Top 5 ETHGlobal HackMoney DeFi Virtual Hackathon Winners

HackMoney – a virtual DeFi hackathon by ETHGlobal – has just concluded with a closing ceremony earlier today.

The #HackMoney Finale starts now! Join us in celebrating both the finalists and all of the amazing projects created in the past 30 days💪

Supported by our judges: @aantonop @ThomasBertani @ashleighschap @rleshner @vitalikbuterin @StaniKulechov https://t.co/hmQpXixY7w

— ETHGlobal (HackMoney Finale – Today!) (@ETHGlobal) June 2, 2020

With 100+ submissions from the 30-day event, over $30,000 in prizes were allocated by leading DeFi sponsors including but not limited to Aave, Balancer, Compound, and Uniswap.

During today’s closing ceremony, we saw live demos from the top 10 finalists – many of which went on to win a suite of prizes. In this article, we’ll cover 5 projects which made the most noise in terms of winnings and Q&A reception from the judges. To view a list of all the submissions, check out this list.

Our #HackMoney finalists, live 2-4pm ET Tuesday at the Finale:

🌇Sunset Supreme
⚛️Atomic Ninja
✍️https://t.co/hn0kRZ5C7A
👁️DeFi Support for VS Code
👼GodmodeForTest
⛽️1inch CHI
🎪https://t.co/A2afIoCFGS
🙈Umbra
💧LiquiDeFi
☂️Cover

📺Tune in https://t.co/0GdzY8Cyde

↓ Thread ↓

— ETHGlobal (HackMoney Finale – Today!) (@ETHGlobal) June 1, 2020

Top 5 HackMoney DeFi Projects

Oya.Market

As a decentralized e-commerce platform, Oya provides an easy solution for online merchants to sell goods and services using popular cryptocurrencies like ETH and DAI as payment. Geared at slashing selling fees, Oya gives merchants a much larger cut of the sale, with the added incentive of earning OYA governance tokens for using the protocol. Oya can be integrated directly into legacy platforms like Shopify, eBay or Etsy as a payment option or natively on the Oya Marketplace. By leveraging smart contracts, Seller are only paid after a delivery has been confirmed by the buyer with important data such as tracking numbers being represented onchain using ChainLink oracles.

Umbra

As a stealth payment solution, Umbra allows users to set up payment channels in which the identity of the two parties is only known by the sender and receiver. Using an Umbra account, the receiver can collect payments from newly created addresses every time a transaction is made. Only the account creator can collect their payments from the newly made stealth addresses, and by using the Gas Station Network, Umbra payments can be claimed without having to have any ETH in the wallet to start.

Cover

As a generalized options protocol, Cover leverages Uniswap V2 token pairs to allow anyone to take out an American style option on any asset of their choosing. Starting with Dai as a target, the idea was to create a way to hedge against peg volatility as seen in Black Thursday. To do this, a user can use Cover to purchase (or sell) a call (or a put) for $1.01 DAI at any point between now and a predefined date. Beyond Dai, Cover pools liquidity to allow traders to take out a protective put or call on any Uniswap pair – even interest-earning assets like Aave aTokens. While the protocol requires liquidity to operate at scale, the notion of being able to permissionlessly take out an option for the right to purchase (or sell) an asset at a predefined price in the future is pretty powerful!

LiquiDeFi

As a tool to benefit from liquidation auctions with no technical knowledge, LiquiDeFi creates smart contract pools to share the revenue earned from liquidations in protocols like Maker. For those unfamiliar, Maker Dai liquidations allow Keepers to purchase collateral at a discount to market value, meaning there are big arbitrage opportunities when successful. However, up until now the profits from these auctions have been restricted to those who were able to set up a Keeper bot and had excess capital to participate in the auctions. With LiquiDeFi, users can pool Dai in exchange for sharkDai – a claim on future capital that enters the pool as a result of liquidation auctions. Backed by top tier memes, LiquiDeFi is set to give anyone the opportunity to act as a Keeper by putting their Dai to work.

My DeFi Pie

As a means to create a diversified mutual fund, My DeFi Pie gives nontechnical users a way to create custom investment strategies using templates that target different sectors like equities, cash, crypto, and commodities. Structured as Balancer Pools, each DeFi Pie can be tailored to suit different makeups not only of popular DeFi tokens, but also with onchain representations of real-world assets like stocks and gold. While My DeFi Pie did not place as a finalist, they won so many different sponsor prizes that it was impossible not to mention them in this post!

Closing Thoughts

Across the board, there were so many awesome HackMoney projects which are worth checking out. From Sunset Supreme’s product to interact with Ethereum using Google Spreadsheets to Atomic Ninja’s means for deploying liquidity, swaps and flash loans in a no-code fashion, it’s evident that the degree of composability out there is getting insane.

To add some contrarian thought to this overly positive post, it is interesting to consider if going deeper down the DeFi rabbit hole is the right way to bring DeFi to the mainstream. Some could even argue that DeFi is not meant for the mainstream, however, it’s tough to imagine that an average user will ever feel compelled to deploy a Flash Loan, regardless of how easy the tools become.

To this end, I’d like to doubly applaud projects like Oya and Umbra which took technically complex systems and presented them in a way that was *more* digestible and attractive to someone facing real-world problems with little knowledge of crypto. To quote Vitalik’s response to Umbra “I would actually use this” I believe these are the type of projects showcase exactly what make hackathons like HackMoney so valuable.

To stay up with ETHGlobal and their future events – of which there will be many – follow them on Twitter!