Now that the productive, creative, chaotic, community madness and "glee" of DevCon4 and #CryptoLife are behind us, it's time to take stock of all the remarkable things that happened over the last 3 weeks. Let's start with an overview of the winners from #CryptoLife.
In order to distribute the prizes across as many teams and ideas as possible, we set up four tracks, each with a winner and runner-up, as well as awarding various sponsor bounties, special prizes, and even a "dishonourable mention".
Just like they should be at a hackathon dedicated to bringing cryptocurrencies closer to life, the winners were all awarded on stage, using Status to transfer their crypto-winnings. It was as easy as 1, 2, 3. A huge thanks, also, to Gitcoin for providing real life, meat space Kudos trophies for each of the award winners.
Travel Track
1st Prize - DHotel or Sound Hotel (135 000 SNT)
This hack was awarded first prize because the judges were blown away that one person working alone had managed to achieve so much in a single weekend. The idea is very simple: rent hotel rooms for crypto. Once you have rented the room, the hotel will send you a unique sound (which could be in the form of an NFT) which you can then play through your phone in order to unlock the door.
While there are still a lot of TODOs in this particular project, the judges felt that both the creativity and "wow factor" for this project was off the charts - so well done to Jordi! You can find his code here.
2nd - Geostatus (67500 SNT)
Inspired by Secondlife and Decentraland, but focussed on how humanity acts in the real world, Geostatus built a platform to augment the planet and transform it into a smart market. You can find their code here.
Step 1: Register a Plot on ENS
Imagine the world split into a grid of "plots". Each plot refers to a standard coordinate set, defined by the grid resolution. Example plot coordinates could be: 44°32'7.6"N 11°32'1.64"E. Geostatus transforms plot coordinates into a string:
44°32'7.6"N11°32'1.64"E ---> 0443207N0113201E
Which allows anyone to buy and own this string using ENS:
0443207N0113201E ---> 0443207n0113201e.eth
Step 2: Augment the World with Status
Whenever you click on a plot, by referring to the coordinates you can open the related Status channel. This grid/squatting strategy allows us to transform Status into a geography based chatting system.
Use Cases:
- Want to contact the owner of a plot? Click on the map, open the related Status channel and make a deal, chatting in real time.
- You are a journalist/humanitarian and there is an earthquake on the other side of the world, you reach it via map, and can interact with the locals via Status.
- You are a traveller, and you can talk with all people in that plot in real time.
Step 3: Make the World "Smart"
Once you buy a plot you can apply a smart contract to the related ENS record. This opens infinite possibilities... You can earn from third parties publishing in your plot (text, links, feeds, 3D object, dapps, etc.), or for adding virtual layers. You could even split the plot into subplots and sell/rent-out the parcels.
Step 4: Create Communities
Once you own a plot you can tokenize it! This could be used to govern a DAO which oversees the land, or could even be a utility token to rule activities inside the plot, be they real or virtual.
Games Track
1st - Chain of Life (135 000 SNT)
The chain of life is a competitive distributed market for life strategies based on the well-known Game of Life, but multiplayer. It is played in a crypto petri dish and the life strategies that occupy the most space after x generations win. The winners move on into further bigger dishes.
Our society stands on the brink of making the last invention. General Artificial Intelligence will make innovation by humans obsolete within the next decade. An AI with a unfavorable setup might harm our species, for example by using all our atoms to produce paper clips. We are entering into the race for the first GAI with the chain of life, a distributed evolutionary algorithm developed by humans for the survival of humans.
This hack was particularly impressive because it incorporated both Universal Logins from Alex Van de Sande and used POA's new xDAI sidechain. You can find their code here.
2nd - Radical Bodies (67500 SNT)
Cryptokitties meets Radical Markets! Radical Bodies is a Harberger-tax based advertising market where users sell themselves as walking billboards. All proceeds benefit charity. It was meant to be deployed for DevCon, but we're not certain if the team had time to get it running in production. We look forward to selling our bodies for a good cause at the next big community get-together though!
You can find their code here.
