What You Missed at EthDenver
On February 14-16, 2,000+ attendees gathered for the third annual ETHDenver hackathon for three days of hacking, knowledge sharing, and community building. Read on and check out the projects that won the Infura Hackathon.
On February 14-16, 2,000+ attendees gathered for the third annual ETHDenver hackathon for three days of hacking, knowledge sharing, and community building.
Whether you spent the weekend heads down building new dapps and competing for sponsor prizes, or jumping between educational panels, workshops, and social events, ETHDenver was one of the most productive and fun opportunities for a Web3 developer to learn, engage, and contribute to this growing ecosystem.
Infura had engineers and product folks answering your questions at the ConsenSys help desk and invited teams to compete for a $1000 prize for the best hack utilizing the Infura API. To win the prize, hackers had to create a useful and unique decentralized application using either the Infura Ethereum API or IPFS API. Many other ConsenSys teams were represented, with great hacks produced around custom MetaMask Snaps and MythX smart contract safety analysis.
Infura Hackathon Winners and Honourable Mentions
Many hackathon projects found using the Infura API to be the easiest integration in their hack, with most deciding to use Infura as a Provider in various web3 libraries including ethers.js, web3.js, and web3.py. Even mobile development using the Dart language was represented, with Infura plugging directly into a library called web3dart. We were impressed with the breadth of submissions and purposes of the dapps, and we thank and congratulate the hackers!
Infura Bounty Winners
A project by the 1inch.exchange team, this project created an easy way to get leverage on ERC20 tokens by using elements of the following protocols: Compound, Fulcrum, Aave and MakerDAO CDPs. By combining a new type of near-instantaneous loan called a flash loan, together with ChainLink oracles for on-chain price verification, token owners could trade at a higher leverage ratio. While most hacks release on testnets, this hack utilized Infura’s Ethereum API to release on mainnet, which was super impressive. Congratulations to the team for producing a really useful combination of DeFi protocol building blocks! 🎉
This project was in two parts: an underlying smart contract, and a practical application. The team created a contract that accepted Dai, and converted it to ‘savings Dai’ called ‘DSR’ to gain interest, which accrued while a user was interacting with the service. After the service was completed, the Dai was returned and the interest gained could be paid anyway the project designers wished. The practical application was an Airbnb-like site that accepted user deposits while renting, with an Arduino-powered lock that was connected to the smart contract 👏
Honorable Mentions
TallyLock aimed to reduce the risk of election fraud by providing a simple and affordable way to notarize and lock election tally sheets on a public blockchain, right when they occur, in 3 simple steps. They used the Java library web3j with an Infura API key to connect to testnets. Based in Honduras, the TallyLock team believe that by putting election results on Ethereum, their notarization process would be cheaper, compared to the current method, and less susceptible to interference.
Count on Me was designed specifically to connect patients to donors by blood type, using geolocation. Built with Dart and Flutter, the app was built to work for both Android and iOS platforms, with the feature of being able to connect using web3dart through Infura.
Tired of old CryptoKitties in your account? This team created a game that enabled users to send their Kitties into battle against bosses. If your Kitty won the battle, you received a treasure chest of Dai. This team used Infura with Truffle for deploying their contracts to Rinkeby.
Over 100 hacks were submitted in total at EthDenver this year. Some strong themes emerged, with many teams building projects around Defi and Dai, Crypto Gaming, improved Crypto UX, and planning ahead for Eth 2.0. You can read a full account of all the winning projects on Medium. Shout-out to Consensys’s own team for hacking together Metacredits!
Future Events and More Infura Developer Resources
We’re working on building out more tools, tutorials, guides, and documentation to help you build faster. For the next developer event, if you’d like to get a headstart on learning how to create a frontend for a web3 project, please check out and star our new developer-resources section on our github here. Please create issues for guides you’d like to see, and expect many more soon! Future topics include using the features of Ethereum web3 libraries such as ethers.js, for all the major languages.
Heading to EthCC?
Infura and Consensys will be at EthCC in Paris in two weeks, where Infura will unveil an exciting new open source tool we’ve been building. If you’re heading to this event, make sure to carve out some time to catch this presentation!