Waves Moscow Blockchain Hackathon — Report

Last weekend we held a huge event for developers at Digital October in Moscow. The venue was filled with young programmers who responded to our call and came to get a closer look at the Waves ecosystem.

The hackathon was a big developers’ party — not exactly a traditional party you’re used to, but one with lots of laptops and plenty of coding. In any case, it was fun — being creative and building something new is always enjoyable.

It all started with an opening ceremony given by Inal Kardanov, Developer Advocate at Waves.

We received 150 applications, but after testing their skills we had chosen only 64 developers for the hackathon, forming 16 teams. We also had 4 teams formed of Waves’ own developers.

The hackathon program included four tracks with different tasks to solve and a workshop explaining the basics of each track’s topic.

Hackathon participants had around 30 hours of programming time to complete their tasks, including overnight from Saturday to Sunday.

Of course, sometimes they took a break to participate in Workshops delivered by Waves team members. Overall, we held three workshops during the event:

— ‘Blockchain basics. Smart contracts, smart accounts and smart assets’, by Inal Kardanov

— ‘Smart contract development for real-world usage’, by Inal Kardanov

— ‘Gaming Workshop. Video game development using Waves smart contracts’, by Yuriy Naydenov

Track 1: Identity and key management

This track was hosted by Yuriy Naydenov, our blockchain engineer and head of our Gaming Project.

The topic: Many people store scans of their documents in the cloud to send them when needed.

The task: Using Waves smart contracts and DataTransactions, implement a system that enables secure document storage, with access on-demand.

The winner of this track was ‘Diffie-Hellman’ team who made a ‘KYC FOR STO’ application and took the prize of 2,500 WAVES.

Track 2: Gaming

The track was hosted by Yuriy Naydenov, our blockchain engineer and head of Gaming Project.

The topic: in the game mechanics of lotteries and draws, PvP games and loot boxes, there are dark areas for the user — the true algorithms at work are hidden, and the developer can deceive the player. The blockchain can make these mechanics transparent and establish common rules for such games.

The task: create or adapt an existing game using smart contracts to solve transparency problems, using Waves Keeper to interact with the player.

The winner this track was the ‘Gamity’ team with their ‘Ships on The Waves’ game. They also took home a prize of 2,500 WAVES.

Track 3: Fraud Detection

The track was hosted by Alexey Kofman, Product Manager of Waves Node.

The topic: The blockchain may contain transactions with assets that were once involved in fraudulent activities. What is needed is a tool that can check the ‘purity’ of assets being transferred, to ensure that funds received have not previously been involved in any questionable schemes.

The task: Implement a system that will use Machine Learning to detect suspicious transactions.

The winner of this track was the ‘EquityCharger’ team with their project ‘The algorithm for constructing the path of the transaction’. They also took home a prize of 2,500 WAVES.

Track 4 — Documents and task flow

This track was hosted by Alexey Kofman, Product Manager for Waves Node.

The topic: At the moment, tools like DocuSign are used to sign documents between geographically distributed entities, or people even have to mail signed paper documents.

The task: To implement a system that allows a user to create documents, sign them and quickly share them with others.

The winner was team ‘RD-107’ (their name is based on a type of rocket engine), and their project ‘A solution for digital document flow based on the Waves blockchain’ won the challenge and the prize of 2,500 WAVES.

It was very hard to assess the solutions built by the participants, but after some hard discussions the Waves team judges, including Waves founder Sasha Ivanov, made their decisions.

What did we find out in the hackathon?

These types of events are very useful for the Waves team and our developers because they provide us with valuable feedback that can help us to understand what can we do better and what we need to improve in our ecosystem. At the end of the hackathon, after talking with developers and understanding their problems, we have collected extensive feedback about libraries, products like Waves Keeper and blockchain explorers, and smart contracts. We now know what we need to work on to make the system as friendly as possible to developers.

Special thanks goes to our partner who helped us to organise this event — Binary District. We couldn’t have made it happen without them. Our partners presented a certificate for education courses ‘Blockchain developer’ for young developers who participated in our hackathon.

And, of course, we would like to thank all the participants who worked with us at the Hackathon. Some of those developers came onto the radar of our HR department too!

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