Six innovative projects made the cut when the Bitcoin Association, the Switzerland-based global industry organization that works to advance business with the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain and digital currency, announced the semi-finalists for the 4th Bitcoin SV Hackathon. This year’s theme is peer-to-peer applications, with a USD $100,000 (payable in BSV) prize pool staked for the winners. Three finalists will be announced Aug. 24.
Bitcoin SV Hackathons are global coding competitions designed to challenge developers to both learn about the technical power of Bitcoin’s original protocol and innovate on the fly. Within a set time period, participants are tasked with developing an application on the BSV blockchain within the parameters of an overarching theme announced at the start of the competition.
Peer-to-peer applications will focus on any direct interaction between participants on the Bitcoin network. Although “peer-to-peer” is a key part of the title of Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, the P2P elements of Satoshi’s design were disabled and de-emphasized on the Bitcoin Core (BTC) network. That is why entrants will be tasked with leveraging the recently released SPV Channels service as part of their application to facilitate P2P communication across the network, as well as interacting with the Bitcoin network directly via the Merchant API (mAPI).
Americans are involved with two of the six projects Gary and Vince Miller developed BitCommit, an application for trustless fitness competitions using micropayments and smart contracts. They are joined by Dave Foderick and Canadian partner Marcel Gruber, whose entry CATN8 is a micropayment-enabled online video platform with a full P2P SPV wallet implementation.
Canadian Joe Thomas has created Bitcoin Phone, an app for broadcasting voice data over the Bitcoin network that leverages the non-finality of nSequence to enable close to real-time data streaming. Another Canuck, Joonyeong Park, teamed with Japanese duo Youngjin Jang and Seyoung Jang to develop TimeKet, an SPV wallet combined with a reservation and payment validation system.
Japanese entrepreneur Meta Taro’s entry TKS Pnt is a point tokenization system for merchants and their customers. Aussie Tim Middleton’s Alien Wallet is an SPV wallet with its own pay-to-order hash function.
The three finalists will be invited to present at the upcoming CoinGeek New York conference, scheduled for Oct. 5 – 7. The finalists will compete for a share of a USD $100,000 prize pool, paid in BSV – $50,000 for 1st place, $30,000 for 2nd, and $20,000 for 3rd.
“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,” Bitcoin Association founding president Jimmy Nguyen said. “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. I congratulate all the semi-finalists and look forward to seeing who are selected as the three finalists.’
“Working with all-new technologies – just like we tasked participants in the 4th Bitcoin SV Hackathon with doing with SPV Channels – is never an easy proposition,” nChain CTO Steve Shadders added. “But challenging situations often lead to innovative solutions, which we’ve certainly seen with the standard of entries in this year’s Hackathon. 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.”