The winners have finally been announced for the Devera Blockathon — Expansion ICON 2.0 contest!
The hackathon, boasting over US $34,000 in prizes, brought 258 developers from around the world to build new products on the ICON 2.0 blockchain. The contest started on Dec. 1, 2021 and, while originally slated to end on New Year’s Eve, the deadline was extended to Jan. 31, 2022 in order to give teams more time to prepare quality submissions.
Three judges were brought in to pick the winners: ICON Project Founder Min Kim, Head of ICON Ecosystem Daeki Lee and CTO of ICONDAO-affiliated Lecle Corp. Daesun Park. Min Kim praised the excellent contest entries in a Tweet:
Developers built products in four categories. The most popular category by far was NFTs, with six projects relating to NFTs in some form. Other projects were submitted for the Metaverse, DeFi and Social Media categories. There was a fifth category for Utilities, but it didn’t see any products reach the final round of judging.
In total, 26 projects were submitted, but only 13 of them passed the application testing round. Nine of the finalist projects were built by professional developers, while four of the finalist teams were students of Devera’s ICON development course in Vietnam National University, sponsored by ICONDAO (students competed for different prizes than pro dev teams). Let’s take a look at the winning projects!
Developer Project Winners
Grand Prize, Developer Segment — Eclectica Icon Metaverse
The US $10,000 grand prize winner was a team from India who created Eclectica, a Metaverse platform on which users can control an avatar that can walk around a 3D space, talk to other people and bots with live audio, share and watch presentations and view and buy NFTs. The end result is pretty spectacular given that only two months of development went into it. Want to try it out? You can create your own 3D NFT Metaverse art gallery on the Eclectica website (ICX wallet sign-in required), or you can walk around an existing Metaverse space here (no sign-in needed).
Second Place, Developer Segment — Minty
A San Francisco-based team took home the US $5,000 second place prize for Minty, a 3D NFT trading card viewer built as an Android app. Imagine playing a virtual game of Magic the Gathering where you can flip the cards over and look at the art from all angles. They also previously created a version of Minty for Ethereum and another for the Theta blockchain in a different hackathon, which they won — can we say BTP? An APK for the Minty Android app is available here, for anyone who wants to try it out (download at your own discretion, of course).
Third Place, Developer Segment — ICON NFT Rarity
The blockathon’s US $3,000 third place prize went to a Vietnamese team for their app, ICON NFT Rarity. This is a tool based on the popular Ethereum-based rarity.tools website that lets you know how rare an ICON NFT is. It lists rankings of Craft Network collections and includes a few filters and data analysis features. You can check out the working ICON NFT Rarity webpage here — hopefully we’ll see this deployed as a permanent website soon!
Best of Category Winners
Four US $1,000 prizes were awarded to the best entry from each category that didn’t make the top cut. All of the category prize winners were submitted by pro developer teams. The first three teams listed below were from Vietnam — Devera is based in Vietnam, so there was obviously a bit more exposure there — while the DeFi category winner was a team from India.
NFT Category Prize — TicketPal
TicketPal is an e-ticketing platform built to make the process of purchasing tickets to concerts and other events smoother and more transparent. Event organizers can list tickets for event-goers to buy and all participants in the ticketing process are recorded on the blockchain — including resellers and secondary purchasers, because we definitely need more transparency to combat the ever-rising problem of ticket scalping. You can demo the TicketPal site here.
Social Media Category Prize — HandShake
Handshake is a social media platform where employers can connect with freelancers, much like Fivrr or Upwork except built on ICON. It allows employers to list a job, find a freelancer and pay in ICX when the job is completed. Could be a useful site for dev teams looking for a bit of extra help when the next hackathon’s time crunch kicks in! You can demo the Handshake site here.
Metaverse Category Prize — ICON Metaverse Gallery
ICON Metaverse Gallery is a great site for NFT artists to show off their collections. You can mint NFTs right on the site and display them on 3D virtual walls that prospective buyers can browse around in. Premium galleries can also rent space to other artists to display their own NFTs. Imagine getting your NFT displayed next to one of the more popular creators’ pieces — instant brand exposure! You can demo the ICON Metaverse Gallery site here.
DeFi Category Prize — ExSplinter
Looking for an easier way to budget spending money for a large family? Or keep track of how much money you’re lending out to various people? ExSplinter makes the process easy by divvying out the money in ICX and storing all transactions in the cloud. You can also set up recurring payments with but a click of a button. You can demo the ExSplinter site here.
Student Project Winners
There were some great student submissions as well. The three winners were:
Grand Prize, Student Segment — Launchpad
The US $6,000 student grand prize went to Launchpad, a webapp on which anybody can create a generative NFT art collection — without having to look at even a single line of code. You can check out the Launchpad site here. Watch this video — with captions on — to see how the site works.
Second Place, Student Segment — WeChoice
The US $3,800 student second place prize went to WeChoice, a social media platform where people can share media and receive ICX donations. You can demo the WeChoice site here, and check out their video here to see how it works.
Third Place, Student Segment — RealVerse
The US $1,700 student third place prize went to RealVerse, a shared-ownership real estate market that tokenizes the full cost of a real estate holding and allows multiple people to purchase partial ownership of the same property. You can demo the (quite pretty) RealVerse website here, and check out their video here for an explanation of how it works.
Consolation Prize Winners
US $330 consolation prizes were also awarded to the following projects:
An Axie Infinity-inspired web app that hatches a digital creature after you “care for” an egg for a few days. Made in sunny California. The website is up and running here for you to try out, with a video demo here.
A feature-packed social media platform made by a team from India. Seriously, this platform does it all, from standard social media post sharing to crowdfunding, ICX transactions, NFTs and more. You can demo their site here (sign in with Google) and watch their video here. This one is recommended! — you can really envision a future where social media platforms integrate tons of crypto transaction features like this.
A simple tool for fans to tip their favorite content creators with ICX. You can demo the transaction site here, with a video explanation available here. This one was the final student submission from Vietnam National University.
A great end to a successful hackathon
Congratulations to all of the Devera Blockathon winners! The ICON ecosystem is growing and growing faster than ever before, and hackathon projects like this are a great step forward toward getting even more excellent new ICON 2.0 services added to the network. Heck, some of these projects even resulted in finished, polished products! What’s more, with a whopping 258 participants, the blockathon was also instrumental toward attracting new developers into the ICON space, which is always a huge benefit to the ICON network.
Well done, all. We can’t wait for the next hackathon!
What did you think of the projects? Did you agree with the judges’ decisions, or do you think another entry should have won? Let us know in the comments on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
