Announcing the winners of “Hack the Rainbow” – more than $75,000 USD in Prizes!

As NEAR approached its mainnet launch, we had a dream…that hackers seeking to build the open web could cross between Ethereum and the NEARverse using a Rainbow Bridge. Hack the Rainbow was NEAR’s first MOOH (Massive Open Online Hackathon) focused on building bridges between NEAR and the Ethereum ecosystems. 

The Rainbow Bridge allows developers to utilize Ethereum assets and smart contracts on NEAR—a fast, scalable, and low-cost environment. The Bridge has the power to accelerate community growth by giving Ethereum Developers and Dapp users the ability to port their ETH assets to NEAR and back as needed to take advantage of transaction fees and scalability on NEAR.

Over the course of the past month, more than 400 participants and 80 projects from 18 countries around the world were submitted! The NEAR community came out in full force to show the flexibility and speed of the protocol. From DeFi to NFT, DAOs to bots, and even SciFi stories and some dank memes – we’re blown away by the creativity and diversity of submissions.

Judges and mentors

We’d like to take a moment to extend a special thanks to the stellar panel of judges and mentors from the industry that lent their time and experience to help participants from around the world.

Thank you to all our mentors: James Hancock (Ethereum Foundation), Lane Rettig (Space Mesh), Antoine Toulme (Splunk), Pedro Gomes (WalletConnect), Zhen Yu Yong (Torus), Mariano Conti, Alex Stokes, Petr Korolev (Matter Labs), Maggie Love (W3BCLOUD), Emile Kratikoff (Cisco), Trace Wax (Fractal), dApp Lion (dAppNode) and Niran Babalola (Panvala).

These mentors participated in panel discussions, facilitated workshops and answered questions from our participants. This hackathon wouldn’t have been possible without their continued support.

This wouldn’t be complete without a HUGE Thank You to the NEAR Core Devs who went out of their way to help all our hackers. Big ups to Sherif Abushadi, Chad Ostrowski, Mike Purvis, Willem Wyndham, Vlad Frolov, Josh Ford, Evgeny Kuzyakov, and Peter DePaulo.

Partners

For our debut hackathon, we wanted to make sure to collaborate with teams that were really passionate about building and supporting developer communities. Hack The Rainbow wouldn’t have been the same without their involvement. Whether it was through mentorship and being a sounding board for the participants or even jumping on to our Discord to answer questions, these partners have made a lasting impact on the NEAR community. Finally, we asked them to put on their judging hats to review and offer feedback, and, most importantly, give prizes to the winning teams! Huge thanks to all our partners that made this event possible.

And now, here are the winners of Hack the Rainbow 2020!

Overall Winner: 10,000 NEAR tokens + 1,000 DAI

yNEAR

yNEAR leverages the Rainbow Bridge to create staking based derivatives on NEAR. Users can earn yNEAR tokens by staking NEAR tokens to certain validators and the amount of yNEAR is adjusted to accumulate validator rewards. By transferring yNEAR to Ethereum on the Rainbow Bridge, token holders can explore diverse opportunities from DeFi projects. A small commission of validator rewards will be collected into the treasury, in which all yNEAR token holders can participate in the governance and project initiatives.

Team Members: Yoonsung, Jeon Jeongho

Runners Up

NEARswap – 6000 NEAR + 600 DAI 

NEARswap is an AMM protocol. Currently, it implements the Uniswap model. The team created a shared pool structure and researched other models for better AMM experience. With NEARswap and Rainbow bridge you can securely and efficiently exchange NEAR and Ethereum assets. The team used Skynet for their UI and also qualified for a participation prize from our partner Sia! 

Team Members: Robert Zaremba, Lucio Tato, Amit Yadav, Jameson Hodge

NEARBook 6000 NEAR + 600 DAI 

NEARBook is an on-chain order book implemented using Rust. The matching engine is implemented as a smart contract on the NEAR blockchain. It uses the Rainbow Bridge to use Ethereum assets on NearBook. The team also used Skynet for their UI and qualified for a participation prize from our partner Sia! 

Team Members: Prince, Ayush

Advanced Fungible token standard 6000 NEAR + 600 DAI 

Advanced Fungible is a modern, secure and user-friendly token standard for NEAR protocol. It aims to fix some of the issues past token implementations, especially ERC-20 and NEP-21, have. It includes features like single-click trades, more useful metadata like icons and Rust compiler based security features.

Team members: Mikko Ohtamaa, Rachel Black

Intoo TV 6000 NEAR + 600 DAI 

Intoo TV is a p2p live-streaming platform to design, share and monetize real-life experiences.

Team Members: Alex, Naz and Ebtesam

Influences 6000 NEAR + 600 DAI 

Influences is a decentralized social network that allows fans to subscribe to their favourite influencers for a monthly fee. Influencers in turn share images and videos. By leveraging smart contracts and distributed storage, they put influencers in direct control of their earnings. The team behind Influences also won the runner up prize from our Hackathon partners Sia/Skynet! 

Team member: Guillermo Gallardo

Vital Point DAO 6000 NEAR + 600 DAI

The DAO is NEAR! Vital Point-DAO is a Moloch v2 port to NEAR that can whitelist/integrate with any NEP-21 token. A module of the VitalPoint AI is decentralized community platform which makes it easy to manage community resources and proposals.

Team members: Aaron Luhning

Partner awards 

Skynet Labs

Piece Protocol: 1 million SC

Piece rewards creators and their supporters. Share a small portion of your future earning with your supporters, not with the platforms. The two runner up prize winners for Skynet Labs are Influences and Almost There.

Textile

NEAR-Textile indexer: $1,000 DAI

Event indexer for smart contract on NEAR using Textile as storage and query engine.

We also have given out many more prizes! You can check out the full list of winners here: https://www.notion.so/nearprotocol/7951e643157941b3a17032c061aebe41?v=47c62c9fd20f4580a6b9f63ac9a8f9cf

Huge congratulations to all the winners and a big thank you to our partners, judges and mentors.

If you’re interested in developing on NEAR but missed out on the hackathon, do check out our hackathon workshop videos here join our Discord server and talk to us on #development. Check out the Bounties we have available, especially these two bounties co-sponsored with our partner Balancer Labs. Also check out KERNEL Block 2, an 8-week program for talented builders looking to build relationships, products, and companies in Web 3.

Keep an eye out for future hackathons coming up from NEAR!