FoB 2 Challenges
After our Launch Announcement, we are delighted to reveal details of the Challenges participants can answer during this year’s Future of Blockchain.
For those who are unaware, Future of Blockchain is a 3-month competition for developers in university cities. During the competition, participants can either build a startup or answer a technical challenge. They are rewarded with numerous prizes, both monetary and non-monetary. It is open to anyone who studies/studied or currently lives in the cities of Oxford, Cambridge, London or Berlin.
How it works
Participants can enter (by 1st November) in teams of 1–6. You can either participate by:
- General Challenge: Building or entering a startup/project of your own design
- Partner Challenges: Answering a technical challenge
Participants have 3 months (November to mid-March) to complete their project. You must register (you can apply up until submission day) and submit your project digitally by 15th March 2020.
Timeline
- w/c 21st October 2019: Launch Events
- 1st Nov 2019 to 15th March 2020: Build Period
- 15th March 2020: Submission Date
- 27th April 2020: Demo Day
Prizes
Open to every participant, there is an overall prize of £10k cash.
For each Partner Challenge (not including the General Challenge), there are set prizes. These are listed below
Partner Challenges
Gold Partners
Tezos
Tezos is a decentralized computing platform with a proof of stake consensus, formal verification and the ability to let stakeholders vote on changes to the protocol.
Challenge 1
- Spec: Build a DApp on Tezos on a subject of your choice. Examples include Finance, Supply Chain, Public Administration. Building a framework for DApps is accepted too!
Challenge 2
- Spec: Build tools for Tezos. You can either contribute to existing open
source tooling projects (block explorers, libraries to interact with a
node, etc cf. tezos.help, developers.tezos.com) or start from scratch.
Challenge 3
- Spec: Contribute to one of the parts of the Tezos codebase: its peer-to-peer or storage layers, its consensus algorithm, smart-contract language or voting rules. Full reimplementations are encouraged.
Prizes:
- Each challenge has a total prize of XTZ 20,000 (XTZ 60,000 in total)
- At the half of the competition (mid-December), a Tezos jury will select N promising projects with 0 <= N <= 10 and will attribute 4000/N tokens to each selected project (if there are any).
- At the end of the competition, for each challenge, the 1st prize (if any) would be (at most) XTZ 8,000 (i.e. one roll at the moment), the 2nd would be XTZ 4,000, and so on for every project that the jury wants to reward.
Algorand
Algorand is an open-source public blockchain based on a pure proof-of-stake consensus protocol.
Challenge 1
- Spec: Build an asset creation and management platform on Algorand that allows users to specify asset parameters, launch assets via sales, and manage assets on an ongoing basis.
- Prize*: 15000 Algos
Challenge 2
- Spec: Build a metamask like Chrome extension on Algorand for keeping spending keys secure and using them to sign transactions while using web applications.
- Prize*: 10000 Algos
Challenge 3:
- Spec: Develop template explorer for Algorand’s Transaction Execution Approval Language (TEAL)
- Prize*: 10000 Algos
- The Algo cannot be traded in the United States, Canada, or other jurisdictions listed on the Foundation website. For this reason, to receive an award, participants must provide deposit information with a bank located in Europe.
Silver Partners
Near Protocol
Near is a blockchain protocol designed to bridge the adoption gap for mainstream commercial DApps.
Challenge 1:
- Spec: Integrate with NEAR accounts. This is for anyone who uses the wallet and accounts from NEAR for Single Sign-On. Condition:
- Prizes: If you simply add SSO and it only logs the user in, then you automatically win $100. If you use the accounts and store data against a NEAR account id, then you can qualify for $500 + 100 Near tokens at the discretion of the judges.
Challenge 2:
- Spec: Build an app using Near. The app does exactly one thing, and it does it extremely well. This is as much a technical challenge as it is a design challenge. The test for passing this is that your mother’s mother should be able to understand and use your app. Bonus points for a lot of hard work behind the scenes making the user experience epic. Every detail of your user’s experience should be ironed out.
- Prizes: $5000 + 5000 tokens prize for every submission Near think good enough.
SAP
SAP is a market leader in enterprise application software.
