Wrapping up a month-long hackathon
For the past few weeks, we’ve hosted hackers from around the world in support of one mission, helping Ethereum scale. While scaling is always an important issue for Ethereum’s growth, recent excitement around the space has highlighted an increased need for scaling solutions.
Interesting stats thus far:
- 1100+ Summit Attendees
- 630 Hackers
- 143 Projects
- 58 Countries Represented
- 18 Time Zones
- $200,000+ in prizes up for grabs
We were absolutely thrilled by the level of quality brought by every team that participated, and that has been matched by the energy brought by our speakers and sponsors. By creating an event featuring the brightest minds in the community, we are able to further the scaling discourse and find new solutions to ongoing problems.
Our finalists were selected from an extremely competitive pool of over 130+ projects. With only three weeks to hack, these teams built new-to-world solutions that were unique, fun, and well-executed. Alongside our overall finalists, other teams were selected to win individual sponsor prizes.
Our Finalists:
🦘Kangaroo: Kangaroo is a Discord Layer 2 Wallet powered by zkSync. It provides a Discord bot experience that won’t break the bank and enables seamless L2 onboarding.
🏛️ Alexandria: A dApp using STARKs to verify aspects of your identity without revealing more than you should!
🧪 The LabRats: A multiplayer trading graph betting game where you bet if the graph will go up or down. Sign and send the transaction on every bet using optimism L2 to show how you can do complete on-chain betting without spending loads of ETH on gas.
🌞 Zeneth: Utilizing Flashbots to enable arbitrary meta-transactions so EOAs can enter L2s without ETH
🌊 HydroFile: An automated way to keep track of IPFS CIDs — sail the seas of CIDs!
🐛 Cairo Debugger: The Cairo Debugger Adapter Protocol brings feature-rich debugging of Cairo programs to VS Code, Emacs, and Vim.
⚒️ Devolution: A flexible L2 DAO platform that provides scalable base layer interoperability with customizable organizational design in a friendly user interface.
🧩 NFT Puzzle Thing: Adding a layer of intrigue and excitement to the collecting of NFT’s through a puzzle-based game (this is luke’s summary for concision)
❌ Exfil: A protocol and SDK that provides instant withdrawals of crypto assets from L2.
🍧 eth-sorbet: Smooth transition to L2, just like sorbet before the main course.
😎 Flaunt: Enabling NFT owners to creative meme-ified derivative assets (new NFTs) from items they already own.
🌈 Ray Tracing: Tracing MEV (miner extractable value) hiding between the glass shards of the Eth1-Eth2 devnets and testnets.
Scaling Ethereum was more than just a hackathon
Our sponsors and industry experts kept the energy up throughout the month, giving inspiring talks on the future of our ecosystem. From rollups to MEV, there were a lot of hot topics in scaling discussed during the month.
Here are a few interesting moments from the past month’s summits and talks:
- What Happens After The Merge? — Vitalik Buterin discusses what we’re all wondering
- MEV Roast — A new installment of the Roast series focused on Ethereum scaling issues and MEV
- Introduction to Zero-Knowledge Proofs — Elena Nadolinski discusses the world of ZK computing
- “What are Rollups even?” — Patrick McCorry talks about the importance of rollups in scaling
- From MEV Auction (MEVA) to Sequencer MEV Extraction — Karl Floersch describes a new way of harnessing MEV
These talks and interviews are filled with knowledge on the topics of DeFi, Zero-Knowledge Cryptography, and Ethereum scaling solutions. Be sure to check out some of the other incredible moments on our Youtube page, and visit the Showcase to see how our hackers experimented with this technology.
Scaling Ethereum would not be possible without the support of our generous sponsors
Scaling Ethereum would not have been possible without the support from an incredible group of elite Sponsors. To truly be the catalyst for community that we hope to be requires support from those who share our vision.
Our sponsors make it possible for us to provide these events for free, and directly benefit those who are seeking to enter and grow inside the Ethereum ecosystem.
Our sponsors have provided support in many ways, and the knowledge and experience they bring to our events is undeniable. We’d also like to thank our speakers, mentors, and judges who helped contribute to the community by sharing their ideas and supporting our hackers.
Our mission has always focused on building the ecosystem one developer at a time. We aim to be the catalysts for the community by supporting thousands of developers across the globe to enter and grow with the Ethereum space.
We encourage hackers to continue their projects following our hackathons and will work to connect them with relevant grants and accelerators in order to build momentum for their ideas. No project is too small, if you believe in it, so do we.
That’s a wrap!
With Scaling Ethereum coming to a close, we’re looking forward to our next events 📣
May 28th–30th: Web3 Weekend
We’re running a Web3-focused weekend hackathon in partnership with Protocol Labs on May 28th with a focus on getting web2 developers to play with what smart contracts, data, audio/video, and gaming apps would look like with Filecoin and other web3 technologies.
There will be dedicated prize pools for the following themes: NFTs, Games, smart contract/oracles, & data markets (inc. raw data, archiving, publication, distribution, etc.) If you loved participating in NFTHack or missed out, now’s your chance to dive back in.
Apply now — spots are limited!
June 18th-July 9th: HackMoney 2021
This fully-digital DeFi-focused event will run from June 18th — July 9th, and will give you the support of a huge community of experts, mentors, sponsors, and other community members who want to help you hack the future of finance.
Applications are now open, and we’d love for you to join us!
Follow us on twitter to stay in the know about future events, and we’ll look forward to seeing you soon!
