Through snowfall, long lines, and crowds galore, devs huddled together at the community innovation festival to BUIDL their projects through completion. The energy was palpable throughout ETHDenver. There were 100+ hackathon projects submitted at ETHDenver in total, with 30 finalists presenting their projects in a shark-tank style manner to celebrity judges on Feb 20, 2022. (If you want to watch the whole closing ceremony which included the final presentations, check it out here.)
We saw all kinds of projects emerge from the depths of the Art Hotel, Castle, or whichever venue engineers chose to inhabit that day—with no shortage of enthusiasm from the people behind them.
Thousands of dollars were given out in bounties, cash prizes, and other hackathon gifts.
MetaMask Snaps Bounty Winner
Hailing from our family, MetaMask put up their own bounty for Snaps, an extensibility functionality to increase the rate of innovation within the wallet space as a whole.
The Snaps winner was Aleo Wallet allowing users to access the Aleo network from their browser using MetaMask.
ETHDenver Hackathon Winners
The hackathon’s second round of judges included a ‘celebrity’ panel: Frankie Pangilinan from Balance, Christine Perry from SKALE Labs, Greg Markou from ChainSafe, Griff Green from Giveth, and ETHDenver’s spirit animal the Bufficorn, who was later revealed to be our very own Vitalik Buterin.
Hackathon teams consisted of 2-4 members in each group, many including members who were new to Web3 entirely.
Each team was given ~4 minutes to present their project and answer one question from the celebrity panel. At the end, 5 top teams remained based on the judges’ picks, with a $1000 cash prize and recognition rights on the line.
Congratulations to everyone who participated.
Here were the top selected projects:
Cannon
A Hard-hat plug-in for on-chain dependencies and enabling multi-chain development.
DustSweeper
An AMM to clean small token balances from your wallet and swap for ETH!
Proof of Meditation
An app to incentivize people to take care of their health and emotional wellbeing through meditation.
Deus Ex Securitas
An infrastructure project using machine learning to automatically audit smart contracts.
Loudverse
A 2-sided marketplace for funding hard-to-quantify public goods like music, poetry, and theater.
What's Next?
ETHDenver is a breeding ground for innovation. It’s no surprise that a large number of projects were submitted, and conferences like this are usually the springboard for a person or team’s novel idea.
So many newcomers in the space present an opportunity for talent, ideas, and progress. Web3 is community-centric, and we have room to further educate and engage fresh crowds.
ETHDenver’s presentations, workshops, and talks are mostly available on their YouTube channel so give it a look if you were virtual, wanted to relive some of the experience, and want a look at the themes present this year.