This year’s Chainlink Fall Hackathon broke records across every metric. With 7,800+ signups and 280+ project submissions, developers from around the world came together to showcase their passion and talent for building the next generation of hybrid smart contracts. Over $550k in total prizes was awarded to teams that showed exceptional creativity in both their ideas and execution, birthing new use cases across blockchain verticals including DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and more.

The Chainlink Fall Hackathon also played a vital role in helping accelerate the growth of the smart contract development ecosystem. According to a survey of participants, over 40% of hackathon attendees had little to no experience in smart contract development before entering the hackathon, and an additional 40% had little to no programming experience at all. The Chainlink Hackathon offered these motivated participants complimentary, high-quality educational resources to start new developers off on their blockchain coding journeys—accelerating the blockchain industry as a whole in the process. By educating those new to the space and inspiring and accelerating the growth of experienced veterans, this year’s Chainlink Fall Hackathon was able to showcase the wide range of talented individuals working to grow the collective smart contract ecosystem.

Thank you to the judges, sponsors, and participants that made this Chainlink Hackathon an unparalleled success. We’re excited to announce prize-winning projects for this year’s Chainlink Fall Hackathon.

Hackathon Winners

The Chainlink Fall Hackathon awarded prizes across a wide range of categories, ranging from the $30,000 grand prize to topic-specific prizes representing critical blockchain verticals.

Grand Prize Winner ($30,000)

NUSIC

The grand prize went to NUSIC, an NFT bond project that empowers musicians to better monetize their work and extract value from their material. Built by developers Adam Place, Logesh Rajappa, Zeeshan Hanif, Sharon Sheah, and Rob Ciampa, NUSIC’s NFT music bonds utilize Chainlink’s AnyAPI functionality to directly import Spotify and YouTube metrics to a musician’s NFT bond and assign it a particular rating based on the artist’s popularity and quarterly collateral deposits. This allows musicians to receive advances on their work, while interested buyers can receive consistent yield from the risk-adjusted bond.

Chainlink Services Prize Winners ($25,000)

The Chainlink Services prizes are awarded to the top three projects that built key infrastructure enhancing the Chainlink Network and its stakeholders. The top three projects won $15,000, $7000, and $3000 respectively—a total of $25,000.

Kotal

The first-place prize of $15,000 went to Kotal, a platform that streamlines node launches, allowing anyone to easily launch and manage their own node, whether on the Chainlink Network or for underlying blockchain networks. Created by Mostafa Farghaly, Kotal simplifies the node creation and management process significantly for Chainlink node operators, enabling those with limited DevOps experience to launch a node within minutes.

Adapter.js

The second-place prize of $7,000 went to Adapter.js, a Chainlink service that makes it easy for developers to add custom functionality to Chainlink requests. Built by individual developer Morgan Kuphal, Adapter.js is an external adapter that can fetch data from any API or website, securely process the data using custom Javascript, and then return the results on-chain. With increased adoption by Chainlink node operators, Adapter.js enables developers to make custom requests to any node that hosts Adapter.js and helps them verify data in a decentralized manner.

Chainlink Iris

The third-place prize of $3,000 was awarded to Chainlink Iris, a tool that enables those without technical skills to create custom, video-based data feeds that are delivered to on-chain applications through the Chainlink Network. Developed by Ethan Bond, Chainlink Iris takes real-world events and turns them into on-chain data. For example, users can stream videos of an event to Chainlink Iris which extracts data from the video frames and then makes it available to on-chain applications through a Chainlink external adapter.

DeFi Prize Winners ($15,000)

The DeFi prize was initially a single prize awarded to the best DeFi project presented at the Chainlink Fall Hackathon. However, this year, the judges decided that two projects deserved this title, each receiving $15,000 for their standout work. 

Krypton

The first DeFi prize of $15,000 was rewarded to Krypton, a decentralized exchange that is resistant against frontrunning, adverse selection, and miner-extractable value (MEV). Created by Michael Nowotny, Nathan Moore, and Andreas Nowotny, Krypton executes orders as continuous streams over time at finite trading speeds. Put simply, this means that high-speed frontrunning transactions are met with trading speed caps and higher price resistance, which heavily disincentivizes transactions from being frontrun. The project uses a combination of Chainlink Keepers and Chainlink external adapters to reduce the costs of off-chain computation.

Tradeboard

The other $15,000 DeFi prize winner was Tradeboard, an auto-balancing DeFi index fund platform where any trader can build their own crypto index—which any other user can then join in on. Built by Mike Real and Mohandes Jiri, Tradeboard accomplishes its auto-balancing functionality by charging a fee for trades that unbalance the index while rewarding users who rebalance it. Index balances are calculated using Chainlink Price Feeds.

