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@zetablockchain BTC Challenge Hackathon 🚀
Recorded: Aug. 18, 2023 Duration: 0:33:30Space Recording
Full Transcription
All right, GM, everybody.
We're going to give everyone just a couple more minutes to join in.
We've got a really exciting spaces today.
And by the way, this is Annalisa.
I am with Biddlebox.
We'll get into intros in just a moment.
But it looks like everyone that is supposed to be here is up on stage.
If not, let me know.
Cool.
I think we're good.
Awesome.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Well, good morning, everyone, or good evening, good afternoon from wherever you are in the world.
It is Friday.
So happy Friday.
Happy weekend.
We've got Zeta Chain and we've got it looks like we've got Dennis from Zeta Chain on the call as well.
Before we jump into intros with everyone else and as more listeners are trickling in, I'm just going to give a couple updates on Biddlebox.
By the way, if you are not familiar with Biddlebox, definitely check us out.
You can go to our Twitter.
We have our website linked Biddlebox.io we are an end to end web three hackathon platform for builders and for organizations to launch your own hackathon on demand and that aside, a couple updates that are happening in the Biddlebox space aside from this very exciting hackathon, which we will be talking about today, the Bitcoin challenge hackathon with Zeta Chain.
A couple other hackathons you could check out.
We have fun public goods.
We have fun public goods.
We have fun public goods.
We have fun public goods with the funding, the commons organizers that's happening right now.
It is a public goods focused hackathon and I believe submissions are ending on the 31st.
We also have what else permissionless if anyone is planning to go to permissionless, there's going to be a permissionless to hackathon that has signups currently open and that hackathon will be starting in Austin in person on September.
We also have what else permissionless if anyone is planning to go to permissionless, there's going to be a permissionless to hackathon that has signups currently open and that hackathon will be starting in Austin in person on September 9th to the 10th, I believe.
We also have what else permissionless if anyone is planning to go to permissionless, there's going to be a permissionless to hackathon that has signups currently open and that hackathon will be starting in Austin in person on September 9th to the 10th, I believe.
We also have what else permissionless if anyone is planning to go to permissionless, there's going to be a permissionless to hackathon that has signups currently open and that hackathon will be starting in Austin in person on September 9th to the 10th, I believe.
Also, signups are currently open for Luxo's build-up number two hackathon.
Those dates are TBD.
But that is not what we're talking about today.
We are talking about ZetaChain and their latest hackathon.
So welcome, y'all.
I'm going to give everyone the chance to introduce themselves now.
Go for it, Dennis.
Hey, thank you for having us.
My name is Dennis.
I lead the developer experience at ZetaChain, focused on documentation, tutorials, and developer tooling.
Very happy to be here.
And yeah, thank you for hosting and powering this pretty exciting challenge on ZetaChain.
So I'm Jonathan Covey, core contributor for community at ZetaChain.
I'm going to work with a whole big...
A whole big team of ambassadors and mods helping support our global Discord server and community.
We're about 1.5 million people and also cover a lot of key updates and partnerships on our blog
and really bridge between Zeta app ecosystem and the community.
Pleasure to be here.
That's awesome.
And welcome and thank you so much for joining us.
So for...
I'm going to go ahead and assume.
Since y'all have such a large community that a lot of the listeners in the audience might already know about ZetaChain,
but how would you describe what ZetaChain does for those who have never heard of it before?
Sure.
So ZetaChain is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain with a mission to join or connect all the...
all the chains and provide the tooling for developers to build applications that span many chains, right?
So you build your dApp once in it and access all the chains and move assets and call contracts and do all sorts of cool stuff.
So ZetaChain is a sovereign L1 focused on interblockchain interoperability.
All right, awesome.
And so before we kind of get into the actual hackathon itself,
why Bitcoin or why the focus on Bitcoin for this specific hackathon?
And could you tell us a little bit about why y'all have decided to launch a hackathon this time around?
Of course.
So Bitcoin is basically the pioneer.
It's basically the pioneer of cryptocurrency, right?
It's the, you could call it the original blockchain, right?
It's very popular, but for a long time it has been kind of lacking all the cool applications that you can build on other chains.
And we want to change that and allow developers to actually build on top of other chains.
We want to actually build on top of Bitcoin with ZetaChain and allow users to be able to use their BTC in all sorts of interesting ways, right?
So with ZetaChain, what you effectively are doing is building dApps that you can call from Bitcoin and you can transfer BTC to these dApps.
And you can build anything that you can build on an EVM machine.
Right?
Which is almost anything, right?
So this is very exciting because this gives a new life to the assets that people already have.
But they're just, right now they're just kind of laying dormant.
