Here are our guidelines for prizes and grants for Harmony’s $1 million hackathon (https://hack.harmony.one).
Original Github link:
There are 3 main themes and within each theme there are 4 tracks. Those are listed below.
For each of the 12 tracks, the prize pool is $81,000. The judges and Harmony team will have full discretion to select the following winners and prizes:
Top Prize: $20,000
Second Prize: $10,000
Third Prize: $5,000
Pool Prize: $6,000 divided up for all projects with a qualified submission: a smart contract deployed on Harmony mainnet / testnet. The pool prizes are entirely up to the discretion of the judges.
Each track will then have 4 follow on grants of $10,000 each to give out in the 4 months after the hackathon for any winner reaching any of the goals:
launch on mainnet with 1000 users
$100,000 in venture or DAO funding
a 3-out-of-5 multisig DAO with 100 on-chain votes
These milestones must be reached by January 31, 2022 before the grants expire.
For each track, there will be a 9-person multi-signature wallet of $40,000 and those signers will give out the 4 grants. The 9 people will be the top 3 winners, 3 from the pool prize and 3 from the judges, Harmony DAOs (community, validator), developer captains, and pangaea captains.
The multi-sig holders will decide on the 4 follow-on grants, though we ask that all follow on grants be posted in the Harmony forum (here) with strong support from the community.
In addition to the 12 Harmony tracks, we are working with Terra, Chainlink, Sushi, Maddock Capital, and Hashkey on a challenge with the following prize structure: $20K for top prize, $10K for second, $5K for pool prize, and 2 follow on grants of $10K to be decided by the prize partners.
a. Liquidity. Harmony Cross-Chain API for aggregation, Hummingbot for arbitrage, fixed-rate w/ Terra’s UST
b. Middlewares. Graph, Crazy.ONE names, privacy-mixer
c. DeFi/NFT/DAO. Metamask, Web3.js, randomness opcode, FlyClient bridges vs rollups, BLS aggregated signatures
d. Platform. On-chain delegation, O(1) sync, RaptorQ gossip
The first hackathon theme is Cross-Chain with our trustless, on-chain bridges. The 4 tracks — Liquidity, Middlewares, DeFi/NFT/DAO, Platform — emphasize the current product-market fits of decentralized applications but across multiple chains. Developers can make use of Harmony’s rich ecosystem: a cross-chain API for aggregation and asset pools; Ethereum-compatible indexing, names, and toolkits; and, unique technical features including randomness opcode, on-chain delegation and aggregated signatures, FlyClient bridges, and fast state sync with message gossips.
Besides advancing these cross-chain infrastructure, there are also many product ideas that can take advantage of our trustless bridges. For example, building arbitrage bots with our partner Hummingbot or integrating stablecoins and saving products with our Terra bridge. Harmony has also launched Bulletproof and Poseidon Hash functions for privacy coin mixers like Tornado Cash. (more)
Note: to qualify for prizes, project submissions in this category must build upon 1Wallet or SmartVault.
a. Frontends. Focus on user onboarding & mobile clients
b. Web3. Curate crypto names + reputations + moments, as DeFi dashboard + NFT gallery + DAO townsquare
c. Web2. Link with Twitter/Github/Linkedin identity, multi-factor biometric/location/device authentications
d. Security. Formal verification, cryptography research
The second hackathon theme is On-Chain with our social wallets and keyless security. The 4 tracks — Frontends, Web3, Web2, Security — emphasize the consumer experience of delighting the users without worrying about blockchain technology or custody. Wallets are becoming the Web3 portals as a DeFi dashboard for asset swaps and investments, a NFT gallery for collectible editorials and auctions, or a DAO townsquare for governance votes or payrolls. Our hackathon encourages seamless onboarding and incentivized education for smart contract wallets; builders can start from our audited prototypes featuring authenticator-based security and on-chain account recovery.
Composing Web3 contracts and integrating Web2 components is the crossing of the chasm for daily uses. Our wallets should work as a mobile or even wearable client. They can also curate crypto and domain names, work activity and reputations, or even virtual and life moments. Furthermore, the wallets can link your identity on Twitter as social clout, Github as work prowess, or Linkedin as tailored profiles. At this hackathon, cryptography or security researchers can extend our authentication to multiple factors, verify implementations with formal methods, or prototype based on our latest research papers. (more)
Lastly, the third hackathon theme is Cross-Border with fintech and social integrations. The 4 tracks — Gateways, Corporate, Regional, Impacts — emphasize the real-world value for business and communities across countries. Toward unbundling of banks, our developers can replicate many centralized services like fiat exchanges, over-the-counters, credit cards, or even corporate finance. Many global business and most decentralized teams are already facing the pain of scaling beyond tens of teammates and countries — dealing with employee payrolls, retirement benefits, medical insurance, and expense compensations. Fortunately, cryptography primitives like auditable privacy will make accounting and tax compliant for business on public blockchains.
Now is also the prime time to innovate on consumer marketplaces and social incentives on blockchain. Radical markets mean self-assessed taxation and quadratic stakes; mechanism designs focus on revealing true preferences and multi-round auctions. Both on blockchain can make retail loyalty programs or commerce logistics far more efficient — or even bring social changes in the form of basic income and retrospective funding for public goods. (more)
### Venture Introductions and Seed Funding
Harmony has relationships with some of the biggest and active funds available. For certain projects and winners, we are happy to make introductions to our keiretsu of venture relationships for additional funding.
