Did you meet Vitalik Buterin? No? Well he probably saw you, so there’s that.

We want to thank everyone that came to the ETH San Francisco hackathon!

The beautiful Palace of Fine Arts was taken over by more than 1,000 hackers in attendance and it was a great weekend packed with amazing ideas! It was really amazing to see these thinkers submitting some really exciting ideas built on ethereum.

The Judges

The submitted projects were evaluated by a panel of judges, including Vitalik Buterin (ethereum founder), Balaji Srinivasan (CTO of Coinbase), Vlad Zamfir (researcher at ethereum foundation), and Linda Xie (VC at Scalar Capital).

Hackers hard at work on the Gamecube

After 48 hours of solid hackathoning (and some Super Smash Bros.), the panel of judges sorted through over 120 submissions, 10 were announced as the winning projects.

Wyre Grand Prize Winner: The Stack Team

As a ETH San Francisco sponsor, Wyre also offered a prize to interesting projects building on the Wyre API and SDK. We were extremely pleased to award the Stack team Wyre’s grand prize of 500 Dai for their Lending Party project.

Stack’s goal was to remove the normal obstacles to receiving a personal loan in today’s market. Although there are providers that allow easy access to loans, they often come at a steep price; desperate users agree to high interest rates and are sucked into a vicious cycle of debt that they’re unable to pay off.

To solve this, Lending Party provides an intuitive interface where a borrower uses BloomID as a single sign-on solution to verify their identity and obtain a no-interest collateralized loan with a very small origination fee. The use of Collateralized DAI on this platform ensures that there is no time bind for the repayment of the loan. A key attribute of this project that impressed our judges was the user interface that is quite easy to use; scan a BloomID QR on your phone and start using it right away. Wyre was a crucial component of Lending Party, giving users an easy to use off ramp from crypto to fiat.

An important aspect of this solution is that the the user can access all the functionality, without ever knowing they were using a Dapp. This gets to a core belief of Wyre that in order to get mass adoption of cryptocurrency, the way to interact with it must live up to current expectations of ease of use.

The Stack team was able to produce an impressive functioning interface within the time allotted, but this is a huge issue they are tackling and we can’t say just how excited we are to see how this gets developed.

Learn more about Lending Party: https://devpost.com/software/lendingparty

Thanks to All Participants

Congratulations to the Stack team for their prize and we’re so excited to see how they develop it! We also want to thank everyone who showed up to compete in the hackathon, it was truly invigorating to see all the teams working hard on some next-level ideas and we’re encouraged to see the ecosystem in the capable hands of some pretty smart builders.