Hack, eat, and forget to sleep
Coming back from our hackathon weekend in both Berkeley and Bangalore, we still feel totally euphoric. The first weekend of October, hundreds of brilliant developers and designers headed to the famous UC Berkeley campus for Calhacks 4.0, and to the Cowkrs offices located in Bangalore’s spectacular Ecoworld building for India’s biggest community hackathon InOut. Prepared to hack, eat, and forget to sleep, hackers spent the weekend to build cutting-edge technologies, supported by our team members and those of Microsoft, a16z, Facebook, Nasdaq, PayPal, Google, and more.
It was a pleasure to see how curious and excited hackathon participants got about the Blockchain technology, Ethereum, and the idea of prediction markets. With a go-getter attitude that is commonplace in today’s startup world, students who haven’t heard much about the Blockchain before just jumped right in and started hacking. They caught up on the technical requirements so fast that they were able to deliver prototypes within 30 hours — we were more than impressed.
We’re very thankful for the teams who decided to dive deep into GnosisJS and build use cases for prediction markets. Here’s a big shout out to the best applications that have been developed on Gnosis during both hackathons:
🐻 Calhacks 4.0
Bet-On-It by Tian Qiin and Ashley Nguyen
The first-place team at Calhacks built a decentralized application (DApp) that encourages users to complete their own tasks by giving them financial rewards upon task completion. Users need to put an initial stake in the market if they want other users to participate and bet on whether or not the market creator will complete a given task. Thus, if the market creator forfeits their promise, the participants who bet against him/her will earn a profit while the task creator and their supporters lose their stakes.
We loved the simplistic interface allowing users to easily manage their to-do lists and create a prediction market for each task. In the future, the Bet-on-It team hopes to add functionality for users to share task prediction markets only with a certain group of people so that they can challenge friends, family members, and colleagues.
🔷 InOut
SpamSlam by Team Freisenberger (Akash Trehan, Kumar Ayush, Kumar Ashutosh)
The first prize at InOut goes to team “Freisenberger” who created a prediction market logic for spam emails with the goal to deter spammers. Before sending an email, the sender needs to place a prediction that the email is not spam and back it with ETH. Upon reception of the email, the receiver then also needs to place a prediction as to whether the email is spam or not. If both sender and receiver state that the email is not spam, they get their investment back. However, if the receiver predicts that the email is indeed spam, a third-party oracle will verify the outcome and if confirmed, the receiver earns a profit while the sender incurs a loss. A small part of the winning party’s profit will also be used to finance the oracle solution. You can watch a full demo of their product here.
Although team “Freisenberger” has been entirely new to the Blockchain and Ethereum, they learned incredibly fast and could creatively apply the Gnosis framework within a couple hours.
Both teams won the first-place prize of $3,000 worth of GNO tokens for their great work.
🐻 Calhacks 4.0
Gnosis Privacy Token by Alexis Gauba
Taking the second-place prize of $1000 worth of GNO tokens at Calhacks was Alexis who built a prediction market revolving around the question: Which privacy-oriented token will perform better, ZCash or Monero?
The fact that there aren’t many valid sources currently available producing actionable information on the legitimacy of ICO-backed companies inspired Alexis to create a prediction market that would not only provide insight into public sentiment about tokens, but also hold ICO-backed projects accountable. With a prediction market on their token performance, competing companies will be incentivized to uphold their promises and hence satisfy their token holders. In the future, bots with access to data streams on certain performance indicators will also be able to participate in the market. Check out a detailed description about Alexis’ motivation and future vision of the project here.
🔷 InOut
Fake News Predictor by Team Reaction (Abhishek Warokar, Ayush Shukla, Manoj M)
The second-prize team at InOut built a fake news predictor based on Ethereum where users can mark media posts as fake or genuine by buying a token using ETH. If their prediction matches the final outcome, they will earn a profit, otherwise they’d incur a loss. Check out their Github Repo here.
🐻 Calhacks 4.0
BitTrace by Michael Qu, Arthur Silverstein, Gary Ge, George Lee.
🔷 InOut
Futarchy Prediction Market by Team Bits Please! (Vaibhav Chellani, Rishabh Thaney, Hrishi Patel)
Thanks so much for both the Calhacks and InOut teams for having us — we had a blast working with brilliant hackers on innovative Gnosis applications.
Want to build a use case of your own? Follow these steps and start building today!
Originally published at blog.gnosis.pm on October 19, 2017.
