Chainlink participated in the ETHParis Hackathon and awarded prizes to the teams with the best working applications of Chainlink on the Ethereum blockchain. Initially, there were plans to award only one $1,000 prize. However, given the amazing submissions, the judges decided to award another prize for the second-place team.

Second Place: SmartKek

The second-place prize of $500 USD in LINK was awarded to SmartKek, a four-person team from Russia, including members Evgeny Marchenko, Pavel Kondr, Sergio Pavlin, and Alex Levin. Their Cleanedapp Dapp enables anyone to post a write-up about a token, only after they burn a portion of that specific token. Combining crypto-economic incentives with mechanical burning, the more tokens someone burns, the more words they’re allowed to write in their post. Burning tokens removes them from circulation by sending the tokens to a burn address—a public key with no known or discoverable private key.

Cleanedapp uses Chainlink oracles to feed the smart contract different data metrics, such as the amount of on-chain transactions or distribution of tokens, to ensure a project is authentic. The Cleanedapp team stated that “The oracle determines if the token is real, so you can’t spam the network by using a token specifically for this purpose.” Having reliable data feeds ensures higher quality posts from people involved in verifiable projects.

Inspired by projects like Startup Graveyard and Failory, Cleanedapp is not only creating a graveyard for blockchain projects; it’s also a post-mortem resource for developers seeking honest feedback about why a project failed. According to the team, “Experience should not be lost. If you want to launch something, then you probably want to read about other attempts and see why it failed.”

First Place: Nanti

Earning first place honors of $1,000 USD in LINK was Nanti, a local two-man French team of Xavier Lavayssière and Alexandre Kurth. Nanti is a Dapp that allows companies to issue and use corporate bonds as collateral for instant payment channels. Nanti facilitates tokenized bond issuance on private networks compatible with Ethereum, such as Quorum. It also offers quick access to liquidity for bond owners who want to use the bond as collateral.

In order to accurately calculate bond payments, Nanti uses Chainlink oracles to retrieve the LIBOR rate—a global standard of the average interest rate used for interbank lending in the London market. The LIBOR rate is the off-chain input that triggers the on-chain contract to issue an output in the form of a bond payment.

The idea for the project came from Lavayssière’s university research in blockchain regulations and Kurth’s background in Ethereum. Lavayssière stated that “The huge question since last year is not whether something is going to be public blockchain or private blockchain, but how do we mine the gap between the two?” Kurth followed up by saying, “Chainlink is the answer to part of this question.”

Conclusion

Congratulations to the ETHParis Hackathon winners! Both projects demonstrated how on-chain smart contracts can be reliably triggered by off-chain data that is securely delivered using Chainlink oracles. By allowing smart contracts to interact with off-chain resources, Chainlink has created a much-needed bridge between the legacy world and the blockchain world.