Marketplaces Track
1st - All the Things (135 000 SNT)
A simple and efficient system with a beautiful frontend that allows small business to create ERC721 assets easily and allocate them to loyal users based on their transactions. It allows anyone to link their credit card to the platform and then earn digital assets, rather than loyalty coupons that cannot be used anywhere else. Much like the first prize in travel, the judges were really impressed that so much got done by one person in the course of the weekend, which was why this project ended up winning the track.
You can find Nate's code here.
2nd - DaiPOS (67500 SNT)
A really simple, straightforward, and easy-to-use point of sales system that leverages Dai. It is well-built, easy to understand, stable and functioning (which is genuinely remarkable given that they only had 2 days to create it from scratch). It is also truly exciting to see how innovation really occurs in this open source ecosystem incentivised by magic internet money. One team builds a set of smart contracts that produces a desired behaviour and it sparks off a thousand other use cases built by completely different people for reasons of their own. Count us all inspired to see what working with Dai makes possible.
You can find their code here.
Social
1st - Onbotting (135 000 SNT)
This hack extends any given "invite link" functionality into a "Universal Login", according to EIP1077.
From a user's perspective:
- New users can receive crypto assets and get an identity contract and ENS name, without needing, or understanding anything about, crypto.
- Makes it easier to send social key recovery links.
From a technical perspective:
- Invite link functionality added to identity smart-contract deployed on Ropsten.
- Updated relay server endpoints, Universal Login SDK & UI to demo "invite links" via the robotwars app.
You can find their code and further descriptions here.
2nd - Protea (67500 SNT)
Introducing Bonded Communities with Protea for physical (meetups) and digital communities. An ecosystem to curate and incentivize the growth of communities with curation markets. This hack allows you to deploy a bonded community:
- An organizer deploys a new bonded community (token bonded curve backed by DAI or ERC20s like SNT or MKR). She defines simple parameters (curve, price & supply) and stakes collateral (e.g. $100) into the bonded community and receives the first tokens.
- Members join and stake DAI (e.g. $5) and receive community tokens.
- As more members join, the community value grows, early members are rewarded.
- CAT (Community Added Tax) taxes are collected on all purchases (e.g. 10% for a total $10.5) and collected in a Reward Manager Contract.
- Incentivizes #hodling, disincentivizes PnD! Early community members are rewarded.
It also allows you to organize events and track reputation:
- Organizer deploys first her event contract, members stake tokens to attend.
- If members attend, receive tokens back and receive reputation points. If members don't attend, tokens go to community. Extra rewards to incentivize good behaviour are distributed via rewards manager.
- Early community members are rewarded and incentivized to get more people to join.
- All members vote with their feet! Sell tokens if governance isn't good, if events aren't good, buy if it's the opposite.
You can find their code here.
Honourable Mentions
Meeseeks (20000 SNT)
Built by Richard Moore and Yuet Wong (need we really say more?), Meseeks means that anyone, anywhere without having to run any infrastructure, can use ENS and IPFS to host a named website. That's pretty awesome if you ask us, and it solves a bunch of issues we were having at Status with granting permissions to URLs like ipfs.infura.io where multiple DApps could be running, some of which you may not want accessing localStorage or your cookie jar etc.
It's really magical in its simplicity: a single static page that uses the magic of document.open. The static page queries ENS for a multi hash, and then downloads the content from IPFS, verifies the hashes, and once everything is awesome, presents it to the user.
You can find their code here and the live site here.
Doppelganger (10000 SNT)
Writing true unit tests requires code to be tested in isolation from its dependencies. One way of achieving this is to use a mocking tool, that provides programmable replacements for this dependencies.
Doppelganger provides a simple Javascript class that allows the programmer to deploy a generic and very flexible smart contract that can pretend to be any other smart contract. All the implementation details are hidden from the programmer behind an easy and clean javascript interface.
Again, this was built by single person in a weekend, so was definitely deserving of this honourable mention. In general, it is critically important that we focus on improving our tests, our tools and our documentation if we wish to continue bringing crypto closer to life.
