Crypto 4 Your Thoughts? A bcoin & Cosmos Hackathon
Another year, another hackathon! Last year’s event went so well, that we decided to host another. This time, we were able to partner with a handful of sponsors to have a larger event (more connections, bigger impact, and bigger prizes!) and saw some incredible projects get built in just 48 hours, bringing blockchain development to a growing ecosystem of developers.
Leading up to the event, bcoin released the alpha version of their new Blockchain Management System (or BMS) platform called bPanel. BPanel enables developers (of all skill levels) to easily create and experiment with new interfaces for different use cases, and allows users, especially non-technical ones, to integrate these applications into their personal or business workflows. To us, this tool has great potential for making crypto useful. #BUIDL
Who was there:
People came from all over the world (from Florida to South Africa)! There were a handful of students eager to dive into blockchain (and as you’ll see, some of them even won prizes), as well as seasoned crypto developers.
We were grateful to be joined by Jinglan Wang, cofounder of the Blockchain Education Network & Managing Director of Anarres, Marjorie Kasten, senior Payment Strategist at Silicon Valley Bank, and Jae Kwon, lead developer/co-founder of the Cosmos project as judges for the event.
The Event
The event started off on Friday night at Impact Hub, our home base for the weekend. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to partner with a community space that fosters change-makers working on issues from low-income student success to inclusive technology, just to name a few.
There was a packed house for talks by bcoin contributor Buck Perley who demoed the new bPanel platform, and Jae Kwon, Co-Founder of Tendermint, who spoke about the Tendermint protocol and their new blockchain development stack with the Cosmos SDK and LotionJS.
Then it was off to the races! Teams formed, ready to compete for more than $30k in prizes that would be handed out less than 48 hours later. It was a jam-packed weekend as not only were teams working on their projects, but workshops were also held. Chronobank demoed how to interact with different blockchains APIs using their DMT middleware, the Tendermint team demoed how to build your own blockchain using LotionJS, and TokenSoft talked about Multisignature wallet infrastructure with bcoin. Participants could even stop by in the morning for yoga!
The Winners
Really, everyone wins when so much great development is made on crypto projects :) While we wish it was possible to give everyone a prize, there could only be a few winners…
The top prize, and winner of $15,000 in cryptocurrency of their choice, 2 years of VPN’s, Ledger Hardware Wallets, Conference tickets, 1hr meeting with advisor & angel investor Terrence Yang, went to Team Ivy. For their project, they took the open source Ivy playground for writing Ivy smart contracts that compile into Bitcoin Script and built it into bPanel plugins that allowed for the writing and deploying of smart contracts from the platform directly onto the live testnet network
Second place, and $1,500 in Bitcoin to spend on Purse.io, went to team Blockbook for their application that helps protect cryptocurrency users from transaction fraud with a machine learning algorithm.
Third place went to DSNP for their decentralized session negotiation infrastructure leveraging bcoin’s Bitcoin peer networking.
The winner of the Purse.io challenge for best application to solve a real world business use case was the Lotioning Network for their payment channel system that allows for easy bookkeeping of off-chain transactions and exporting as a CSV (to give to your accountant!).
See all submissions on c4yt.devpost.com.
For more information from Cosmos, check out their blog.
ICF Grants
Cosmos held a special session for LotionJS + Cosmos SDK specific projects to present to the Cosmos team for a chance at their incredible $15k ICF grant to continue developing their projects. Read more on their blog post here.
Four projects ended up getting picked for this opportunity:
- Reforest: A middleware that lets blockchain developers donate part of transaction fees towards planting trees
- Tenderfeud: A Family Feud-like polling system built on a LotionJS created blockchain
- Cosmos Prediction- An easy to implement prediction platform
- Pillar- A stablecoin built on LotionJS
Next Steps for bcoin and bPanel
Hackathons are always a great opportunity to learn more about what the community wants and how we can continue to make and refine the tooling. A lot of development has been happening at bcoin to help make for a more flexible and extensible platform. We plan on continuing to refine our documentation and guides as a way to ease developer on-boarding.
bPanel is still just in its infancy but we were excited to see some great projects get developed on top of it in just a couple of days. In addition to improved documentation and adjustments to the API, we’re looking forward to continuing to develop a more full-featured suite of plugins that users can install on their own as a way to interact with the blockchain in new and interesting ways.
To learn more about these projects and join the community, check out the websites:
And if you want to get informed about next year’s C4YT hackathon, head on over to c4yt.io!
A final special thank to all the people and teams that helped make this year’s C4YT possible, in addition to all the sponsors and community partners: Cosmos, Ant Pool, TokenSoft, Chronobank, Ledger, Private Internet Access, and Blockstack.
