UPDATE: Team Sunset Supreme made it to the finals! Watch the live stream here: Hack Money Finale

Add to calendar: June 2nd 14:00-16:00 ET / June 3rd 3:00-5:00 JST

We recently participated in ETHGlobal’s Hack Money hackathon. We are fond of hackathons at Curvegrid. Exactly three years ago at the Consensus hackathon in 2017 we entered our first competition as a company. The difficulty during that experience of building on the blockchain led to the development of our SaaS platform MultiBaas. Three years later and we are actually using MultiBaas to build rich applications on the blockchain as we had dreamt about back then.

ETHGlobal, the organiser of this event, helps build the global Ethereum community through hackathons. The event focused on decentralised finance or “DeFi” which is an effort to improve upon traditional financial products. The aim of DeFi is to make products such as lending, borrowing, and portfolio management more efficient and accessible by creating and connecting shared, transparent networks and platforms.

We entered two teams in the Hack Money hackathon. These types of events are a good way for us to stay connected with the community, get some real experience with our own products, and help out other developers in learning about Ethereum. Of course it does not hurt if some longer term business partnerships arise from the occasion as well!

Here is a little summary about what we built along with links to the full presentations.

Team: WANT a Nintendo Switch

Idea: An Animal Crossing to Ethereum Blockchain gateway. A token pool that gives you WANT tokens in return for deposits and gives you something random from the pool when redeeming a WANT token.

The project consists of a smart contract suite that manages deposits of supported tokens and redemptions of WANT tokens, a Vue.js frontend website, and MultiBaas in the middle to tie it all together.

The smart contract calculates the amount of WANT tokens you receive for depositing a type of ERC20 token, you get more WANT tokens the rarer the token is in the pool, and it selects a random token from the pool when you redeem a WANT token. It uses the Uniswap protocol to handle the exchanges and save on transaction fees.

Unfortunately I butchered the audio when doing the presentation, which you can see here if you like with the judges comments and questions, so the clip below is the original presentation with clean audio:

Team: Sunset Supreme

Idea: A spreadsheet interface to the Ethereum blockchain that can both read and write transactions.

The project is a Google Apps Script plugin that connects to our MultiBaas API. It can do everything MultiBaas can, but in spreadsheet form. For example, if you wanted to pull a list of the most active users of a particular token, instead of writing a custom script and then importing it into the sheet, you can simply enter a custom formula. This opens up the blockchain to the world’s billion spreadsheet users. (Until this competition, I had no idea there were that many spreadsheets out there either.)

For the demo, it was linked to Chainlink, Aave, and Compound to explore their DeFi smart contracts. The project is generating a lot of excitement internally as well. If you have ever done data analysis, you will know how marvellous it can be to replace a dozen tedious steps with a single click.

Here is the full presentation including some gracious feedback from the judges:

We would like to say a big thank you to the organizers of Hack Money for putting on such a well organized, constructive, and positive event. We were quite inspired by the other entries and look forward to checking them out in the coming weeks as well as attending the grand finale on Wednesday.

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