189 developers, 48 countries, one month: setting up for the future and highlighting the birth of a stronger blockchain finance æcosystem

What began as a venture to build widespread financial solutions over a decentralized platform, in under two months of toil and grit, the human DeFi Haeckathon concluded with the spirit of celebrating technology and humanity.

The Haeck was a catalyst in spreading the word about æternity and its unique advantages! The devpost landing page of the Haeckathon garnered over 3k views, with users spending an astonishing average of 10 minutes on the #HumanDeFi haeck web page on devpost.com.

189 people from 48 countries all over the world successfully submitted 20 projects of which 14 got into the Final (presentations available here).

After the month of hard work, remote collaboration, learning sessions and judges evaluation, 8 teams are awarded with the Prize Pool of $ 16.6k (details are available here). Winners were announced on the December 20th, LIVE, streamed and available here, as well.

We are proud to present the HumanDefiHaeck winning teams in the following 8 categories:

⚡️ The Best DeFi Solution: æLink

A powerful, open-source implementation in a product enabling all Bitcoin-based currencies to transfer value to the æternity Blockchain, thereby bridging old school blockchain technologies to enjoy æternity Daepps and all other functionalities.

“I believe everyone over here won today because the knowledge you are gathering is more important than the award itself”, said Martin during the HumanDeFi Winners Announcement Session

Link to Project details here | Creator: Martin Kuvandzhiev

⚡️ Best Superhero.com new feature: Decentralized Insurance on æternity Blockchain

An open-source project integrating a decentralized insurance marketplace on æternity blockchains social media platform Superhero.com. It allows buying policies, perform escrow services, and use it as an investment tool to earn money.

“Thanks to the Aeternity team for inspiring me to build and put something to this Haeckathon..I found support and comfort “, said Jeevanjot while explaining the Best Superhero.com new feature!

Link to Project details here | Creator: Jeevanjot Singh

⚡️ Superhero Community award: Superchat

An open-source DeFi chat app embedded on the Superhero.com for connecting with familiar ones, to send and receive AE tokens. Current features being worked on include adding group functionalities to enable a user to send and save tokens alongside messages to members of that group.

Link to Project details here | Creators: Emmanuel Joseph, Yinka Adedokun, Amaka Ubaka, Moyinoluwa Fesobi, Oluwatosin Ayeni and team

“Personally I still want to get a hang of the state channel technology, there are lot of things that you can do with state channels‘‘, highlighted Superchat’s team during the Winners Session

⚡️ The Best use of AE technology, most performant Sophia Smart Contract: AeonNet

A convergent and coherent clearing house powered by Aeternity time locked token contracts. It uses Hash Time Locks implemented through the time stamping transactions in a Blockchain, additionally, implementing a non-fungible token standard for time token monetization.

Link to Project details here | Creator: Gokul Alex

⚡️ The Best Prototype: Carbonland Trust

Carbonland Trust creates a tokenized carbon credit and forest conservation program that is opening access to the CO2 marketplace for everyone. It offers token holders an easy way to offset CO2, while offering landowners financial incentive to manage and conserve forest land.

“Thank you very much for seeing potential in Carbonland Trust; I look forward to continuing on our project, and see how we can potentially use Carbonland Trust and æternity blockchain to preserve millions of acres of forests and sequester CO2”, said Boone while receiving the award on behalf of the team.

Link to Project details here | Creator: Luca Capra, Boone Bergsma

⚡️ The Most Impactful Project: Superhero for Charitable causes

An interface embedded on the Superhero platform that will allow users to directly donate using smart contracts, to charitable causes that are registered on the Superhero platform. Organizations can claim their donations simply by registering their chain name on Superhero.

Link to Project details here | Creator: Jeremiah Joseph, Sadick Mghase

“In our regions we have seen donations being misused by people but using Superhero we believe this can end the problem”, explained Jeremiah while introducing the winning idea.

⚡️ The Coolest Stuff: Blinkit

An IoT device based around Arduino that can connect and interact with the æternity blockchain rendering a plethora of services like displaying prices and price on changes of the æternity token, Showing number of transactions on the blockchain, digital signage gateway for payments and a user-friendly multi device web interface amongst others.

Link to Project details here | Creator: Techtek

⚡️⚡️ The Best Mentor: Marco Walz

Always putting myself in the perspective of the users. Love doing Scrum (the right way) and push me and my team to new limits. Passionate about new technologies and inventions that will make our all lives better and more comfortable – it’s a short introduction to amazing work, energy and mentorship skills which Marco brought to the HumanDeFiHaeck!

If you’ve missed the Award Ceremony, you can watch it now, and hear the reactions of each winning team:

Judge Milen Radkov, CEO of Hack.bg and a recent inductee in the Forbes ’30 under 30′ title, expressed his joy in reviewing such inspiring projects, and urged each and every recipient to evolve these prototypes and realize them on the æternity mainnet in the future.

The panel of Judges boasted of an all-round composition of stalwarts within the blockchain community.

The Story Behind 💬

On the 22nd October 2020, æternity developement team brought together a community of enterprising, innovative, technologically proficient haeckers and proposed a challenge to deliver human-centric financial services over its network. Subsequently, dispatching the development of its open-Source social media platform Superhero.com to the community. This was also an entry point to start developing on the æternity blockchain. As a result, the Haeckathon included in its agenda, a strong educational component to highlight the advantages of æternity protocol to its archetypal compatibility with DeFi solutions.

Embedded oracles, unlimited scalability, low transaction fees and a user-friendly programming language for developing smart contracts are just some of the features that make æternity an ethical and technically competent protocol, especially for building DeFi solutions.

Besides providing developers with essential tools and resources to build on æternity, the Haeckathon purposefully facilitated design thinking techniques to ensure a market-centric development of solutions. To further alleviate this process, accomplished experts and long-time collaborators b4H ‘ Blockchain 4 Humanity’ led three different design thinking and team building webinars to guide participants towards the holistic development of meaningful solutions.

Over the initial days of skill-building activities and creating think tanks, a total of 10 webinars were conducted. These sessions were conducted over a live stream and have garnered 1.7k+ views so far. A recommendation for anyone and everyone interested in getting started with development on æternity. The complete playlist including webinars are available on YouTube, linked here.

æternity development team hopes this haeckathon has been an enriching experience for all the participants and vouches to continue this approach to continually support and grow our community to build the next generation of decentralized applications on top of æternity.

This is a great opportunity to thank @hack , b4H, CryptoTask, SmartCredit.io, Jelly, Piixpay, EthicHub, Nym, mentors, judges and media friends for supporting HumanDeFi!

After 5 weeks of team building, ideation, learning and coding, we are really content with the outcome of the haeck and have already started building agendas for the next one!

See you in the next haeck!!!

#LetskeepBUIDLing #StæyTuned