The EasyA Consensus Hackathon, hosted on May 14-16 in Toronto, was the largest blockchain-related hackathon in North American history — and its organizers, brothers Phil and Dom Kwok, are planning on going even bigger next year in Miami.
“We had some really good results, really cool projects,” the duo told CoinDesk in an interview recently. Over 1,000 developers joined the event, all of whom were carefully vetted beforehand. Applicants had to demonstrate their coding experience via their GitHub and LinkedIn pages, the aim being to enlist developers with a proven track record. “That’s why so many of the projects are really outstanding this year,” EasyA chief operating officer Dom Kwok said.
The potential prize? Millions of dollars in funding, courtesy of five blockchain networks: Aptos, Stellar, Polkadot, Bahamut and Forte.
The highlight of the conference, however, was when representatives of Universal Studios invited one of the projects (ApTap, which won first place in the Aptos track) to showcase what they built to Universal’s executive team in Orlando. “That was crazy,” EasyA CEO Phil Kwok said.
With a community counting over 1 million developers, EasyA is one of the world’s largest and most popular Web3 learning apps. The firm has organized over 30 hackathons since it was founded in 2019.
The winners of the Toronto hackathon were determined by teams behind the blockchain they were building on. Each network had its own mission statement — Stellar’s, for example, was “Web3 UX doesn’t have to suck. Prove it.” The overall goal is to continue funding the winning projects over a long period of time, which means that the bulk of the reward prize is actually distributed further down the line.
“Developers don’t just come to these hackathons, win prizes and then go on to the next one. Like many others, the goal of our hackathons is to make sure that people actually continue to build and add long-term value to crypto,” Dom Kwok said.
As previously mentioned, ApTap, a project that makes it extremely easy for users to access their Aptos wallet on their phone, made it to first place on the Aptos track. Stellar’s winner, CycleBuddy, helps women track their menstrual cycle while earning tokens. On Polkadot, Sutanpu, an app that enables travellers to mint NFTs of the places they visit, took the crown. Bahamut, a relatively new blockchain, gave the big prize to NameVault, a decentralized naming service akin to Ethereum’s ENS Domains. Finally, a protocol that aims to make airdrop allocation smoother, GASS, came in first on Forte.
Other winners include AptosAI Guard, MMO, FailSafe, Borrowhood, Automated Savings Policy, OrbitSwap, DotStriker, Merge Fund, Proctodot, SmartTrust, Ratezilla, MilkyPay, Fast Credit, VYB and MLOps.