Hackathon and conference: NFTbilisi

Community Events
1

Name of Event/Project

NFTbilisi

Proposal overview

We are hosting a weekend conference and hackathon June 10th-12th in Tbilisi, Georgia. There will be both in-person and online attendance options. We believe it would be ideal for Harmony to be involved to raise awareness of the possibilities for NFT projects to build on Harmony.

NFTbilisi is designed to connect projects, artists, builders, NFT enthusiasts and anyone who is curious about the space. Our program will include speakers, breakout sessions and ample opportunities for networking and social time.

The hackathon will run in tandem with the conference, culminating with a demo night at the end of the event. Every hackathon participant will be required to have at least one woman on their team, and Ukrainian citizens can attend for free.

Our primary goal is to make this event a valuable experience for everyone who attends—builders, sponsors, speakers, artists, investors and all the curious folks. We are designing the entire event to revolve around opportunities for education and connection.

Proposal ask

$50,000

Metrics for success

We have room for up to 500 in-person attendees for the conference, and an unlimited number of hackathon participants and virtual conference attendees.

We would like to use the full amount of the grant for hackathon prizes (we have some ideas about how to split it, and we are open to suggestions as well).

External links

NFTbilisi

Additional useful information

Tbilisi is the capital city of Georgia with a large NFT-focused community and easy flights to many European and Eurasian airport hubs. Both a local university and the Georgian government have expressed interest in helping us promote the conference. Georgia has a thriving tourism industry and is a destination for travelers from all over the world due to the cultural experiences available here.

We would love to have Harmony involved in the hackathon and as a speaker at the conference, although the hackathon is the hub of the weekend. We are using the hackathon to build interest around the conference. After all, builders are the ones are driving this whole thing forward for all of us.

The event tracks:

Metaverse

  • What’s hot? Cutting-edge metaverse projects
  • NFT bridging—take your NFTs with you as your traverse the metaverse
  • NFT marketplaces and their role in the ecosystem

Gaming

  • Sports and e-sports
  • Play to earn
  • The role of NFTs in cross-platform playability

The business of NFTs

  • Intellectual property
  • NFTs as financial instruments & and a new asset class
  • Connecting NFTs to real-world assets—real estate, collectibles, art
  • Lending, renting and yield farming
  • Fashion
  • A focus on women and NFTs

Unique use cases and what’s next?

  • Universal profiles—take your identity with you wherever you go
  • Politics—fundraising, voter IDs, metaverse rallies
  • Medical records
  • Authenticity verification for physical items
  • Supply chain
  • Event ticketing

A focus on the code

  • Coding talks
  • Developer panels
  • Security and privacy
  • Working with distributed developer teams

Artist focus

  • Promotional strategies for NFTs and collections
  • Photography
  • 2D, 3D and animation
  • Royalties—best practices and success stories
  • Local Georgian NFT artist spotlight
  • Music
  • Video

And, of course, an exclusive airdrop for hackathon and conference attendees.

2

Hey @nftbilisi! Welcome, and thank you for your proposal. I like the vision for the conference and hackathon, and a focus on diversity in web3 is always important. I have a few questions regarding the metrics and value proposition for Harmony:

Can you detail how you will use the $50K?
For the winning teams for the hackathon, will there be an incubation phase to prepare them to launch on Harmony? (for example, the top prize being awarded a 50K launch grant on Harmony)
Who will be the speakers, and what will the topics be? (Harmony may be able to have a rep attend as a virtual speaker)
Will the breakout sessions/workshops be tailored to building on Harmony?
Do you have any other sponsors?
How are you recruiting quality builders and attendees to the conference?

Thank you for clarifying these metrics, it will help us gain a better sense of the next steps to take.

Matty

Thank you for your time!

Matty

3

Hi Matty,

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

First, it’s worth noting that we will likely be postponing the conference and hackathon until the fall. As a result of the conflict in Ukraine, we have experienced a flood of people arriving in Tbilisi who are escaping the battles and the sanctions. The result is our housing stock (including Airbnbs and hotels) has become extremely limited and expensive. Tbilisi is USUALLY a very inexpensive place to visit, but the housing issue is a big one with no easy solution right now and makes the location much less appealing.

We have also noted a distinct lack of appetite in traveling to our region right now. Even though Tbilisi is far from Ukraine, people pull up a map and see Russia sitting next to Georgia and lose interest in visiting here right now.

With that said, we will take this delay as an opportunity to build a bigger and better experience for when things are better for a conference and hackathon in Tbilisi (likely aiming for September or October).

To answer your questions:

  1. The entire $50K will be distributed to the hackathon teams. We haven’t made a decision on the exact split, but all of it would go to the hackathon teams and we are open to input on how to best distribute it to the winners and other participants.

  2. If you have a suggestion for the incubation phase, we would be happy to work with you on that. The format we like from past hackathons is to get an MVP built over the weekend, have the teams present their MVPs and choose winners from that group. If it makes more sense on your end, we could easily extend that period of time to give the teams more of a chance to build something sustainable (hopefully with the help of the Harmony community) and choose winners a month or two down the road from the end of the conference. So, MVP over the weekend, and winners chosen from more thorough products in the future.

  3. For any conference and hackathon sponsors, we provide speaking and panel opportunities. We have a rough list of sessions and topics we’d like to cover and you are free to suggest specific topics that would be ideal for you. Our only request with those is not to make it a blatant sales pitch–we want it to have educational value as well. Something like, “Here are five NFT trends we see appearing in 2022” and making Harmony a logical solution in the presentation would be totally fine.

  4. Through the personal networks of myself and the other organizers, we can fill all the speaker and panelist slots today if we need to (we all work full-time in DeFi and web3). We have commitments from other sponsors who want to present sessions, so about half the spots are still up for grabs for other sponsors.

  5. Yes, we plan to have breakout sessions tailored to our sponsors’ companies.

  6. The recruiting has been a combination of efforts so far. The one blessing from all the refugees who have recently arrived in Georgia is that many of them are builders so we have a bigger local pool than we did two months ago. There are several universities here who want to participate and the joint promotional efforts from our sponsors (like Harmony!) will help spread the word and fill the spots. We also plan to ramp up the Telegram/Discord/Twitter promotional efforts once we decide on a future date.

Please let me know if I can clarify any of this, or provide more information.

Onward!

Jon

4

@nftbilisi - This is so sad to hear. I know how difficult this situation has been for so many, and my heart goes out to everyone affected.

I enjoyed your response, and I think we’re on a good track here. I am going to go ahead and decline this for now, but invite you to submit a new proposal once you are ready to resume. You can include the new info we discussed to help your next proposal move along more quickly. In the meantime, you are welcome to chat with me on Telegram - @Mattyontap

I look forward to the next steps!

Matty