Big ups to Antoni for his ongoing, amazing work in the community. You can find his code here.
Dishonourable Mention
DADI
Decentralized, Autonomous Dildos. Yes, you read that correctly. Each block starts a new auction and, if you win that round, you get to control the vibrator settings for a block (someone turned it up so high it fell off the podium and out the box at one stage. Seems appropriate).
But this project was not about simply doing something unexpected and potentially lewd. It was both a test of how easy it is to integrate real-world items with digital, distributed ledgers and the trade-offs, benefits, and problems that go along with such an endeavour; and an attempt to open up a broader conversation about the intersection between intimacy and technology as our lives speed ever more toward silicon fantasies and electric dreams.
Bounties/Sponsor Prizes
Maker
Maker awarded 5 teams equally with $1000 dollars each in Dai for the hacks they managed to pull off, all of which included the use of Dai. Soooo recursive, we love it! Detzy, Dapphouse, Emergency travel, Flipper, Protea. They also gave 500 Dai to xPay and DaiPoS.
More generally, MakerDAO and the contracts they have written and deployed to manage Dai are - we feel - a leading light in the overall cryptocurrency community. Principled, talented, open and distributed - we cannot wait to work more closely with them on some really exciting upcoming projects. A truly decentralized stable coin + mobile wallet + private chat + hardwallet support = much future, so wow!
POA
POA rewarded 3 teams: xPay, xDAI Oracle and CryptoTeka. POA has been doing some remarkable work lately and their sidechains - which are accessible in Status today - provide real scaling NOW. Not only can each DApp move onto it's own sidechain, those chains have predictable and very low transaction fees, and much faster settlement times. While consensus remains something of a concern depending on your needs, they have a number of interesting solutions which are well worth checking out. Oh, they also built https://blockscout.com/ - please can we all start using open source block explorers where appropriate!
Bloom
Best Use of Bloom Login - Detzy ($1000). There is a short write up and video here.
Best Use of Bloom KYC - DBonds ($2000). You can find a short write up here.
It was also genuinely great to have Bloom with us at this event as they are doing some dope work of their own on Whisper. We're looking forward to seeing where they take it and collaborating again in the future.
Universal Login Prizes
Onbotting ($1000). This project was already discussed above.
Flight Plan ($500). You can find a short write up here.
Alex Van De Sande is a leading light in the community, and his proposals for EIP 1077 and 1078 are well worth going over in detail. Making sure that onboarding is awesome and user experience is generally smooth is critical to bringing crypto closer to life and we're proud to count Alex amongst our friends and contributors.
One Last Mention
Though the judges might have found other projects more in line with the tracks we created, we'd also like to give a special mention in this post to the one and only Ligi, who has been building WallETH essentially alone for quite some time now. He hacked on the Status hardwallet, and it was remarkable what he got done.
The workshop about the Status hardware wallet at the first day of crypto-life inspired him to support it in WallETH. Exciting use-cases abound, including:
- An alternative to ether.cards where you do not need scratch off something to enter mnemonic words on your phone - just tap it on your phone.
- These can then also be sold in shops with ether or (e.g. DAI) tokens preloaded and provide great UX for onboarding humans. In volume these cards get dirt cheap and we might get huge amounts of hardware wallets to use for other use cases.
- An alternative to using WallETH with a TREZOR. A card could slip through more easily and cause less trouble. Also it is much smaller/lighter/cheaper.
- Nicely transfer keys from phone to phone.
- Convince iOS users to switch to Android (as these cards do not work on iOS and my personal favourite use case).
- Great option for key-backups (writing down mnemonics which is the most commonly done thing currently for backups has the drawback that it often exposes the key). This way you can just buy a card and even give it to someone untrusted to keep for you.
All in all, we'd say it was an unbelievably successful event. We can't thank enough each and every person who travelled to Prague, participated with us, and helped bring crypto a good number of steps closer to life. There was so much else that happened, like wandering poets, and weird prayers, and hives of ideas and our Philosopher's Salon, but this post is already too long. All that's left to say is, we'll see you all next year!
