The Hedera18 Hackathon Mon 15th - Tues 16th October was organised in 8 host cities around the world including: Singapore, Bangalore, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Paris, London, Dallas and San Francisco! The challenge? To develop innovative DApps that take advantage of Hedera’s differentiated micro-payment feature.
The Hedera Hashgraph platform has fast latency, is low-cost and so secure, it’s achieved Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) 😎. Dallas hosted the inaugural Hedera18 Developer Conference to share insights into the platform, founded by Dr Leemon Baird and Mance Hamon, to be launched this December.
London
People from all over Europe registered for the London hackathon to face the challenge of creating disruptive dApps for the upcoming launch of the Hedera blockchain MainNet in December! With 14 teams registered, whittled down to 9 pitching teams, 3 local winners, and one global champion— this was an incredible event!
DAY ONE
On Monday morning, October 15th in London, Solidity developers, blockchain engineers, java developers, decentralised experts and eager innovators piled into the Wallacespace Spitalfields in East London to start the Hedera18 Hackathon.
Alex Godwin from Hedera Hashgraph launched the event explaining the challenge and criteria that the dApps would be judge by: Feasibility, Innovation, Challenge Fit, and Technical Execution.
12 Individuals pitched their ideas to recruit participants to their teams, or presented their initial idea to stake claim to their project. The ideas diverse: from a crowdsourced ideas bounty platform, Surveys, Music copyright, Crowdsourcing presence app, and many more…
Soon projects sprung up out of nowhere and 14 teams registered their ideas to create dApps over the next two days.
Teams got straight to the task and worked hard to plan the dApp and get onto the Hedera Platform TestNet!
Some teams were pre-formed, but the majority had just met this morning over breakfast and were embarking on a new hackathon adventure ready to win the prize for best dApp.
PRIZES
The teams were all working to learn new tech, get to grips with the hedera platform before launch and contribute to the robustness of the tech, collaborate on cool projects, meet new people, but also — to win the local and global prize!
Each city were battling to gain the 1st place prize of $10K, 2nd place 7K and 3rd place of 3K of which would be made up of Hedera tokens and cash ;) The 3 winners from each city would compete to be chosen as Global Hedera18 Hackathon winner and claim the 50K bounty!
JUDGES
The London judges to select the local winners included 3 blockchain experts: Helen Disney, founder of Unblocked which helps clarify all the topics of blockchain across industries, and helps demistify the legal, financial and regulation aspects; Alex Godwin Director of Business Development EMEA from Hedera Hashgraph; and Shiv Aggarwal, CEO of MyEarth.id, the decentralised ID management system.
PITCH TRAINING
The teams were given a workshop on demo pitching to ensure a super slick presentation and video demo. Teams worked relentlessly to ensure they were able to produce an MVP of a dApp along with a video demo to showcase the features of their product. Not everyone was used to pitching so the tips came in very useful!
End of the Day ONE and some hackers continued throughout the night to complete their challenges.
Fortunately, there were some comfy sofas to grab some Zzzzs and showers to freshen up at the amazing venue Wallacespace Spitalfields venue!
DAY TWO
Teams worked hard to finish off their demos and their pitches and worked ruthlessly to complete them in time for the code freeze at 3pm, and were supported through one-on-one pitch coaching and feedback to get their demos up to global competitor level!
FINAL DEMOS
It was the moment everyone had been waiting for — the final demos!!! The nine teams that were left in the competition had made it to the final stage — pitch their MVP in front of the jury in only 3 minutes! Then face 2 minutes of questions from the blockchain experts. The following projects were presented:
Magical Hash — dApp enabling valuable health data to reach medical researchers to create cures and save lives — without the data ever leaving the hospitals and owners. Patients would receive HBar rewards.
Trusted Survey — dApp using Micropayments for rewarding survey participation, with an aim to increase the number of completed surveys and increase engagement.
Blockimon — dApp Game to help high-street stores boost sales by offering Arcoin and HBar through an Augmented Reality meets blockchain solution.
PAYPER — Peer-to-peer micro payments for the Open API Economy. Anonymous disintermediated small-amount payments the open API’s need.
4C — Premium Music for Creators on Youtube to help increase use of copyrighted music with defined payment splits between creators and artists.
Dealeos — Redistributing wealth from content creation between the creators, readers, and platform provider.
Penny — Highway Infrastructure Micro-payment platform paired with to alert local councils to common problem and identify which sites to prioritise — scope for scaling to other issues.
Authenticity — A content authentication platform where the creator and publisher of content get incentivised by the user to have authentic content.
MonEYE — Real time payments made simple: Advertiser’s pay only for ads that reach their targets, and influencers get paid per views.
After hearing the 9 superb pitches and demo videos, it was time for the Jury to deliberate
It was then time to discover the hackathon winners.
🥁DRUMROLL PLEASE! 🥁
In 3rd place: PENNY!
In 2nd place: MONEYE!
In 1st place…: PAYPER!
Afterwards, we all celebrated the end of the hackathon — congratulations to everybody!
End of Day TWO and the local hackathons had all come to an end. But who of the cities’ Top 3’s would win the global bounty? We’d have to wait another whole day to find out!!!
GLOBAL JUDGES
It was up to the Global Judges to select the Global Hedera18 Hackathon winner the next day at the Hedera18 Developer conference in Dallas. The Co-Founders of the Hedera Hashgraph were among the esteemed judges!
GLOBAL WINNERS
The global winners were announced Oct 17 11pm CT and guess who the winners were….??
YES! The London first place winners — PAYPER!!!!
Having flown in to London all the way from Romanian tech capital Cluj — this hot team of developers certainly knew the way to the judges’ hearts by heading straight to facilitate API communication. Experienced dApp Coders with team members working at blockchain startup Provably Fair, the fast-growing blockchain startup and the main technology provider for iGaming powerhouses like mbitcasino.com.
📖 Find out more about the PayPer solution here 📖
Congratulations to PayPer and to all the winning teams!!
The winners from each location, each awarded $10,000 worth of cash and hbars, included:
Blume, a peer-to-peer internet hotspot sharing app using micropayments, from the Bangalore hackathon,
Hash Name Service, a low-cost native implementation for a human-readable name service, from the Dallas hackathon
Helpon, a decentralized charity platform to transparently connect people in need with those willing to help, from the Moscow hackathon
Proof of Life, a solution that enables identity and life verification through voice to streamline the pension process, from the Paris hackathon
H X, which utilizes the speed and fair ordering of hashgraph to create a trusted secondary auction market with verified goods, from the San Francisco hackathon
Artgraph, a platform that allows artists to get paid in-person or online when their art is sold, viewed, or rated highly, from the Singapore hackathon
Cronos, an SDK for developers to create new user rewards with a shareable tokenized asset earned by time spent in app or games, from the Tel Aviv hackathon
Seriously though, you are all champions as this was no easy task! Congrats for your ambitious and super dApps. We can’t wait to see them launched on the MainNet in the next few months!!
You can find photos of the event on the Flickr album.
Check out our upcoming events at bemyapp.com/events