With our partner Dorahacks, projects will receive community matching and potentially also venture capital investor interest from their 60+ investor community.
### Terra’s Challenge:
We are an opinionated Layer 1 platform. As we have relationships with most major liquidity providers and investors in DeFi and crypto, we recommend exploring the following themes to make the most of the hackathon.
1.Understand core themes.
2.Identify technologies and areas of interest.
3.Identify suitable skill match.
Extending Stablecoin Adoption
Beginner to intermediate developers.
Take advantage of TerraUSD native stablecoins to introduce crypto-native experiences: subscription payments and micropayments, yield-bearing escrow, milestone or instant payroll, creative remittance solutions.
Decentralized Asset Management
For beginner and intermediate frontend developers.
Over 20% of users of Mirror are in Thailand. Interact with Terra.js, Mirror.js to build decentralized front ends for Mirror. This is a core priority for TFL to enable censorship resistant asset management across borders.
Crypto Native Financial Primitives
Intermediate to Advanced Developers
Extend primitives available within the Terra ecosystem. For example, DAO treasury issue bonds issuance, revenue sharing agreements, income sharing agreements, DAO creation and management cross-chain liquidity, traunching.
Picks and Shovels
Advanced developers
One of the highest leverage opportunities in the ecosystem is to enable other developers and builders. Create indexers, block explorers, and developer facing tooling to fix issues every developer will face into the future.
### Maddock Capital’s Challenges:
Theme, “Reduction of the broker / middleman tax in all financial marketplaces”
Preamble: blockchain technologies power is to reduce transaction friction and transaction costs across all marketplaces in a mature and efficient ecosystem. Currently nearly every financial transaction undertaken has a “broker tax” applied to it. Harmony’s infrastructure enables that to be materially reduced.
Currently most online businesses, particularly early stage startups and more mature tech businesses with recurring revenue have limited recourse to raise money outside of equity rounds. Typically, equity raises when advised by financial intermediaries charge 5-7% of proceeds. A blockchain enabled Crowdfunding solution for equity in these businesses (ideally native to and utilising blockchain technologies) could significantly disrupt this market by bringing new sources of capital to these businesses. In short, improve access through designing a 2-sided marketplace for equity raises.
Similarly these businesses currently are not able to raise debt. Current solutions are focused on securitising or forward selling revenues linked to recurring contract income.
In short we want you to disrupt online platforms providing marketplaces to forward sell revenues and contract receivables.
Our view is that this would require the Use of a stable coin pegged to the USD in the first instance. This should enable any blockchain participant to put their capital to work for real growth.
### Chainlink’s Challenge:
The development of price feeds delivered via a decentralized oracle network has facilitated the emergence of DeFi applications at scale. Chainlink current offers a variety of additional smart contract services such as verifiable randomness, fair sequencing services and keepers that are also allowing developers to create new and innovate applications. The concept of decentralized oracle networks outlined in the the Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper outlines a future where different constellations of nodes collaborate to process a wide range of workloads. In similarity to how DeFi projects are composable, we envision a future in which the services that facilitate the emergence of new applications are also composable. The purpose of this challenge is to identify the next generation of smart contract services that can be delivered via decentralized oracle networks to allow developers to create new products, new sources of value and ultimately facilitate the emergence of the next wave of blockchain innovation.
### Hashkey’s Challenge:
Cross chain is the future of DeFi yet liquidity is segmented across chains. With Harmony’s lightning speed and cross chain APIs, a cross chain liquidity management solution is in high demand for yield farming with Harmony chain assets on other blockchains and vice versa. In particular, Harmony chain assets can be deposited in the newly designed protocol for yield farming in cross chain yield vaults. On the other side, assets in Ethereum, BSC, Solana etc. can earn farming rates in Harmony yield vaults. This will create the future of networked liquidity and increase the mass adoption of DeFi.
### Submission Requirements
All submissions must be open source with a github repo.
To qualify all projects must utilize the Harmony as part of their application stack
The application must be USEFUL or INTERESTING or NOVEL. Extra points if app is deployed on Harmony Mainnet.
If there is wide appeal for the application, it will score better.
A demo video must be submitted for a complete submission
All submissions are through Gitcoin and teams must be formed via Gitcoin with all team members registered.
### Judging Criteria
A panel of distinguished judges will evaluate your submission. Here’s the criteria by which your work will be judged:
Teams are limited to 4 members at most. We encourage team members to be from a variety of backgrounds. We prefer that web2 devs just dipping their toe in web3 have more seasoned developers on their team and to learn from each other.
Alignment to the challenges theme of TradFi to DeFi
Is the application useful? Is it interesting?
Originality and innovation: Because Harmony is EVM-compatible, porting anything from Ethereum is super easy. If you’re going to fork something, that’s ok. But add your own flare to it and make it worth using and be explicit how this fork is . If it’s just a plain-vanilla fork with nothing new, you’ll win nada. zip.
Technicality of implementation: how difficult was it to create your application? If it was easy, that will reduce the likelihood of winning anything.
Design and usability: Have some pride in what you create; add some craftmanship to it.
### Schedule
In addition to the hackathon, we will have a series of workshops, fireside chats, panel interviews, office hours, and check-ins. The schedule is TBD but will be announced as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are the key dates:
July 15, Open Registration
August 16, Hackathon begins, Opening Ceremonies
August 17, Team Formation (details TBD)
August 20, Submit Team names and team members
September 15, Mid-point Demo Day (optional, depending on interest)
September 30, Submission Deadline, Hackathon ends, Closing Ceremonies