But with Omnichain contracts that ZetaChain offers, you can actually provide so much more utility and interesting use cases for the tokens that you already have on Bitcoin.
So this is very, very exciting in my opinion.
Yeah.
Right on.
Oh, go ahead.
Yeah.
I might add, like part of this is an awareness thing among developers that, excuse me, there is a new, simpler, safer way to build for multichain.
Dennis mentioned Omnichain smart contracts.
And part of what that supports is it allows apps to interoperate with Bitcoin.
And so like we still write and we talk about Bitcoin smart contracts at conferences and online and people write us off as crazy, like they don't believe it.
But like even in the past week, we're starting to see testnet applications coming out like Eddie Finance, where you can swap native Bitcoin for other DeFi assets and create tri-token pools with native assets, including Bitcoin.
Right.
And I'm sure we'll talk more about these use cases.
But I think people are starting to see that this is real.
And so, yeah, part of the motivation to do a Bitcoin focused challenge is to raise awareness and start making real product around these use cases.
I think that's awesome.
And yeah, currently, I mean, I'm about only a year into Web3.
I have yet to hear of many use cases of Bitcoin.
So I'm really excited about how unique this hackathon is compared to all of the other ones we've done.
And I'm really, really excited to see what developers come up with.
So that's super exciting.
And I know we touched on this slightly, but just because I'm not quite sure.
Have y'all run a hackathon?
Have y'all run a hackathon before?
And what's brought y'all to launch this hackathon this time around?
I know, aside from developing more use cases for Bitcoin on Zeta.
But let's hear it.
Yeah, I'll go first.
We've been doing a lot of hackathons in the past few months.
We're at ETH Argentina right now.
Our developers down there.
We were just at ETH Global Paris.
We're doing some hackathons in Asia coming up at the big conferences.
And then we've also had a lot of success with online ones.
And I think we want to try different things.
We want to try different platforms.
And we're excited about launching on yours.
I think the landing page looks really nice.
And we're excited to see if we can tap into a new segment.
Into a new segment of developers.
Yeah, that would be my two cents.
Dennis?
Yeah, we launched the long-running testnets that added more functionality to the Bitcoin part of the stack, so to speak.
So I think it's a very exciting time to host a hackathon like this.
The number of...
The tooling that we have is growing and it provides a very nice developer experience.
Though I'm a bit biased.
But we have more wallets connecting to Zeta chain and allowing you to transfer Bitcoin in a way that will be recognized by Zeta chain.
So it's all coming together.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's a good time.
To host a hackathon like this.
To let developers really leverage the tooling that Zeta chain provides and build something awesome.
And the other thing, we did a big fundraise announcement on Wednesday this week.
We had a big Zeta radio with thousands of people.
And we're going to mainnet in Q4.
And hundreds of companies and developers are deploying on tech.
They're deploying on testnet and preparing to do that.
And we want to support Bitcoin use cases.
And the chance for young entrepreneurs and people that want to build startups to be an early adopter for this kind of use case.
Sort of before the Uniswaps and Curves of the world start supporting this functionality.
So I think there's a really big opportunity.
And we want to support that now.
Yeah, absolutely.
So now seems like a good time to segue into the hackathon itself.
We talked about the why.
But can we talk a little bit about the what?
So can you give us a high level intro on the hackathon and what developers can expect?
Yeah.
So the goal of the hackathon, as we discussed, is to encourage developers to build on top of the interoperability between Bitcoin and Zeta chain.
And there's no really limit of what you can build with that.
So very quickly, what you can do is you can try to build on that.
You can transfer BTC on Bitcoin.
And it will be transferred effectively in a wrapped way onto Zeta chain, which is an EVM compatible chain where you can use this wrapped Bitcoin and build all sorts of cool things.
Like you can build stablecoins with Bitcoin as collateral.
You can build social media protocols that leverage Bitcoin.
You can build NFTs.
You can different sort of derivatives, DEXs, of course.
And there are many things you can do with this wrapped Bitcoin on Zeta chain.
You can swap it to other tokens and withdraw them to chains like Ethereum, BSC, Polygon.
Right.
So there are many combinations you can try out for your app and see what kind of cool thing you can build.
Right on.
And I know that the challenge or the official challenge or challenges for the hackathon hasn't been posted.
But is there any insights on specifics on the challenge and what the prize money is looking like?
I know on the landing page it currently says.
Over 20,000.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
What's going on with the challenge?
So Jonathan, take that.
Yeah.
Well, I trust what the landing page says.
How that's broken up the 20,000 prize pool.
I'm not sure.
We'll update you in the dev zone on Discord.
Awesome.
Yeah.
I do know that challenge hasn't been posted for a good reason, but I can definitely assume that it has to do with building Bitcoin debts.
So I actually do have a graphic from y'all.
