We’d like to introduce the first place winner of our $20k grand prize awarded to an outstanding project submitted to our second global hackathon, which concluded after 6 weeks on September 14th.

He goes by the alias ‘Mossid’ on GitHub. In real life, Mossid is a South Korean 12th grader named Joon. Joon started programming since 2011 — as an 11 year old. His tinkering in blockchains started with Ethereum, working with Solidity, before he became interested in Tendermint, “because of ERISdb,” Joon told us in a follow-up Q&A. “I’m interested in verifiable computing and functional smart contract language.”

This was his very first hackathon. Joon submitted the prize-winning proposal he named ETGate.

The idea is simple: build a gateway between Ethereum and Tendermint, hence ETGate, via relayers. Inspired by the Ethereum peg-zone design described in the Cosmos white paper and our Ethermint implementation, Joon built a communication mechanism, blending the pegged-chain concept with our Inter-blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, between Ethereum and Tendermint.

Mossid’s GitHub repo can be found here: https://github.com/mossid

Congratulations Joon!