Reinventing Finance — 53 hours and 50 hackers later…

What was “Reinventing Finance”:

On May 17th, 5pm CET, Melonport kicked off it’s first ever Hackathon enabling participants to play a role in “Reinventing Finance”. The Melonport team kicked off Thursday evening with presentations and introductions around different categories which were available for hackers to choose from. A total prize pool of CHF 50,000 (in Melon tokens) was available to best solutions in different categories and one overall grand prize for the most innovative solution of them all !

The categories included UX/UI design, design your own trading bots, compliance (KYC/AML) integrations, Melonchain specific research (courtesy of Trinkler Fellowship) and a Freestyle category! Thanks to The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Rotkreuz 41 became home to over 80 hackers for 53 solid hours with make-shift beds for the weak and cans of Red-Bull for the strong.

By 9pm on Thursday night — teams were already starting to form and by 11pm the lively discussions and mapping out of ideas were already beginning to materialize.

Simon Emanuel Schmid of Melonport presenting on UX/UI and Trading Bot categories

DEXY team pushing ahead through the night… “sleep is over-rated”

50 hours later….

The next 50 hours was a whirlwind of teams studying Melon protocol documentation, brainstorming, idea-generating, implementation and…. burgers…. lots of burgers!

At 4pm on Saturday 19th, the teams were requested to stop hacking and to begin preparing their presentations !

The Fork & Bottle food truck on standby to refuel hungry hackers

Presentations…

At 5pm sharp on Saturday 19th May — 13 teams and the Melonport judges gathered in the auditorium to watch teams present their results over the next 2.5hours. The judges were incredibly moved to see so many interesting and innovative tools and ideas being applied to a project which they have worked so hard to deliver on until now. Some categories were more popular than others (Eg. trading bots and UX/UI design) — which made it harder to pick clear winners and others (eg. Freestyle) completely blew us away with what they had to present. One thing was clear — time was short and what these guys managed to achieve in under 50 hours was very impressive. I think its fair to say that everyone walked away from the Hackathon contributing something!

Judging Time

The judges of the Hackathon comprised of the Melonport team. Four categories were taken into consideration when judging:

Technical complexity /achievement (25%)

(25%) Originality/Creativity (25%)

(25%) Impact/Usefulness (25%)

Presentation/Demo (25%)

Some of the Melonport team take a short break for a selfie..looking good guys ! :)

Category Winners….

A quick synopsis of the winners:

KYC category

The prize went to Team 8, the DEXY team who created a permissioned version of their decentralized exchange. They used ring signatures as a way to preserve KYC privacy and identity of users whilst still being able to verify that certain people within a certain “ring” were all valid and able counterparties to trade with.

Matthew di Ferrante presenting on DEXY’s solution to KYC/AML

Consensus Algorithm

A challenging category but a thumbs up to Team 10 for tackling this and coming up with some original ideas. While we didn’t think these were implementable, we thought the team were fully deserving of an award for their research and efforts.

UX/UI Category

Team 4 walked away with the prize after presenting an advanced UX/UI implementation of Melon which introduced the “Melon Spider” — a sophisticated way of comparing funds with different considerations all being visualised in one spider graph. Additionally, the same team made a dynamic comparison tool between funds which allowed you to select different funds (see photo) and compare various metrics. This was all linked to the back end and scored points for sophistication!

Trading Bots

A very popular category and one that was difficult to determine a clear winner for so we ended up awarding two prizes for some outstanding work:

Prize 1 went to Team 2 for managing to collect hourly data on cryptos from two years back and used it to predict the prices of MLN, ETH and BTC. The back-testing of this generally showed to be a good predictor although volatile on occasions. The strongest profits and strength of the predictor were with Bitcoin and this was explained due to longer period of data available.

Prize 2 went to Team 9 for a machine learning strategy which pooled together a mixture of historical price data and “key words” from Twitter to predict prices of Ether/Maker/Dai/Bitcoin and Melon. These strategies were backtested and also proven to make a profit most of the time. The technical implementation and presentation of this team was particularly impressive.

Risk Management

Team 1 won the risk mamagemmemt category by creating a system to categorize tokens and either whitelist of blacklist these tokens. In doing this the managers could decide what their classifications were on creating fund and investors could transparently see into this. One question posed by the Melon team was whether the manager should have the power to determine what falls into the categories or some other outside source!

And (drumroll)….The Grand Prize — CHF 25,000 (in MLN) …went to….

The Chronologic Team — AKA Team 6! This was an exciting end-result on all levels. The Chronos Team built an MVP of a Melon/Chronos integration. The Chronos technology allows the scheduling of transactions to be executed in the future on-chain. Team 6 used the Chronos technology to implement “stop loss “ or “take profits” orders to automatically be triggered on-chain.

The Melonport team had thought about one day working on something like this and we were blown away to see that a team managed to merge work they’ve already done on another project to Melon and achieve these results much faster and more effiiently ! A very big well done and we can’t wait to explore ways to make this more than just a “proposal”.

Big Thanks and Gratitude

As you can see it was a period of hard work, excitement and results! The Melonport team truly felt blessed to have such a diverse and talented group of people come together and give it their top efforts over this period and we hope that you all enjoyed it as much as we did !

I would like to take the opportunity to give a huge thanks to the entire Melonport team for their hard work and sleepless nights during this period to pull off such a smooth event ! We’d also like to give a big thanks to The Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and in particular the support and hard work of Professor Alex Denzler and Tim Weingäertner to make this happen!

If only there had been a prize for the least sleep… eh? Thanks Hansen and Sebastian for your almost 24 hour surveillance on campus!

This blog post is subject to change as the research & development phase is ongoing. Melonport will aim to update blog-posts regularly to represent our latest thinking on a best-efforts basis but there may occasionally be time-lags between latest thinking and updated documentation. With this in mind, the author of this blog assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content of this blog.