HackMoney 2021: 3 Weeks for DeFi
Three weeks in the summer, $300,000+ on the table, and over 1000 hackers from around the world — let’s just say HackMoney 2021 didn’t disappoint. Our second DeFi-focused hackathon brought together an impressive list of leading minds, innovative teams, and hackers of all backgrounds to cross-populate ideas and catalyze growth in our ecosystem.
HackMoney, by the numbers:
👩🔬 1100+ hackers
📺 1000+ summit attendees
🌍 75+ countries represented
Though a month may seem like a sizable amount of time to most, it’s a tight timeframe for a successful hack. Our 16 HackMoney finalists were selected from a pool of 231 projects, while others won prizes awarded by our sponsors. Each of these teams built innovative solutions that explored new possibilities in DeFi, presenting new ideas that could become the foundation of what comes next — all in a matter of weeks.
Our Finalists:
⚡Tesser
“The magic DeFi portfolio manager. Instantly migrate your funds from any farm or liquidity pool to any other in a single tx”
The team: @filvecchiato, @raph_alice, @SimpleFi_, @uxceo
Why we like it: Tesser provides a decentralized, non-custodial system for allocating funds between multiple farms or pools without the risk of centralized structures or hurdles of ill-equipped user interfaces.
🏦Medicis:
“Medicis offers a solution for users to deposit capital, ensure capital is guaranteed and enable personalized allocation of yields to beneficiaries.”
The team: @coinacoin, @tbouder
Why it’s interesting: Medicis uses a web app solution to simplify the yield farming process, while enabling automated yield allocation.
📈NostraSwap:
“A new-generation AMM that provides a stable and secure price oracle, and offers the fairest token swap prices.”
The team: @unnawut, @BiiG_Pongsatorn, @_poomsc, @Kornrapatp1, @nostraswap
Why it’s interesting: An interesting approach to combatting frontrunning, sandwich, and flash loan attacks on oracle price that utilizes an auto-arbitraging feature to compensate liquidity providers and traders simultaneously.
🧾Variable Finance:
“A decentralized PoS (Proof Of Sale) mechanism for ERC20 tokens. From Smart Contract to Brick & Mortar Store, accept any ERC20 token as payments. Also, we implement an on-chain approval manager. Approve it Once, Use it Anywhere.”
The team: @sujithsomraaj, @variablefinance, @SaranRts, @ultrasoundEdik
Why it’s important: An impressive mechanism to enable merchants to accept ERC20 tokens for payment and prove their sale occurred, and an equally impressive use of Chainlink technology.
💹Polynomial Protocol:
“Highly Efficient Options Liquidity Protocol using UMA and Uniswap v3”
The team: @0xMubaris, @realmubaris, @KnowSalman, @0xSalmanNaseer, @gauthamzzz
Why we like it: We found Polynomial to be an innovative use of UMA Protocol and Uniswap technology.
🔄Compound Swaps:
“Collateral swaps on Compound — Swap collateral without a smart wallet”
The team: @GauthamGE
Why it matters: This project makes an innovative use of flash loans to eliminate the need for migrating a position to perform a collateral swap.
💱stakeall.finance:
“DeFi Platform for staking in various POS protocols. Allows users to borrow from AAVE, swap from 1inch and stake to POS based protocol in a single transaction for earning passive income.”
The team: @StakeallF
What’s cool: This project streamlines the process of allocating funds, and brings an impressive amount of simplicity to users looking to explore the benefits of staking on POS protocols.
⛓️Li.Finance:
“Li.Finance allows cross-chain any-to-any swaps by aggregating cross-chain liquidity protocols, DEXes and lending protocols.”
The team: @maxklenk, @lifimesh, @philippzentner
What we liked: Li.Finance provides a simple tool to facilitate a user’s multi-chain needs. This was a unique approach to reducing friction between multiple chains/layers.
⚒️Irrevocable:
“Irrevocable provides a trustless smart contract for NFT sellers to guarantee a certain price floor with a pre-auction agreement with a third-party Guarantor(s). For the guarantee, Guarantors get a profit split above the floor price.”
The team: @ktkzergs, @irrevocablebid, @konrad_gnat
Why it’s unique: This project attempts to provide certainty to the uncertain NFT market by utilizing a profit sharing agreement to allow owners to hedge while selling.
🔢Increment
“Increment is a Forex Derivatives Protocol that empowers retail and institutional crypto holders, including suppliers & borrowers on Aave, to hedge against forex price movements.”
The team: @mlouieeee, @IncrementHQ, @owenmurovec, @joezeng6, @Chinmayy_g, @MarkuSchick
Why it’s interesting: Increment provides a necessary solution for users who rely on non-USD fiat currencies when transacting with Dollar-Pegged stablecoins.
