Last week, Encode Club in partnership with Web3Bridge launched the 8-week #HackAfrica hackathon. The blockchain development hackathon comprises 4 weeks of learning and 4 weeks of building projects. Blockchain development is also known as Web3 is the new fast-growing field in the tech world. Builders will build web3 solutions/dApps depending on the challenges that the sponsors have given to the participants of the hackathon which I'll talk about in this article.
Encode club is a community of university students, researchers, and developers building in the blockchain. It educates, offers support, and catalyzes the advancement of blockchain at universities worldwide. They run:-
- Hacks: 8 to 12 programs to build a blockchain project from scratch.
- Accelerator Program: 10-week programs to help early-stage projects go to the next level.
- Talent Placement: Helping place top developers at leading blockchain companies.
- AMAs: Host developers from top blockchain companies where they're asked questions both by Encode Club hosts and community.
Web3Bridge aims to train persons interested in web3 in a collaborative & supportive remote environment and create an African web3 community. Here are the courses they offer and you can check their site to register:
- Web2: introduction i.e introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript.
- Web3 Bridge: focuses on migrating web2 developers into the Web3 ecosystem.
- Web3 Garage: focused on training those moving from Web3 Bridge(motivated and self-taught developers) on product life cycle user research, community engagement, marketing, and within 12 weeks will be breaking and fixing codes to launch projects/ products.
Sponsors
The hackathon has five sponsors: SushiSwap, Stellar, 1inch, Polygon and Arweave. Each of the sponsors has given out many prized challenges that developers can build on to win awards at the hackathon after presentations have been done and the best projects are selected based on the requirements.
SushiSwap
SushiSwap is an automated market-making(AMM) Decentralized Finance (Defi) project created by Chef Nomi based on a UniSwap decentralized exchange (DEX) fork for bootstrapping liquidity. Sushi is currently deployed on different (Polygon, BSC), but focused on the Ethereum Mainnet. Sushi is a community-run project, governed by the community vote for all major changes to the protocol.
Sushi has Defi innovations crafted by master chefs e.g:
- Multi-chain AMM: The most competitive rates for Defi blue chips anywhere. Switch to other chains in one click.
- Kashi Lending & Leverage: Isolated lending markets, elastic interest rates. Leverage long short or create your own market.
- BentoBox dApps: An innovative ecosystem to use decentralized applications(dApps) gas-efficiently and gain extra yield. (Onchain mini-dApps)
- xSUSHI staking: Earn governance rights and 0.05% of all swaps from all chains in one simple place.
Isolated lending markets, elastic interest rates. Leverage long short or create your own market.
Isolated lending markets, elastic interest rates. Leverage long short or create your own market.
Sushi Challenges
- Build a smart contract with a front-end(UI) prize of $100
- Build a decentralized application(dApp) on top of BentBox prize of $2000, $1000, $500 based on best three top submissions.
- Create a strategy to gather information/analytics from many different chain activities and uncover insights. Choose one or two chains e.g Polygon, Ethereum, BSC, etc.
Stellar
Stellar is a decentralized open network for storing and moving money hence connecting the world's financial infrastructure. Stellar is borderless, limitless, and powerful hence making it possible to create, send, and trade digital representations of all forms of money: dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything. It’s designed so all the world’s financial systems can work together on a single network.
Through Stellar's API and SDK builders with a few lines of code can be able to transform the world of finance, and the network’s currency connections could give even a small company the power and reach of an international bank.
Using Stellar's built-in decentralized exchange for crypto, forex, or securities. Users can swap between tokens using simple functions built into the protocol.
Stellar Challenges
- Build a project on Stellar that solves a real-world problem and should be adaptive to low internet connection and low storage smartphones for $8500 in XML, $3000 in XML, and $2000 in XML respectively for the top three teams. (Lumen (XLM) is the native cryptocurrency for Stellar, an open-source blockchain payment system.)
Companies Built on Stellar
- Leaf Global Fintech: Helping people safely store and transport assets across borders to save, send, receive, pay and exchange that operates in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya.
- Click Pesa: operates in Tanzania and Kenya.
- Uhuru Wallet: A WhatsApp-based digital wallet for Southern Africa. Looking to expand into Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
- DSTOQ: Buy and sell stocks, bonds, or ETFs with zero fees. Currently operates in South Africa and looks to expand to other African and Asian Countries.
1INCH
1inch is a Defi/DEX aggregator, built-in in 2019 during the Ethereum Newyork Hackathon and it picks and chooses the cheapest crypto prices across decentralized exchanges i.e ETH, BSC, and Polygon. It's a combination of different decentralized protocols and brings together the best DEX experience for users. It has surpassed $50 Billion in overall volume within 2 years.
1INCH Challenges
- Suggest your own solution, keeping in mind that the 1inch Limit Order Protocol has conditional execution and arbitrary price discovery. prize $1500 of 1INCH tokens.
- write a smart contract that enables the creation of limit orders for margin trading on the 1inch limit order protocol for a prize worth $2500 of 1INCH tokens.
- An adapter for creating limit orders over the 1INCH Liquidity Protocol or over any decentralized exchange (DEX), based on their available liquidity. The adapter should contain isValidSignature, getMakerAmount (which calculates return amount based on DEX “getReturn” function), and transfer from (which triggers swaps and sends to takerAddress). Prize $2500 of 1INCH tokens
Polygon Polygon is a protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks. Aggregating scalable solutions on Ethereum supporting a multi-chain Ethereum ecosystem. It's considered among the best layer 2 solutions.
Polygon Challenges
- Integrate polygon into your decentralized application(dApp) to make it scalable i.e faster and cheaper for users. (Prize $1000, $500, $250 for top 3 teams).
Arweave Arweave decentralized storage that enables the development of decentralized web2 apps for example social media apps. There's no intervention of developers or maintainers to the user's address. Arweave runs Open Foundry an incubator program where founders get guided on how to launch decentralized web on Arweave. Participants who'll take part in the hackathon can submit them for consideration in Open Foundry.
Challenge
- Build web2 application on top of Arweave.
Thank you for reading through my article. If you're a participant in the hackathon you can check the challenges and I'll add more articles from the workshops of various sponsors of the Hackathon.