PolkaWorld Hackathon 2019 is the world's first substrate developer competition co-hosted by Polkaworld, Polkadot, and Web3 Foundation. The event was held in Hang Zhou, China, for two days, from September 21st to 22nd.

Developers and innovators from New Zealand, Australia, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou formed 20 teams, hacked for 36 hours, to develop and create innovative prototypes with Substrate.

Prize Pool#

The total prize pool is worth 385,000 RMB.

1. First prize (1 team): 140,000 RMB + PolkaWorld Incubation
2. Second prize (2 teams): 70,000 RMB + PolkaWorld Incubation
3. Third prize (3 teams): 30,000 RMB + PolkaWorld Incubation

Additional prizes:

• Crowd’s Choice Award (1 team): a bonus worth 5000 RMB
• The Most Innovative Project Award (1 team): a prize of 5000 RMB
• The Most Practical Project Award (1 team): a bonus worth 5000 RMB

Judges#

• Dr. Gavin Wood - Co-founder of Polkadot; Founder of Web3 Foundation; CWO and Chairman of Parity Technologies; Co-founder of Ethereum and former CTO of the Ethereum Foundation; author of the Polkadot White Paper and the Ethereum Yellow Paper
• Tang Wei - Parity Software Engineer
• Nicole Zhu - Parity Software Engineer
• Alistair Stewart - Web3 Foundation Lead Researcher
• Guanghua Guo - Co-Founder of ChainX
• Bin Lu (咕噜) - Founder of Bihu
• Ming Zong - Chief Investment Officer of HashKey Capital
• Jocy Line - Founder of IOSG Ventures
• Wenbo Yu - Executive Director of Fenbushi Capital
• Yanfeng Chen - Co-Founder of LongHash
• Sota Watanabe - Founder of Stake Technologies
• Antoine Najjarin - Founder of Speckle
• Xiliang Chen - CTO of Laminar and Polkadot Ambassador

ps. A huge thank you to all the judges above who gave meaningful comments and suggestions to the participating teams in this Substrate Developer Contest.

Day 0: Preparation#

After submitting our applications and got admitted, contestants were given 21 days to prepare for the hackathon. After a lot of brainstorming and discussions, our team, A.T.Dot, decided to develop a content co-creation platform using Substrate tackling the following pain points:

1. Content Bottleneck: Quantity, Quality, and Coordination
2. Content Creators are taken advantage of by centralized platforms:
   • Distribution channels are controlled by large centralized businesses.
   • The vast wealth generated by Web2 is not fairly distributed.
3. Lack of a value loop between original work creators and derivative work creators.

Day 1#

Registration and Hacking#

I arrived at Hang Zhou on the morning of 21st September and met up with my teammates at the hotel prepared by the event organizer. We then headed to the event site together and started hacking.

During the day, three workshops were given by the Web3 Foundation and Parity Tech engineers on the following topics:

1. Building a private blockchain with Substrate
2. PoW Consensus on Substrate
3. Web3 Foundation Grants

Sleepless night#

We found countless bugs, and it was annoying. We didn't sleep at all and spent the whole night till morning debugging. Luckily, we did clear all the major bugs in time.

Day 2#

Pitching Castor.Network#

I represented A.T.Dot and pitched our project Castor Network. In short, Castor Network is a blockchain built with Substrate that focuses on the co-creation of content and providing a win-win situation for participants through a value loop.

We try to:

• Increase content quantity by reducing content censorship and providing decentralized distribution channels
• Increase content quality through content curation from communities
• Increase content coordination by incentivizing creators to co-create, cite and build on previous work through crypto-economics
• Protect intellectual property rights by providing the ability to trace content and find relationships between them

Pitch Deck: Download

Demo:

Winning first prize#

Due to the overall completeness of the project and excellent onstage performance, our group won the first prize award. The prize was awarded by Dr. Gavin Wood, Co-Founder of Polkadot.

2018 LongHash Tokyo Hackathon is a blockchain hackathon hosted by LongHash and co-organized by CYBEX and Taraxa. It was held from April 20, 2018 to April 22, 2018 in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan.

Based on the theme of "Decentralization" and "Security," 137 blockchain-related experts and developers from 12 countries representing companies and universities worldwide were invited to have open discussions and jointly develop new features that will contribute to the development of blockchain technology.

Theme#

The hackathon has three open questions that participants can choose to tackle:

1. Regulatory Compliance and Performance Improvement of Decentralized Exchanges
2. Data Analytics on Blockchain for Business and Regulations (AML)
3. Blockchain-Enabled IoT Solutions for Data Silo and Security

Awards#

A total of 100 ETH will be awarded to the six winning teams, and the top 50 contestants can reimburse travel expenses.

Judges and Mentors#

Judges and mentors of the hackathon are all well-known blockchain-industry leaders ranging from:

• Dr. Xiao Feng - Vice-Chairman and Executive Director of China Wanxiang Holding Co, Ltd., Chairman and CEO of Wanxiang Blockchain Inc.
• Dr. Shen Bo - Co-Founder of Bitshares and Founder of Fenbushi Capital
• Evgenia Broshevan - Co-Founder of Hacken Group
• Chen Yanfeng - Co-Founder of LongHash
• James Gong - Founder of ChainB and a popular blockchain KOL with the nickname 'Baozou Gongqinwang'
• and more

Winning First Prize#

I was invited to participate in the hackathon as a member of the Peking University InfoSec Laboratory team (supervised by Professor Chen Zhong and Associate Research Professor Guan Zhi). The six students of our lab were divided into two groups. The first group, composed of Abba Graba, Ke Wang, and Li Yue, focused on improving blockchain consensus protocol for the Internet of Things. I, Liu Chao, and Li Anran formed the second group (Team 18: Yet Another Atomic Swap), tackling the topic of atomic swaps on decentralized exchanges.

After two sleepless nights and a lot of caffeine, our group proposed an improvement plan for the decentralized trading platform Cybex, which consists of design and code implementation. With a profound understanding of the problem, perfect plan design, and excellent on-the-spot performance, our team advanced to the final six and won the first prize award.

Read more about our atomic swaps design here

Other Winning Teams#

Second Prize winners#

Team 29: Labeling, Identifying & Classifying Public Address Behavior

Team 6: Curvegrid's Token Dijkstra

ps. I was really impressed with the public address classification project by Team 29 from Carnegie Mellon University.

Third Prize Teams#

Team 17: BTC Address Classification by Machine Learning

Team 1: GibuvAroch

Team 23: hogehoge

After Party#

After the awards were given, we had a small meet-and-greet with a Japanese KOL and ate lots of sushi and sashimi. Yay!

Other Photos#

In the news#

• PKU EECS News: https://eecs.pku.edu.cn/info/1082/9000.htm
• Interview with 区块链大本营: https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1149014

JavaScript Conference China 2017 on July 15-16 @ Shanghai

We exhibited our repolished Holo Phyperiment AR App at Peking University AR/VR Creative Works Exhibition hosted by Peking University's School of Earth and Space Sciences, where we were awarded the First Prize.

HackPKU 2017 is a Hackathon organized by the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science of Peking University. Each team can have a maximum of 5 people and was given the task of developing an innovative technology product within two nights using software and hardware provided by sponsors. This year's event sponsors are Schlumberger, Indeed Tokyo, SenseTime, Momenta, Hulu, Sohu, Amazon Devices, IBM, Microsoft, and Qing Cloud.

Our team was the only group that developed on the Microsoft HoloLens platform. Though we did not win any prize, we still had a lot of fun spending two sleepless nights studying new technology, programming, debugging, and networking with computer science students from all over China. Read more about what we've created here.