a democratic fashion. This project is still under development, but you can look forward to some exciting news soon!
• DappHub: A one-input-box “Wolfram Alpha for the Ethereum Blockchain” by Ryan Casey and Andy Milenius of the DappHub team, with a working example. During the week, Dapple added support for ethpm-compatible ipfs links for browsing source code. Try entering the database contract for Eip-DAO into its search box:

ipfs://QmNvkFwUn3UikUSXHUGpoJcrf4BQzozD459T2rt1AbZyqY

• MetaMaskMesh: Lastly, of the the projects that initiated the entire hackathon, Aaron Davis continued his exciting work writing a peer to peer gossip layer allowing JavaScript ethereum clients to share Ethereum blocks over the IPFS protocol. He also taught IPFS how to interpret Ethereum paths, allowing simple resolution of paths like {block_hash}/state/{address}/balance which will allow the writing of a JavaScript web3 provider that is not backed by a traditional RPC but can instead be backed by peer to peer communication, like a true Ethereum light client.

The Contestants

All entries were submitted as Github Issues on the Hackathon’s Github repository.

There were three final contestants. They all had good ideas and goals:

• MusicCoin: A fork of the Ethereum blockchain designed to help musicians earn royalties peer-to-peer.
• Carbon Harvest: A strategy to solve global warming using IOT and the Ethereum Blockchain (NBD!)
• Matriarch: A website for deploying and managing customized Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), based on the MiniMe DAO token.

The Winner

While all of the entries were noble pursuits, one stood out for a few reasons:

• It had the most working functionality of all the submissions, including both MetaMask and IPFS integrations.
• It did not try to reinvent the wheel, but rather built on existing aspects of the ecosystem, which the judges felt best represented the virtues of the transparent, decentralized web.

This winner was Matriarch, by ChicoBitcoinJoe. You can try a live demo here! It has a few rough edges, but for a hackathon entry, it represents a considerable achievement, and we’re very proud of Joe’s work!

You can look forward to Joe being interviewed soon by Arthur Falls!

Wrapping Up

This hackathon was great for the participants and hosts, and we made big steps forward for the Ethereum ecosystem by hyper-powering it on the IPFS protocol, and we’re hoping to do it again. (And we’ll publicize the hackathon better in the future!)

It wouldn’t have happened without a ton of community support, so a final thank you to the following people & organizations:

• Martin Bezce for coming up with the idea.
• Frankie BeeQueen for leading the organizational efforts and making it happen.
• Kenny Rowe for bringing together the Seattle Ethereum community, and pulling such a big crowd, even on the night of a historic Super Bowl!
• ConsenSys for sponsoring the location for the hacking to occur.
• IPFS and its team for creating a peer to peer platform for sharing merkle DAGs so flexible that it could carry Ethereum!
• The DappHub team for providing live tools and support for our participants!

There are inevitably people we’ve forgotten to list, but your contributions will live forever in the blockchain, not as transactions, but as enrichment, so thank you for all that you’ve done!