🏴☠️TreasureBuidl:
“With TreasureBuidl you can create complex multi step transactions as NFTs on-chain, and execute them through our treasure planets.”
The team: @vonnie610, @brolag, @jasonchitla
Why it’s impressive: Tokenized transactions can provide conveniency and transparency to the allocation of funds within DAOs without requiring highly technical know-how. Unique approach to dealing with DAO user experience.
💰Wido:
“Best UI for yearn! Discover highest earning vaults, access historical APY and TVL, track your returns and learn from other investors.”
The team: @joinwido, @romanmazur, @kunal_jain
Why we like it: Wido brings crucial functionality to users of Yearn vaults, while leveraging community upgrades in unique ways. The Wido team chose to take a practical approach to existing user experience issues.
💵Tiden:
“Accept payments as interest-earning USDC from anywhere in the world.”
The team: @thejuliawu, @popoaq, @emmaytang
Why it’s cool: Tiden presents a way to allow businesses to reap the benefits of crypto transactions without losing any of the accessibility of current fiat payments, all through a simple plug-and-play system.
🛄Claimable:
“Claimable is a smart contract that allows you to schedule your token release or transfer. It works similar to a stock option grant, where you specify a cliff and a vesting period. This could be used for common use cases such as investor token release and incentive token grants.”
The team: @ICscript
Why it matters: Claimable is a practical project for “releasing tokens after block X.” We saw a few strong use cases, including protecting the anonymity of founders, or interacting with DAOs.
🧱Blockhead: The HackMoney DeFi Update:
“I’m on a mission to build the best interface for viewing and interacting with crypto assets of all forms! For ETHGlobal Hack Money 2021, I’ve updated my crypto portfolio/explorer interface with new features focused around DeFi apps.”
The team: @0xblockhead
What stood out: A huge hurdle for DeFi adoption is poor user experience. Blockhead took the problem head on, aggregating all of a user’s DeFi needs, and presenting them in an accessible way.
↔️Splits:
“Automatically route funds from one address to set of addresses”
The team: @abram, @wminshew
Why we liked it: We were huge fans of Splits’ practicality. Enabling users to directly distribute funds could see great use in helping to collect donations without the use of DAOs.
HackMoney brought back a taste of DeFi Summer
HackMoney kicked off on a high note, bringing in top speakers like Commissioner Hester M. Peirce of the SEC, Demetri Kofinas, and Hasu all in the same day. The following week saw packed, back-to-back summits led by the Flashbots collective and UniGrants. These summits provided hackers and summit attendees with high-level information and insights on the bleeding-edge of our nascent space, led by those grappling with these issues on the front lines.
Hot topics like Miner Extractable Value (MEV), DeFi on Layer 2, and DAOs made for spirited discussions, while workshops led by our partner teams delivered actionable information directly to hackers working with the technologies in real-time. Here are some highlights from the summits and workshops.
Highlights from the Hack:
- SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce and Marvin Ammori
- DeFi security panel
- Uni Grants Summit
- MEV.wtf Summit
The summits and talks continue to be a large draw for our events, even outside of the hackathons themselves. With over 1000+ people signed up for the summits alone, HackMoney presented a wealth of information to a hungry audience of developers and creatives. This distribution of knowledge enables and inspires collaboration, and adds value directly to our growing ecosystem.
As always, if you missed any of the talks or workshops, full versions will be available on our Youtube page. Be sure to check out our updated Hack Showcase to see the incredible projects that came out of the past month.
HackMoney would not have been possible without the support of our partners:
To say we were blown away would be an understatement, HackMoney broke all previous records from our past four years and officially became our largest hackathon. We owe everything to the dedication of our partner teams, speakers, and developer community who pooled their time and resources together to ensure that this event (like all others) could remain free of charge for those wanted to participate.
Our tech mentors, support staff, judges, and partner teams engaged with hackers daily to troubleshoot and guide their projects, enabling multiple teams to walk away from HackMoney with budding companies or grant-worthy primitives. Our mission has always been to build our ecosystem one developer at a time, and to see the level of quality displayed by the projects this month, we know the hard work is paying off.
We strongly encourage hackers to continue building their projects after our events, and we will work to connect them with relevant grants and accelerators to build momentum for their ideas. In fact, a few of our HackMoney partner teams got their start at our hackathons, and you could be next. No project is too small, or idea to far-fetched — if you believe in it, so do we.
Don’t miss our next event — HackFS:
Our next event is right around the corner! Join us from July 30th — August 20th for the second iteration of HackFS, a fully-digital hackathon and summits focused on (F)ile (S)ystems, brought to you by our good friends at Protocol Labs. As always, come prepared to meet new friends, build cool projects, and hack the status quo.
Applications are open, and we hope to see you there! Follow us on twitter to stay in the know about future events, share HackFS with friends and potential teammates, and tag us in your project updates. We can’t wait to see what you build.
