Fluence Devnet Hackathon Recap: Winners And Takeaways

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Fluence Labs

5 min readApr 17, 2019

Decentralization, clusters, validators, functional programming, smart contracts, networks — all together, this might be too much even for an experienced developer to dig through. At Fluence, we’re super-focused on making our product as easily approachable for developers as possible. What’s the best way to communicate the idea that launching a DApp with Fluence is simple and frictionless? Let people try it themselves!

So on April 13 (we’re not superstitious) we gathered for the first Fluence Devnet Hackathon in Moscow at the 2GIS headquarters. For the next eight hours, 35 people across six teams would compete for the $2,000 prize pool.

Fluence combines full-featured databases and arbitrary code execution in one decentralized platform. We were keen to see what ideas could pop into hackers’ heads and what applications and components might be built with them!

For judging, we invited Andrey Lelikov (Fluence advisor, ex-Microsoft), a security and cryptography engineer, and Petr Korolev (a co-founder of Matter Labs), cryptographer and zero-knowledge proofs researcher. Judges scored projects by their relevance to Fluence, readiness, and ambition (the bigger the problem the project solves, the better).

The Winners

The first prize was shared by two teams — both delivered working code within a short time frame and integrated it with Fluence tools.

First Prize: Decentralized Collaborative Art

The Shared Canvas inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage is a great showcase for what can be done with Fluence and a couple of hours of coding. Fluence made possible running a map of 1000x1000 colored pixels, which can be painted in a real-time by multiple users. The app doesn’t require users to understand gas, transactions, or any other blockchain concepts, making the user experience smooth and easy. Needless to say, uploading and coloring such a map on any blockchain would be an enormous waste of resources.

Play here or see the code on GitHub.

First Prize: Decentralized Backend for a Casual Game

A decentralized backend for a turn-based strategy game, Necromancer Returns. The project perfectly captures the idea that Fluence is capable of both storing data and executing complex game logic — something that’s almost impossible to achieve with modern public blockchains. In-game items, skills, perks, NPCs, monsters, and whatever else you could imagine inside a typical game are now integrated with the complex game logic execution on a single Fluence platform. “No vendor lock-in on the games or items” — pointed out as one of the key features in the team’s pitch — added points to the team’s final score.

See the code on GitHub.

Second Prize: Decentralized Verifiable Random Functions

The MixBytes team explores an in-depth approach to random number generation in the decentralized environment with VRF (verifiable random functions). It is pretty hard to run existing C++ libraries on public blockchains due to various code execution constraints, but Fluence is different! The team was able to successfully port and run the BLS signature library on the Fluence network. This shows how easy, brick-by-brick, the community can increase the value of the Fluence platform, bringing critical components for other developers.

Check out the code on GitHub.

Third Prize: Decentralized Exchange

The team sought to tackle the exchanges problem: if centralized, they are subject to multiple fraud attempts, attacks, and malicious actions by various actors with conflicting interests. The best way to solve this is to create a DEX that belongs to no one and won’t hold all of its participants’ funds in one place with limited access. The team designed a DEX architecture where Fluence is used as an order-matching engine (bids and asks). Such a system can process thousands of events a real time and prevent front-running problems by design: Fluence always reaches consensus on the order of transactions before running them.

Honorable Mention: Crypto Poker

Proper deck shuffling is a non-trivial task when you operate in a decentralized network where parties cannot trust each other. The team went too deep into the algebraic complexity of their algorithms, writing more formulas than actual code, but the verdict was promising: decentralized deck shuffling and dealing hands inside the Fluence network would work perfectly, along with the capability to sustain multiple tables/rooms. A provably-fair poker platform might be a huge step forward for blockchain gambling applications.

The Feedback

The fascinating part is that in less than four hours, five out of the six teams had managed to build and deploy their proof of concept using the technology and tools they first saw only a couple of hours before. While there is plenty of room to grow, most participants noted that:

“The deployment part turned to be the easiest one.”
“The Devnet feels ready for real-life projects and commercial applications.”
“Awesome dashboard!”

We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants and thank them for all the feedback, questions, and discussions we had during the hackathon. We certainly had a great time!