Own the Internet Hackathon Results

The following is an excerpt from David’s recent post on the Own the Internet hackathon results. That post is hosted directly on Skynet, and you can find the link to that below.

To kick off our brand new integration of Skynet and Handshake, we co-hosted a hackathon with Namebase. The hackathon has now completed, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results. More than 180 people registered and submitted a total of 64 finished projects. 14 large prizes ($250-$2600) were handed out, and 50 small prizes ($40-$75) were handed out.

Before we dive in to the results, I want to talk a little bit about the new integration. Prior to Handshake, the only way to link to content on Skynet was to use a cryptographic URL like /CABAB_1Dt0FJsxqsu_J4TodNCbCGvtFf1Uys_3EgzOlTcg/. Thanks to Handshake, it is now possible to link to the same content but in a more human friendly way: /hns/big-buck-bunny/. Handshake is a fully decentralized platform for DNS. The ‘big-buck-bunny’ name is actually a domain within the Handshake system that is owned by me. By adding a TXT record to the domain with the value sia://CABAB_1Dt0FJsxqsu_J4TodNCbCGvtFf1Uys_3EgzOlTcg, I can get my skylink to resolve to my domain. You can read more about how to use the Skynet + Handshake integration here.

Beyond human friendly names for content, Handshake also allows for updatable content. For example, someone could host a blog on Skynet under a handshake domain. Before Handshake, any updates to a blog (for example, writing a new post) would require circulating a brand new link to subscribers. But now that Handshake is supported, the TXT record can be updated, meaning that users will automatically see the new content next time they visit the blog.

You can see the full post, as well as all hackathon winners, here.