Serving as a mentor at this Hackathon has been an honor. Being in SF is a reminder that San Francisco is the Kings Landing of the tech Westeros. The quality of the teams and their projects has been top notch here.
Here is how the hackathon went down.
The mentors met at the Village at 7:30AM on Saturday morning. We were all assigned shifts and zones. At 8:30AM the doors were opened and the huge line was let in. There were nearly 500 participants in total.
The challenge was announced on Saturday at 11AM.
Sounded immediately like a DACathon to me! A DAC is a decentralized autonomous company. It means that the parties involved in the company are also the owners. To me, this is the most blockchainy way to align ownership and incentives with users and stakeholders.
The Hackathon challenge as summarized by Crystal Rose on Twitter:
“The challenge: build an #eosio app that fosters a fundamental competitive advantage by implementing a business model that aligns interests among stakeholders and/or drives more value back to users.”
The teams quickly got to work ideating and building. The air was electric with creativity and, of course, plenty of water, coffee, and redbull.
Some of the teams were here all night – they were hungry for feedback and technical assistance. My shifts were 7:30am – 10pm Saturday (I stayed until 1am) and then 6am-3pm Sunday.
After 26 hours of hard work, these were the top 10 finalists – the projects were diverse and exciting:
Chain Relief – decentralized volunteer donations
BiosEOS – decentralized healthcare data
EOS Hive – funding and teambuilding for DAC dApps
CopyMiddle – gamer-owned games
Pollinate – decentralized last mile delivery for packages
Liquidao – deterministic liquidity using a crowdfunded Bancor reserve
SixDegrees – SMS referral bounty and awards on chain via EOSIO
EOS EBT Food Stamps – food stamps on the EOSIO chain
LSTN – decentralized music funding and promotion
You can watch the pitches here.
Next EOS VC – the main venture capital fund for EOS is running a plan called 50 for 50 which means they give $50k for 50 startups to build on EOSIO.
Platin is a proof of location – there are a lot of potential applications for this that involve tracking location of a smart device. Their demo was sort of like a Pokemon-Go powered by EOSIO where you can grab EOS tokens in the aisles of the Hackathon.
Next they gave another presentation about Varius Solution – NFT (non fungible token) digital assets powered platform that I believe is powered by BlockVee, not EOSIO. It was shown because Galaxy invested in the project and Novogratz is one of the judges.
Non-fungible tokens are cryptographically secured unique digital assets that cannot be copied or divided. These are going to be a big part of the future of digital assets using Blockchain technology. Digitally uniqueness is actually a really amazing expansion of what Bitcoin established 10 years ago.
Block.One did an amazing job with the organization and running of the hackathons across the world. I attended both the London and SF Hackathons – venues, food, and staff were the highest quality.
Most Valuable Mentor – My good friend Jae Chung
Best Social Media Post – Ky Primo
Best UX UI – EOS Hive by the EOS Lynx team
Best Social Impact – EOS EBT Food Stamps
Eli came to our workshop on Friday night and sat next to me. He had no knowledge of EOS, which I helped him install, but he did bring some food stamps.
And the winners are…
3rd Place – SixDegrees – $10k
2nd Place – Pollinate – $25k
1st Place – Nougit – $100k
Congrats to the winners and all of the participants!! It was a great pleasure being with you all. Thanks to Block.One and Daniel Larimer for EOS and the great hackathon!
As usual – hit me up on Twitter any time!
