Milestone: Run one drand-specific hackathon

[yiannisbot]

eta: 2023-06-30

description: Self-explanatory. More details and sub-tasks to be added closer to the date.

[yiannisbot]

The drand team participated in the June version of HakcFS, which completed on June 21st. @CluEleSsUK led the drand team's participation, at least in terms of setting the challenges, interaction with the audience, judging final projects 🙏 👏

drand Winners

Defi-kicks:

A one man team who built a defi DAO protocol for FVM that takes code submissions for new trading strategies and allows users to timelock encrypt votes for or against them. Votes are decrypted and winning proposals get automatically added to the smart contract and computations are done with CoD.

Details and demo can be found here: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/defikicks-b1wo0

Chamber of secrets:

This team built a dead man’s switch backed by IPFS. It also has pastelock-like functionality.

Details and demo here: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/the-chamber-of-secrets-78v06

DAOmocracy:

Timelock encrypted voting mechanisms for DAOs

Details and demo here: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/daomocracy-uaqed

Another cool project in the drand category:
Zen Garden:

Basically NFTs but for planting trees. Used drand to randomise NFTs a bit. Not a killer app, but had some cute trees.

Details and demo here: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/zen-garden-7g5kx

Other cool projects that weren’t in the drand category:
Our vault:

Social wallet/seed phrase recovery using verified encryption and secret sharing. They didn’t use timelock, but it’s a project ‘in our space’ and would be cool to reach out to the devs and see if they have interested in continuing with it/implementing it with timelock/getting involved in drand.

Details and demo here: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/our-vault-bvurj

Blockaoke:

AI-powered karaoke!! Wasn’t a lot of web3 and 0 drand, but this was my favourite project from a creative standpoint.

Details and demo here: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/blockaoke-unsoh

---

@CluEleSsUK's view
Overall the quality of the drand submissions was not great. Mostly generating NFTs with drand which in my opinion is not the most valuable ones for drand. Some teams even claimed to use drand but didn’t (one team even chased me in the discord channel when they got disqualified for the drand prize!!).

The defi-kicks project team won 4 prizes because their solution used most of the tech participating in HackFS and the solution was so far above and away from the other projects in quality.

---

Post Mortem

• overall submission quality was not high
  • tighten up challenges to give clearer project possibilities
  • do more communication in our network
• prize structure wasn’t quite what we expected
  • Nikki updated all the challenges/text at the behest of Juan just prior to launch
  • nail it down far in advance with concrete goals in mind
• workshop and support well-received
  • average 8.5 rating from participants
  • feedback was generally high level and about the project goals rather than specific support
  • footfall in the hackFS discord channel was low
  • no complaints about the docs
  • users commented that the explainer/tutorial blog posts were very helpful in shaping their solution
  • support didn’t take up as much time as we feared (though may have taken more effort if participants were more engaged)
• Storswift were unaware hackFS was happening until after registration close
  • do more internal PR in the slack channel
  • a drand-focused forking hackathon could be interesting to spur on timestamping/SSV-type projects based on the DKG or other components
• intersection of technology was mostly missing
  • more blogposts like draffle for integrating different technologies could drive more interesting combinations
  • official partnerships with [nois.network](http://nois.network) or ata network could drive collaborations
  • Nikki suggested we could get on the filbuilders stream to show off stuff we’ve built
• lots of shitty NFT project submissions
  • we should make an official communiqué that the team hate NFTs to ward off the charlatans :^)
• there are further editions of hackFS in August, November and possibly December
  • we may want to submit prizes to some or all of them