DAO Prize Winner ($15,000)

Governor C

This year’s DAO prize of $15,000 was awarded to Governor C, a Sybil-resistant quadratic voting system that solves the problem of Sybil attacks on DAO voting systems, specifically the quadratic voting system. Built by Sanghyeon Park, Elin Park, JM Lee, and In-gun Kim, Governor C adds a probabilistic element to the existing quadratic voting system through Chainlink VRF, resulting in simulated scenarios where running Sybil attacks is unprofitable for the attackers.

NFT Prize Winner ($15,000)

SpaceTombo

The NFT prize winner was SpaceTombo, a gamified lucky draw game in which tickets are exchanged for dynamic NFTs to fund charitable organizations. Created by anonymous developers SoxZz5, Better call Juicy, and KonyTech, SpaceTombo uses NFTs to build a dynamic lucky draw game process for donors. In exchange for a ticket, which has a set minimum value calculated with Chainlink Price Feeds, donors receive a dynamic spaceship NFT with a provably random chance for the NFT image to change powered by Chainlink VRF. Only three NFTs will remain unchanged after multiple rounds, and the owners of these NFTs win the lucky draw game.

Social Impact Prize Winner ($15,000)

Soleil

The social impact prize of $15,000 was rewarded to Soleil, a token-based project that incentivizes the expansion of solar power generators by adding additional income through stablecoins. Created by Sam Humby and Matt Durkin, Soleil allows users to donate stablecoins to solar power-generating entities and receive SLL tokens in return. Chainlink Data Feeds are used to calculate the earnings for each token and publish the Merkle root of the data on-chain, helping establish a transparent source of truth regarding energy production and token payouts.

Off-Chain Compute Prize Winner ($15,000)

Meltdown

Though this prize was not established before the start of the hackathon, an off-chain compute prize of $15,000 was created and awarded to Meltdown, an NFT auction platform that utilizes Chainlink VRF and Chainlink Keepers to create a randomly finalized auction period. Built by Caleb Chang and Vasily Gerrans, Meltdown’s candle-auction uses Chainlink VRF to randomly decide on an auction closing time, with the auction then automatically closed by Chainlink Keepers at this time. This system gives buyers higher confidence that they will not be outbid at the very end of a round while maximizing sellers’ revenues as all buyers must show their hand from the beginning.

Women-Led Prize Winners ($10,000)

The Chainlink Fall Hackathon featured a women-led hackathon team prize to inspire diversity across the smart contract development ecosystem. Two of the most inventive women-led hackathon projects were selected to win a $5,000 prize for a $10,000 total prize.

Figura

Figura, a gaming marketplace for blockchain-based gaming projects, won the $5,000 women-led project prize. Developed by Julia Seward, Figura allows blockchain-based games to be sold to players as a Game Directory NFT with built-in USD prices through the use of Chainlink Price Feeds. Once they have bought a game, players receive a Figura NFT that acts as a receipt for their purchase, opening up a host of dynamic NFT use cases.

CricNFT

CricNFT, a curated NFT platform that allows sports teams to easily launch NFTs for their fanbases, won the other $5,000 woman-led project prize. Created by developer Shivali Sharma, CricNFT gives sports teams an easy way to mint NFTs that can then be distributed to their fanbases, building a streamlined way to increase fan engagement and team revenue.

Top-Quality Project Prize Winners ($1,000)

In addition to the prizes listed above, the judges chose 20 top-quality projects and awarded each $1,000 for their creative implementations. The winners are listed in alphabetical order below. 

1. Alchemist War
2. Blockreg
3. BUIDL a RIG 
4. Daily Stacker
5. DropShop
6. Easel Studio
7. Fantasy Campaign
8. Hacka.link 
9. HomepageDAO
10. HourGlass
11. Net.zero
12. OBAY
13. Phi
14. Satellite Broadband Service Chain
15. Steady DAO
16. Strong Incentive
17. Struct Finance
18. Swaapvol
19. Tsunami Protocol
20. WeiGold

The Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon Is Officially Complete

That’s a wrap on the Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon! Thank you to everyone that played a part in making this event a monumental success, whether as a judge, a sponsor, or a participant.

We hope that participants have made lifelong connections through their experience collaborating and building alongside other developers, and we encourage all blockchain developers to leverage Chainlink’s vast collection of oracle solutions to help them build decentralized solutions to real-world problems. Chainlink hackathons take place every Spring and Fall, so if you didn’t have the chance to join for this event, stay tuned for the Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon!

If you’re a developer actively looking to get your blockchain application connected to Chainlink Data Feeds, Chainlink VRF, Chainlink Keepers, or access any API, make sure to explore the Chainlink developer documentation page and connect with the technical community in the Chainlink Discord.