I'm going to go ahead and post it on the Jumbotron on challenged app ideas.
I know, Dennis, you spoke a little bit on a couple of those.
What other types of dApps or different projects are you hoping to see in this hackathon?
Yeah.
Well, based on the hackathons that we had in the recent past, I can say that ideas related to DAOs are very hot.
Right?
So the idea that people can and should be able to organize themselves in the centralized way.
And now you can leverage Bitcoin in what way?
I don't know.
That's the whole point of the hackathon to surprise the community and everyone with creative ways of integrating Bitcoin into all sorts of crazy ideas.
Right?
Another one I would probably say.
Lending and borrowing.
That's pretty interesting.
And given that you can not only can you use Bitcoin, right, as I mentioned, but you can also use other tokens that Zetachain has and actually move them around.
So this opens up a lot of possibilities and we can do in the DeFi space.
And yeah.
Creative use of NFTs.
Could be interesting.
Maybe NFTs for identity, for gaming.
Right?
I don't think we have seen a lot of examples of decentralized games that use Bitcoin.
So that would be a very cool area to look into.
Right on.
And then in terms of like developers that are interested in participating in this hackathon.
Are there any like particular skill sets that they already need to know or is this welcome for builders of all types like designers, developers and so on?
That's one question.
And then my other question is where can participants go to find team members?
Yeah.
So as a prerequisite to participating in this hackathon, I would say Solidity and just some experience building on EVM would be very useful.
It's not like you can't really start without any experience, but it would definitely help because the contract you will be writing will be running on EVM.
So we have quite extensive documentation that should help you.
Get up and running very quickly.
And you can go to Zetachain.com slash docs and you will see Omnichain contract section, which is exactly what you need to get started.
And we have a section on Bitcoin and a tutorial on Bitcoin.
So you can go from zero to having your dApp running in just an hour.
Right?
And you can test this functionality.
And we also have a frontend tutorial as well.
So if you're interested in making your app usable for regular people, for end users, you can do that with one of the wallets that support BTC and Zetachain.
So yeah.
I think there's a lot of resources to get you up and running.
As for where you can find teammates, I think Zetachain's Discord is a very good place.
We have a Dev General channel, which you can join and ask people if they want to collaborate with you on this hackathon.
I'm sure there are other places you can find teammates on.
But Zetachain, Dev General, or any channel in the language that you prefer.
You can also join that and find teammates there.
Yeah.
And I think it's good to collab with not necessarily only technical people.
So you mentioned designers.
To the extent you can start to build out a frontend product.
Even if you submit a video pitch.
What's the go-to-market?
How are you going to build community around this sort of use case?
And building the marketing story behind it.
I think all of that goes a long way in looking more favorably to the judges.
So I feel like anyone can contribute to a team.
Right on.
Agreed.
And I definitely think user experience is definitely needed still in Web3 technology.
So if you're a designer, definitely.
Partner up with a Solidity developer if you can in this hackathon.
Everyone is welcome.
But that also reminds me.
So I know you touched on some of the resources that devs have available.
Will there be any workshops or any additional ways that devs can find support from your team as they're building out their projects?
Yes.
We will be hosting a workshop.
And it will be available sometime next week.
I'm not sure exactly the date.
But you will hear about it if you follow Zetachain or Buildbox.
So in all channels, we'll post about it.
If you have questions, again, Zetachain's Discord is the best place to get help.
We try to answer questions promptly.
And yeah.
Looking forward to that.
Looking forward to working with you and answering questions.
Awesome.
Okay.
Also, I think we completely skipped over the actual dates of this hackathon because the conversation has been so good.
So for those of you who are tuning in now or if you have been listening wondering when is this hackathon happening, it is taking place.
Sign-ups are open right now.
You can go ahead and post the link in the chat and post to the Jumbotron.
You can also find it.
We've been tweeting the link everywhere.
But submissions are actually going to be opening next that looks like next Friday the 23rd and through the 29th.
So you have over a month to get your submissions in.
By the time submissions open, that's when the challenge should be posted.
And so moving on.
I did.
We covered like how devs can get resources.
They can find team members.
In terms of judging, can you give us a little insight on how the judging process works for this hackathon?
Sure.
So we're going to be evaluating.
Well, not we, but the judges will be evaluating projects based on things like creativity.
Technical implementation impacts on the ecosystem and on blockchain in general, possibly feasibility.
Right.
So, I mean, I know these criteria are very general, but that's the whole point, right?
We don't want to box people in to building something very specific.
We want them to show their creative potential.
And anyone can participate.
And you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to build something.
But it's definitely like if your project has some sort of technical implementation, like if it works, if you can show a video, for example, of how it works, or if you didn't have the time, but at least you can map it out.
