Judging

By noon on Sunday, we had 7 project submissions, located here. Each team was given 3–5 minutes to tell judges the purpose of their Dapp and a demo of the product.

After much deliberation on the judging side, we declared three winners.

#1 Hash Witnesser— Best Project Built on Blockchain

This team, consisted of Mark Camball and Adam Koza, enrolled in the George Brown College Blockchain Program — built a platform that allowed Github to be verified through addresses. It would ensure the trust and transparency of off-chain data.

“STACK’s Stackathon challenged our team to collaborate on both the business and technical components of new technologies, particularly in blockchain technology. Aside from discovering a new business use case and applying a new programming language, we also learned the importance of working together in a cooperative environment. The environment in STACK’s office fostered ideation and getting all the components together for a (mostly) working product to show the judges in the short time we had. Interacting with other participants was also a real joy. The event was a great opportunity to make new friends and network with people interested in the technology.” — HashWitnesser Team

Adam and Mark were well versed in Solidity knowledge, and learnt Etherjs on the spot. It was incredibly eye-opening to see what they achieved in 24 hours this weekend.

#1 Scaling Betting Solution — Best Use of Blockchain Scalability

This team consisted of Doug Hoyte, founder of SportCrypt and Antoine De Vuyst, founder of BitCoin Bay. They built a system to facilitate sport betting, making use of Merkle Trees and Counterfactual Instantiation. It is an impressive feat in all of 24 hours.

“We had a great time at Stackathon. There were a number of interesting workshops and we got to talk to many people working on interesting blockchain projects. For our hack we implemented a system where two parties can agree on the terms of a bet before anything transactions are actually sent to the blockchain. In order for the smart contracts to access relevant terms of the bet, they are encoded in a Merkle Tree, the root of which becomes the matchID used for betting. We were proud to receive the the scalability prize of the hackathon. Thanks STACK!” — Doug and Antoine

Blockchain-based betting systems and gamification is an increasingly popular usecase for Dapps recently. We wish this team the best of luck in the future of project!

#2 Top Team — ETHMessage: Best Project Built on Blockchain

Similar to how an eTransfer would allow a message field, or how a cheque would have a memo field, or even the STACK app having a message field in a P2P transfer, messages in Ethereum transfers are not available. ETHMessage facilitates the message field in an Ethereum Transfer. This is useful not only for attributing messages to transfers of ETH, but also for auditing purposes and mapping a transaction to a certain purchase or transaction.

“I appreciate the opportunity and support STACK/STK has provided in this hackathon. It gave me a platform to start off my adventure in blockchain. I couldn’t have done it without the supercalafragilisticexpialadocious support from their mentors.” — Zichen Jiang

Zichen Jiang, software developer at Indellient Inc, built his first end-to-end system from smart contract, backend, to frontend. We hope he continues to work on ETHMessage as a standard, as it would be useful for many Dapps out there.

Overall, we were very happy to see the number of submitted projects, as well as educating the next blockchain developers in the space.