BSV Hackathon Semi-Finalists Leverage BSV Blockchain Capabilities with P2P Applications

The six-week coding period for the fourth BSV Hackathon has ended on July 26, and the shortlisted six semi-finalists have been announced. Participants for this year’s global blockchain competition have been tasked to leverage the unique capabilities of the BSV blockchain, such as its high throughput and unbounded scalability, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) application.

On top of developing a P2P application, which is the overarching theme of the fourth BSV Hackathon, utilizing the BSV network’s recently released SPV Channels solution and Merchant API (mAPI) is part of the requirements. Despite the difficulty level increasing due to these specific requirements, entrants were able to impress the judges and proponents of the competition.

“This iteration of the Bitcoin SV Hackathon has once again turned in numerous strong entries, each with a unique take on how best to leverage the peer-to-peer aspects of Bitcoin’s original design and the BSV network’s new SPV Channels implementation of P2P capabilities. With a challenging theme and complex requirements to remind developers about the often-forgotten P2P aspect of Satoshi’s intended Bitcoin system, it’s been impressive to see the different approaches employed by our participants,” Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen said.

“Having worked intimately on introducing the Bitcoin SV implementation of SPV Channels, I’ve been intrigued to see how developers would approach it—and for a first foray with this new technology, I’ve been impressed with the early returns we’ve seen so far,” Steve Shadders, nChain CTO and BSV Technical Standards Committee Chairman, added.

The six semi-finalists that have been shortlisted are as follows:

• Alien Wallet (Tom Middleton) – Bitcoin SV wallet that leverages Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) as well as a pay-to-order hash function.
• Bitcoin Phone (Joe Thomas) – Voice-over-Bitcoin protocol which can transmit audio between users over Bitcoin transactions by leveraging the non-finality of nSequence to enable close to real-time data streaming.
• BitCommit (Gary Miller, Vince Miller) – Trustless fitness competition application that leverages both micropayments and smart contracts.
• CATN8 (Marcel Gruber, Dave Foderick, Thor) – Micropayment-based online video streaming platform which offers a fully featured SPV wallet implementation.
• TimeKet (Joonyeong Park, Youngjin Jang, Seyoung Jang) – Unique SPV wallet service which offers integrated systems for reservation and payment validation.
• TKS Pnt (Meta Taro) – Point tokenisation system designed to be used by merchants and their customers.

One representative each from the three finalists who will be selected from the six semi-finalists will be flown in to New York for the CoinGeek Conference to be held on October 5 to 7, 2021, where they will present their final projects in front of a live audience, who will also get to vote for the winner in addition to the panel of judges. 

The finalists will be able to attend the very informative three-day event and also get a chance to network and meet renowned experts and professionals in the world of blockchain, as well as potential investors who will help them launch their platforms. The experience in itself is hard to come by, and on top of this, the winner gets to take home $50,000, while the second and third runner-ups will be awarded $30,000 and $20,000, respectively. All prizes are payable in BSV.

There have been many success stories from the past BSV Hackathons, and rookie developers and innovators are given the rare opportunity of being able to penetrate the blockchain space and start their own business. Blockchain-based platforms TonicPow, Britevue and Kyrt are just some of the more successful finalists who have managed to launch their own business through the BSV Hackathon.