Several members of the Storj team spent a weekend in Denver in mid-February to represent Storj at ETHDenver, a 36-hour hackathon. As a sponsor of the event, we got to add a challenge to participants—to build the best implementation of the Storj network in their projects. We’ll get to that in a bit.
First, the scene. This was the first ETHDenver, and judging by the interest and activity, it won’t be the last. The 500-person event sold in advance, and so many people joined the waitlist that the organizers capped it after another 500 people wanting to join added their names. As you can imagine, as the weekend unfolded, the space was packed.
Reflecting the community, the organizers brought in art, emphasized diversity, and just made it cool. A chill lounge with gorgeous lighting, giant bean bags, and a DJ gave hackers a place to take a break from the coding marathon.
Storj Hackathon Winners
Along the way, we met hundreds in this community of hackers, writers, and artists. And on the last day, we awarded more than 2000 Storj tokens to the top three teams, creators of Ethereum File Hub, Strassemusik, and Crypto Dish. Our judges evaluated the projects by their creativity, difficulty, practicality, extensibility, cohesiveness, and usability.
Ethereum.File.Hub: Our first place winners created a system that enables people to send money directly to content creators, removing intermediaries from the media transfer process. They implemented a smart contract that allows users to ‘pay as they go,’ where they only pay for the length of time viewed. In terms of difficulty and practicality, this project scored high. We’re excited to see what becomes of this project! Congrats to team members Sean Martin, Paul Brower, Prakash Malla, and Harish Kanuri! The team recently presented at the Ethereum Boulder Meetup. To try it out, visit their GitHub Repo.
Strassemusik:
We awarded second place to team Strassemusik for their platform that helps street artists and performers get rewarded with cryptocurrency. They created an extension of Storj that can be industrialized for global event management. This project did very well in the extensibility and usability categories. They implemented a QR scanner that can identify a street artist, so they can receive cryptocurrency. Team members Pon ArunKumar Ramalingam, Chakra Ithayamani, Saipavan Narasaraj are writing a blog post about their experience. Check out their GitHub Repo.
Crypto Dish: The third place winning team created Crypto Dish, a mashup of food combinations from different cultures. Users can create a unique fusion dish and people bid the likeness of the dish. This project scored high on cohesiveness and usability. The screen views flowed seamlessly, and it was intuitive to use. Congrats to Ava Fang, Ethan Fan, Brian Cottrell, and Sarah Han. Find out more about their project on Github.
Thanks to all the hackers for using Storj as the decentralized layer for their Ethereum-based decentralized apps! If you’re wanting to implement Storj in your DApps, we’ll have a beta-release of developer documentation soon. Contact Developer Evangelist Nadine Farah, nadine at storj dot io, to get started, and follow us on Twitter for updates.
