ETHWaterloo Hackathon Brings Together Crypto’s Smartest Minds

October 16, 2017

Many companies are making the push towards decentralized technology and an event last weekend in Waterloo saw some of the brightest minds in the space come together to push their limits.

ETHWaterloo, which is the largest Ethereum hackathon in the world, hosted its inaugural event this past weekend at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The hackathon saw several companies come together for 36 hours to imagine and build their visions of a decentralized future. The participants all hailed from the Ethereum community and the hackathon encouraged all the developers to learn and build around applications based around the cryptocurrency.

The closing ceremonies were held on Sunday and the top eight teams pitched their projects to a panel of revered judges, including Joseph Lubin, the founder of Consensys; Joey Krug, the founder of Augur; Ryan Zurrer, a partner at Polychain Capital; and Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.

The eight teams that presented all revolved around making a cryptocurrency user’s life much easier. The finalists were:

Happy ENS, a DNS server that can resolve .eth addresses in any kind of browser, without any third-party plugins.
Third eye, a platform for developers to help audit smart contracts. A smart contract (otherwise known as a self-executing contract) can remove the use of lawyers by converting the contract to code and storing it on a digital ledger with blockchain technology.
TrustUs, an easy-to-use platform to get started with smart contracts.
Pocket, a gamification platform created to educate children about the value of currency and to help develop good saving habits.
Provt, an application offering an easier way to safely download and verify files on the blockchain.
Congruence, a tool that allows the exchange of service tokens for healthcare and insurance providers.
Rufflet, a tool that provides contract information and shows deeper insights to how methods are being used over a period of time.
MetaMask Brave Integration, added support for the MetaMask extension into the Brave browser, allowing the Brave browser to access the distributed web and run decentralized apps.

These top eight teams were awarded $1,000 in tokens of their choice.

“We believe that by creating an Ethereum-focused hackathon in one of the greatest cities for developers, we can help introduce incredibly talented developers to the developer ecosystem we are building,” ETHWaterloo writes on its site.

“Our hope is to give ambitious, passionate, and excited developers the chance to meet the people behind this technology like Vitalik Buterin, Jeff Coleman, Joseph Lubin, and others, and an opportunity to work alongside people like them to build interesting applications on top of Ethereum.”

The entire event was run by a volunteer group of hackers and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Over 400 attendees came to the event, selected from a pool of over 800 applicants from 32 countries. Over the 36 hours, the participants were mentored by legends in the field including the panelists themselves.