This past weekend, Kata Boric and I ran our first Stackathon at STACK Headquarters. Participants were given 24 hours to create blockchain-based prototypes. They were provided with mentorship from our STK Team, along with mentorship from our sponsors LinkCoin.pro, BYTOM BLOCKCHAIN, and George Brown College. We’d like to give a shoutout to our sponsors, as none of this would have been possible without them!
Stackathon started around 10am on Saturday, where participants were greeted with STK swag, stickers, sponsors, and food. Hackers started building their prototypes noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday.
I wanted Stackathon to be a learning experience for attendees, regardless of whether they were Solidity experts, or whether they were new to blockchain. For that reason, our workshops were planned in a way for new blockchain developers to ramp up fast enough to be able to build a Dapp Prototype by the end of the hackathon. Developers would get the chance to visit workshops as they wished.
- Introduction to Solidity — Nat Chin
- Introduction to Ethersjs and Smart Contract Integration — Thomas Lui
- Blockchain Market in Asia — Louise Zhang
- Introduction to Web3 Integration — LinkCoin.pro
- Introduction to Bytom Blockchain — BYTOM BLOCKCHAIN
- Introduction to Bitcoin Scripting — Aleksa Jovanovic
- Introduction to STK’s Payment Channels — Nat Chin & Thomas Lui
I had quite a few people make a point to meet me after the event and thank me for the workshops. I’d like to think we gave many developers a sufficient starting point to understanding blockchain in general.
Judging
By noon on Sunday, we had 7 project submissions, located here. Each team was given 3–5 minutes to tell judges the purpose of their Dapp and a demo of the product.
After much deliberation on the judging side, we declared three winners.
#1 Hash Witnesser— Best Project Built on Blockchain
This team, consisted of Mark Camball and Adam Koza, enrolled in the George Brown College Blockchain Program — built a platform that allowed Github to be verified through addresses. It would ensure the trust and transparency of off-chain data.
“STACK’s Stackathon challenged our team to collaborate on both the business and technical components of new technologies, particularly in blockchain technology. Aside from discovering a new business use case and applying a new programming language, we also learned the importance of working together in a cooperative environment. The environment in STACK’s office fostered ideation and getting all the components together for a (mostly) working product to show the judges in the short time we had. Interacting with other participants was also a real joy. The event was a great opportunity to make new friends and network with people interested in the technology.” — HashWitnesser Team
Adam and Mark were well versed in Solidity knowledge, and learnt Etherjs on the spot. It was incredibly eye-opening to see what they achieved in 24 hours this weekend.
#1 Scaling Betting Solution — Best Use of Blockchain Scalability
This team consisted of Doug Hoyte, founder of SportCrypt and Antoine De Vuyst, founder of BitCoin Bay. They built a system to facilitate sport betting, making use of Merkle Trees and Counterfactual Instantiation. It is an impressive feat in all of 24 hours.
“We had a great time at Stackathon. There were a number of interesting workshops and we got to talk to many people working on interesting blockchain projects. For our hack we implemented a system where two parties can agree on the terms of a bet before anything transactions are actually sent to the blockchain. In order for the smart contracts to access relevant terms of the bet, they are encoded in a Merkle Tree, the root of which becomes the matchID used for betting. We were proud to receive the the scalability prize of the hackathon. Thanks STACK!” — Doug and Antoine
Blockchain-based betting systems and gamification is an increasingly popular usecase for Dapps recently. We wish this team the best of luck in the future of project!
#2 Top Team — ETHMessage: Best Project Built on Blockchain
Similar to how an eTransfer would allow a message field, or how a cheque would have a memo field, or even the STACK app having a message field in a P2P transfer, messages in Ethereum transfers are not available. ETHMessage facilitates the message field in an Ethereum Transfer. This is useful not only for attributing messages to transfers of ETH, but also for auditing purposes and mapping a transaction to a certain purchase or transaction.
“I appreciate the opportunity and support STACK/STK has provided in this hackathon. It gave me a platform to start off my adventure in blockchain. I couldn’t have done it without the supercalafragilisticexpialadocious support from their mentors.” — Zichen Jiang
Zichen Jiang, software developer at Indellient Inc, built his first end-to-end system from smart contract, backend, to frontend. We hope he continues to work on ETHMessage as a standard, as it would be useful for many Dapps out there.
Overall, we were very happy to see the number of submitted projects, as well as educating the next blockchain developers in the space.
We had the pleasure of inviting a variety of judges for Stackathon, including Ameer Rosic from Blockgeeks, Noah Marconi from Tag Loyalty, Teddy Yip, Nahim Nasser, Thomas Lui, Sharaf Ansari from STK, and Behzad Malek, Raza Siddiqui from ONTAB. Thank you to all the judges who spent their Sunday afternoon looking through our hacks and providing insight on the submitted projects! Thank you to STK Token and STACK for supporting our hackathon!
