Who and What are Bound to Trample the Competition at ETH Denver?
Plenty of familiar teams and team members. All of the teams above have live documentation you can use to try and integrate their tech. If you want to know what sort of tech you should be looking at — stay tuned to the BUIDLHub medium for a breakdown.
- Expect defi apps will be prominent — projects making use of APIs to execute lending, margin trading, or asset pool, or staking contracts.
- Expect oracles, like Chainlink, bZx, and Tellor, to be ready to integrate into your projects.
- Expect synthetic tokens can be tied to some externalized price feed, and NFT tokens to extend ownership beyond gaming and compose of collections of records.
- Expect apps making use of dev tooling and contract analytics from ETH Denver’s very own ETH Dev Tools, DFuse, and of course, BUIDLHub.
- Expect projects to extend transactional awareness between chains, and being built on networks beyond Ethereum like Ethereum Classic, Cosmos, EOS, Polkadot, Ripple’s Xpring, or Hashgraph.
- Expect some projects to dip their toes into enterprise focused permissioned networks — using Quorum, JPM’s Ethereum clone loaded with private transactions and contracts and peer permissioning, Corda, or Hyperledger, and make use of a new enterprise language like DAML.
- Expect DAOs to be as prominent as ever at ETH Denver, with Colony, MolochDAO, MakerDAO, DAOStack, and Aragon being tightly integrated with the event’s proceedings. The event organizers are even trying to DAOize the event itself. Choose wisely — or perhaps not at all.
- Expect multiple projects to implement IPFS or Storj for storage.
- Expect several authentication options between Fortmatic, 3Box, and Universal Login that offer KYC/identity solutions, or make app onboarding easier. And
- Expect contracts running atop L2 scaling solutions like Loom and Tendermint, implementing meta transactions with MetaCartel, or using ephemeral wallets.
- Expect dapps to have 3rd party wallet integrations, like Authereum, Portis, or Torus.
No one loves digging through endless dev docs during the hackathon to scavenge for ideas—so we thought we would make it a little easier. BUIDLHub will soon release another article to give you all the materials in one place, stay tuned.
Three tracks are open pathways for developing at the hackathon. These are “Bounty”, “Open”, and “Impact” — and these are pretty fluid to shift between. Bounties are released by sponsors for prizes ranging from $500 — $10K USD. These bounties are listed some time within a period of 3 days before the hackathon starts (the 10th). The Open and Impact tracks allow you to build anything as long as you don’t use an existing project, and the top 5 projects share a prize pool of some amount greater than or equal to $15K.
Here are organizations that may be sponsoring bounties.
Here are organizations that may inspire you on how to make an “impact”.
Regardless of what you do, you may want to impress the fine folks from these organizations. They didn’t think they’d sponsor a bounty, but wanted name recognition and/or want to be there for investment research.
Below are examples from last year’s ETH Denver 2019 hackathon to give you an idea of how projects have approached the sponsors’ bounties, the techs they implemented.
Universal Wallet
A wallet that onboards users in just a couple of steps using counterfactual deployment, universal logins, and the ability to buy dai with debit/credit card through Wyre.
The application was built in React.js. The contracts were based in the ethers.js boilerplate with Solidity, using Waffle, a Truffle alternative for testing. They implemented multi-sig wallets, meta transactions, create2, counterfactual deployment, and dai transactions mechanisms.
They went after the Wyre onboarding bounty and the Universal Login SDK bounty.
Open Curator
A dApp that allows to curate multiple Token Curated Registries (TCRs) in a single app. In the process, they designed a TCR standard, allowing users to curate multiple sources of content into a single place. You can find it here: https://github.com/Xivis/opencurator.
Its frontend was implemented with React using Material-UI, Rimble UI, and Redux with redux-saga and redux-router. They integrated the Portis web3 SDK. They developed TCR contracts with Solidity and Zeppelin OS ZepKit.
They pursued the Zeppelin and Portis bounties by using the ZepKit and OpenZepellin contracts for bootstrapping, and by integrating the Portis SDK for UX as a default provider for ZepKit.
ETH Dev Tools from ETH Denver
ETH Dev tools is a chrome developer tools extension that acts like a swiss-army knife for developers giving you access to a network inspector showing logs and interactions, an ABI explorer showing calls and sends, a GraphQL explorer preloaded with The Graph subgraphs and Infura’s EthQL endpoints for querying, and an activity monitor powered by a WebSocket proxy.
The Chrome Extension was built in Vue, and developer tools were built in React, web3.js and truffle and solidity were used for querying the blockchain, and a golang webhook and WebSocket proxy was deployed on Heroku.
They went after three bounties from The Graph, Infura, and SALT. They did by preloading the GraphQL playground into the chrome inspector, adding an assortment of pre-populated example EthQL queries, and adding a module to create and delete contract addresses with Meerkat.
Delfi from ETH Denver
An on-chain oracle providing a liquidity-weighted index of ETH/DAI spot prices from the highest volume decentralized exchanges. This price is paired with the value required to manipulate the rate by 5% or more, providing a quantifiable threshold of economic activity the price can safely support.
The interface was pretty basic, built with web3.js and some lines of HTML, but the magic happened on the backend. Contracts were written in Solidity, tested locally with Truffle, Ganache CLI, and Remix. Backtesting and price analysis was done with Python and web3.py, using the Panda and Jupyter python notebooks, and using Matplotlib for graphs. Data was assembled from ShapeShift and Poloniex’s APIs, a local Parity Node, and Infura.
They went after a Shapeshift Bounty by incorporating the CoinCap API endpoint and bZX’s bounty by implementing their price oracle.
Take these points into consideration as you move forwards:
- Put the pieces together! Think about integrations that help you pursue more than one bounty. Look for complementary integrations—auth + wallets, data APIs + executing trades, etc.
- Do your homework! Research the possible sponsors’ documentation and try to familiarize yourself with different approaches before the hackathon begins. You do not want to be so focused on your computer you forget to socialize, go to talks, or learn from others.
- Read up! Look at those projects that may inspire what you “impact” and keep them in the back of your mind as you dig into the docs and APIs of the sponsors and teams coming. Have a researchable, current problem, and keep in mind that not everyone cares about the privacy of their data, self-sovereign identity, immutable records, or has cognitive bandwidth to think about trading and transparent data.
Published at Mon, 10 Feb 2020 23:50:34 +0000
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