Portis winners of the ETHGlobal ETHOnline hackathon
We say it every hackathon, but we just can’t help ourselves, simply because it’s true: DApps are becoming more and more ready for mainstream users, as the stockpile of tools and libraries grows every year, compounding good UX.
Our team had a lot of fun reviewing all the projects that chose to BUIDL with Portis. Unfortunately, we could only select the top 3 to receive prizes.
Since the choice was so hard, we added two additional categories for “Honorable Mention” and “Inspirational”, which might not receive a monetary prize, but do receive a strong tip of the hat from us 🕺
🥇 First place: Podcast Pools 🎙🌊
What does it do?
Podcast Pools allows podcast creators to capture value by having their fans lock up stablecoins into a no loss lottery where the prize is an NFT that represents that week’s episode.
In this project, a no loss lottery is where users lock up DAI into an interest-earning protocol in exchange for ticket tokens and a chance to win a prize. The no loss aspect is that the user doesn’t lose their initial deposit, only the interest while their DAI is locked up.
The prize for the lottery is an NFT episode from that week’s podcast and the interest from all the DAI goes to fund the podcast creator.
Similar to Patreon, people can contribute to creators they support, but instead of directly donating money, they are instead giving the interest earned by their assets for a chance to win a tokenized episode.
live demo: https://anader123.github.io/podcast-pools/
source code: https://github.com/anader123/podcast-pools
Why do we like it?
Podcast Pools ticks all of our boxes: UX that’s friendly for non-crypto users, a product that is aimed at mainstream users (improves the Patreon model with DeFi tools), uses NFTs in an interesting way (which we love), has some DeFi flavor to it (no loss lottery pool a la PoolTogether), and all powered by solid code.
The Podcast Pool team isn’t forcing the usage of blockchain to solve a problem. They’re flipping the script, and rethinking the whole concept of sponsoring creators via DeFi tools.
🥈 Second place: Croco Finance 🐊💰
What does it do?
The Croco Finance team built a web application that harvests information about Balance and Uniswap pools and presents them in a sleek format. Their main focus is to compute the returns on liquidity provision as precisely as possible. To achieve that they process historical fee data, returns from yield farming, transaction gas costs, and plenty of other pool-related statistics.
live demo: https://croco.finance/
source code: https://github.com/croco-finance
Why do we like it?
The rise of DeFi and more specifically yield farming brought the concept of impermanent loss into the limelight.
We believe that the great promise of Ethereum is that it can make scary concepts from finance much friendlier. Why? Because DeFi is breaking down the walls of the closed gardens of finance. That means that no longer will those systems be built only by entities that have aligned interests with the average person remaining scared.
Croco finance promotes that goal, by crafting a beautiful tool for investors, letting them easily figure out the expected outcome of their investment, taking into account all of the “DeFi fine print” and presenting it in a simple and friendly manner.
Making complex concepts simple isn’t simple at all and deserves recognition.
🥉 Third place: Crescendo ⛽️📈
What does it do?
Crescendo attempts to solve the problem of rising gas prices by allowing users to submit a single approve transaction that not only approves Crescendo to spend coins but also embeds data in the higher-order bits of the allowance u256 which are used to process a predefined action. Using this data, Crescendo's contract will combine the approvals of many users together and offer a reward to a transaction “minter”, targeting profitability for a miner at around 10 minutes. The transaction minter listens on the blockchain for “Approve” events targeted towards the Crescendo contract and includes the addresses in the exec transaction for when it's good to run.
Crescendo only requires clients to use a single approval transaction to do everything that it does, and it has the potential to greatly reduce transaction costs for smaller, more casual investors. By targeting Uniswap and ERC20 token transactions, Crescendo effectively reduces the overall gas cost of the largest protocols running on Ethereum, meaning Crescendo is not only good for its users but the Ethereum Ecosystem as a whole. Additional info here.
live demo: https://crescendo.dbeal.dev/
source code: https://github.com/KillerByte/crescendo
Why do we like it?
Rising gas prices have been an increasing issue with Ethereum this year. Thankfully, L2 Ethereum/optimistic rollups are on the horizon, but there are still some shortcomings, such as onboarding, migration of existing apps, and movement of funds/data from one L2 solution to another. We need a more immediate solution. Something simpler that can be deployed to mainnet today and can be immediately integrated into existing DApps.
Their live demo UX might be barebones (who needs CSS amirite?), but that’s irrelevant. Crescendo is akin to a protocol. If they’re able to achieve their goal, they will improve the UX of countless DApps in the ecosystem, by offering another creative solution for one of Ethereum’s biggest UX challenges: gas fees. And we’ve always been on the lookout for projects that aim to solve that issue.
🎖 Honorable Mention: Upala Digital Identity 🤖💥
What does it do?
Upala provides a digital identity uniqueness score. The score is valued in USD and represents the explosion price — an amount of money that an identity holder can get at any time for deleting their ID. The higher the explosion price the higher the owner values the ID and the safer it is for DApps to interact with.
Why do we like it?
Complete decentralization and anonymity has its benefits, but also its downsides when you’re trying to build products for the mainstream. One of those downsides is attacks on systems by bots. In a centralized world, there are ways of tackling that (for example KYC), but decentralized systems have to work very hard to become Sybil-resistant.
Upala is building out a solution which we believe makes a lot of sense. We’ve already awarded them a prize during the Hack Money hackathon in May, so you might say we’re fans 😊 Keep your eyes on this project, it’s going places!
live demo: https://multipassport.on.fleek.co/#/
source code: https://github.com/upala-digital-identity
💫 Inspirational: Machu-Picchu 👨🌾⛈
What does it do?
The vision of Machu-Picchu is to make user data a public service, not confiscated by today’s platforms like GAFA and the likes.
To make that happen, they start by building a distributed system where more than 500M smallholder farmers worldwide can share their crop weather risks and their data. Sharing crop risks is a sore need. For more than 40 years, governments have been using centralized insurance to try and satisfy this need without success. This is because insurance is best to protect big amounts against infrequent damages, while the problem is here the opposite: small amounts and frequent risks.
Since the dawn of time, farmers have successfully shared risks P2P without insurers, but this is not scalable to address climate change.
By combining blockchain and Earth Observation, Machu-Picchu wants to reduce costs drastically while using ancestral risk-sharing practices. Once the risk-sharing part of Machu-Picchu is successful, its open-source thesaurus of farmers and of their history of damages and of contributions can be a public service of data, to promote credit rating, gender equality, sustainable low-carbon best agro practices, health, education, etc.
The benefit of Machu-Picchu is like Route 66 for the development of the USA High-West: many communities and trades can take benefit of the network but no one can confiscate it.
live demo: https://34.122.69.68/
source code: https://github.com/Machu-Pichu/hackathon
Why do we like it?
Sure, their UX needs work, and it doesn’t use the latest trendy DeFi tools, but this project is setting out to improve the lives of hard-working farmers, by releasing them from the grip of huge corporations. We think it’s a product that is very close to blockchain’s original vision of freedom, and for that, we find it inspirational.
Thank you to all the other teams that used Portis in their projects. You’ve offered us invaluable feedback and we’re deeply appreciative of that. We can’t wait to see what you all BUIDL next.
Happy Coding!
The Portis Team
Have any questions? Join the conversation on our Telegram and Twitter. Ready to #BUIDL? Head on to our docs.