So we can understand how it might work.
Like that definitely gives you an advantage.
And things like if this project could really be used by end users and increase the number of people in blockchain, right?
If it can bring more people in the industry.
Like that would be super cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we'll release the roster of judges probably closer to the public blog post that comes out next week.
I think what's cool is that you're going to see a lot of big Bitcoin holders, like thought leaders in the space who, like the Bitcoin culture, has generally been wary of DeFi.
And some of these patterns.
Right.
And some of these are really nice and catchy solutions to wrap Bitcoin into DeFi.
So having their stamp of approval and mind share of some pretty well followed folks in the Bitcoin network is pretty cool.
So stay tuned.
Absolutely.
So there will be an announcement with more info coming next week that is very good to know.
And I won't dig too much in on the full itinerary of the Hackathon.
Because I know more information will be announced.
But I am curious about in terms of like all these projects that the builders will be building, what type of support can they receive after the Hackathon?
I know you all have announced your funding.
Yeah.
What other opportunities can participants expect?
Yeah.
So go ahead, Sean.
Yeah.
I'll go quick.
Yeah.
So the grant program that we have, it's a $5 million grant program we launched in April.
Good projects that come out of this will be eligible for that program.
And the funds are intended to help support the development of cross-chain.
So it's a lot of cross-chain functionality in your apps and help you bring that to main net.
And, yeah, I would look at this as an opportunity to work closely with ZetaChain on positioning your app to the community and, again, bringing that to market.
For the first time, actually, we have Zeta developers coming to conferences with us.
Korea Blockchain Week.
Token 2049.
After that in a few weeks.
And some of these folks are going to be speaking on panels with us and, like, demoing their technology at our exhibition booth, which is super cool.
So, again, I think there's a big early adopter opportunity here.
And we'll support you along the way.
That is amazing.
And this is in perfect time for all of, I mean, I feel like the events are nonstop or at least the in-person events are nonstop.
So that's good.
We've got Token 2049 coming up.
So that aside, before I open up for any questions from the audience, also, if you do have any questions about the hackathon, you can also drop them in the chat.
I'm seeing there are some technical questions in there.
If it is a technical question regarding ZetaChain, I would probably direct those to the Discord unless you want to pick those ones up.
But let me think what else.
Is there anything that we didn't touch on that you would like to share with the audience about the upcoming Bitcoin Challenge Hackathon?
Okay.
Well, I think we covered quite a bit.
And, yeah.
We sure did.
So if you do have any questions, go ahead and you can raise your hand and I'll go ahead and bring you on stage.
But just a quick recap.
We've got ZetaChain.
They are launching or they have launched.
Sign up now.
They have launched.
Sign ups are currently open for the Bitcoin Challenge Hackathon that is taking place starting next Friday.
So if you are interested, be sure to I think I posted the link on to the Jumbotron here.
But you could go ahead and head over to Biddlebox to sign up and the challenge will be posted next week.
Submissions are open until September 29th.
And we are looking for.
Different use cases and Dapps on ZetaChain.
So definitely check that out.
Oh, and then one more question.
And I'm not sure if this information is or if we if there is an answer to this yet.
But when will the or around when can we expect the Hackathon winners to be announced?
That's my question.
Okay.
All right.
So Hackathon winners will be announced if I remember correctly on October.
In mid-October.
Let's say mid-October.
And we'll post precise dates a bit later.
All right.
Awesome.
Okay.
So if we don't have any questions, I'm running through the chat.
Looks like people are being okay.
These are technical questions.
Not related to the Hackathon.
Last call for questions.
If anyone has any questions or if you have a project idea perhaps that you want to bounce off of us with the co-hosts on stage.
Last chance for that.
All right.
Well, awesome.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Jonathan and Dennis.
Really, really excited for this Hackathon.
And I'm so curious to see what projects come out of it.
So I'll let y'all leave y'all with your closing words.
Yep.
Thank you so much for hosting.
And I'm also excited to see what comes out of this.
So, yeah.
Hit us up in the Discord server and find collaborators.
I'll help connect people on different teams.
And let's build some cool stuff.
Yeah.
Thanks for having us.
And I'm also looking forward to all the projects that we'll see.
And also looking forward to technical questions.
Bring them on and we'll sort them out and find solutions.
That's right.
So for those of you who did hit the chat with technical questions, definitely hit up the Zeta Chain Discord.
And if you're interested in building, they can answer any of your questions.
You can in a Biddle box if you're having questions about signing up.
And link is posted in this chat.
And otherwise, thank you everyone in the audience for joining us today.
My name is Annalisa.
And I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.
And continue to build out loud.
So I will go ahead and close this space.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Annalisa.
Take care.
Take care, y'all.
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