- Spec: Design the Enterprise 2.0: pick a specific industry (e.g. automotive), along with a specific line of business (e.g. supply chain) and redesign it based on the DLT concepts of asset tokenisation, decentralised identity, decentralisation collaboration, interaction of resources without disclosing entire business flows. We encourage you to use any public blockchain
- Prize: A 3-month paid internship within NVT’s group working out of Potsdam, Germany. Just like with SAP employees who live in Berlin, the winners of the challenge who will accept the internship offer, will be able to travel from Berlin Westkreuz to Potsdam via the SAP shuttle currently in use by SAP employees.
Zilliqa
Zilliqa is a high-throughput blockchain platform
Zilliqa challenges will be based around “Social Pay”, which is a blockchain based app developed by Zilliqa that allows users to get ZIL tokens for tweeting.
Challenge 1
- Spec: Include more complex behaviour in Social Pay that makes business sense, such as varying the reward amount of ZIL tokens based on followers or letting people change the hashtag or build a reward equation based on interactions (likes, retweets, comments)
Challenge 2:
- Spec: Build Social Pay like functionality, or an enhanced version of it, on other popular social media sites like Instagram, Reddit, Facebook etc
Prizes:
1st: £3000 + enter the final stage of $5m grant pool (which provides funding with 0% equity in return)
2nd: £2000
3rd £1000
Oasis Labs
Oasis is a decentralised cloud with built-in data privacy and security.
Challenge 1:
- Spec: Run a node on Oasis. Join our staking competition and run a node on our mainnet. The highest performing Node gets an initial grant prize (TBD number of tokens) at end of November 2019.
- Prize: £1000k in USD
Challenge 2:
- Spec: Create a confidential version of key DeFi tools. Examples include CDP, Stablecoin, Oracle, DEX, and other ideas in the open finance space. Be creative and consider the key opportunities that blockchain enables in
finance. This can use existing code from ethereum and porting it over
to Oasis and adding confidential smart contracts. - Prize: £2,000 in USD
The Graph
The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data.
Challenge 1:
- Spec: Build a subgraph to index your smart contracts
- Prize: We are awarding 2 bounties of 500 DAI, for the best subgraph created and deployed that indexes data from your smart contracts.
Challenge 2:
- Spec: Utilize an existing subgraph from Graph Explorer to build a front-end dApp
- Prizes: We are awarding 4 bounties of 250 DAI each, for the best use of a subgraph in a front-end dApp.
Bronze Partners
Witnet
Witnet is a decentralised oracle network built on a blockchain with a native token.
Challenge 1
- Spec: Build a Dapp for mass adoption using Witnet. No blockchain experience needed, just used the Witnet guides!
- Prizes: 10 prizes. Top 3 will receive £500 each and rest will receive £100
Challenge 2
- Spec: Build a block explorer for Witnet to offer detailed information about the current and past state of the Witnet Blockchain.
- Prizes: £1st: £2k, 2nd: £1k, 3rd: £500
AdEx
AdEx Network is a new-generation solution aiming to address and correct some of the most prominent inefficiencies of the online advertising industry: user privacy misuse, ad fraud, lack of transparency in reporting, etc.
- Spec: Build a solution/migration for click fraud that works with AdEx Protocol
- Prize: £1,500 with an additional £2,000 available for exceptional projects.
Arweave
Arweave is a novel data storage blockchain protocol enabling a permanent serverless web and creating truly permanent data storage
- Spec: : Build a decentralised app on the permaweb, using Arweave Deploy and Arweave JS
- Prizes: 1 x £3,000, 2 x £1,500 and every permaweb dApp will win $250 in ETH + 150 AR
Catalyst Network
Catalyst is a full suite of new technologies enabling secure, decentralised computing and data storage.
- Spec: Develop a Visual Studio Professional, Code or other IDE extension for creating smart contract projects from templates in a similar manner as other project types supported by the IDE.
- Prizes: £2500
Launch Events
We will have a Launch Event for the competition in each city to provide more information to potential participants in the competition. The dates of which are:
Tuesday 22nd October: Oxford
Wednesday 23rd October: Cambridge
All events will last from 7–10pm. The format will be talks about the Competition and the Challenges, followed by an Information Fair.
Spreadsheet with more info on challenges available here!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b-0WjLYcZh7CNao1K4S5a37inqaepTSxfUiYAkKFBak/edit#gid=0
Registration
Registration is now open, please do so via www.futureofblockchain.co.uk. You can register for the competition anytime before the submission deadline (15th March).
Thank you to our partners for all their support!
Questions?
Email anthony@stakezero.com
