0x Labs Team Hackathon III

A recap of 0x Labs’ internal hackathon — July 2020

Last month, we hosted our third internal hackathon! These events are not only a lot of fun, but they foster our innovative spirit and allow us to explore creative ideas that have the potential to grow the 0x ecosystem, as well as the overall crypto economy. In the last hackathon, projects ranged from a 0x Mesh visualizer, Stablecoin AMM, Gods Unchained market maker, and a 0x protocol v3 rap (event recap here). With the launch of our new DEX aggregator, we felt that it was only appropriate to make “Matcha 🍵” the event theme. In this post, we’ll review the hackathon structure, describe all of the submissions, and congratulate the winning projects!

Hackathon Details and Structure

Like our previous hackathons, the entire 0x Labs team was encouraged to participate. There were no specific guidelines or restrictions on what teams could build. Everyone had two days to explore concepts and develop their projects. The entire event took place online, which lent itself well to the fact that our team is now more geographically diverse than ever.

After all the projects were submitted, the 0x Labs team voted on winners in several categories:

• Best Technical Achievement: Awarded to the most impressive technical project.
• Best Non-technical Achievement: Awarded to the most impressive non-technical project.
• Most Ready to Launch: Awarded to the project that could potentially be shipped tomorrow.
• Most Liquid: Awarded to the project that has the highest potential to increase liquidity for 0x and the DEX space.
• Most Interdisciplinary: Awarded to the project that had the most diversity in skill sets.
• Most Likely to Drive 1,000 New Users: Awarded to the project that would most likely drive the next 1,000 users to Matcha.
• Best Rap Video: Awarded to the project that drops the illest rap video.
• Judges Choice: We were honored to have Alexis Gauba (Co-founder of Opyn), Hart Lambur (Co-founder of UMA), and Tom Schmidt (Partner at Dragonfly Capital) join us as our judges. They reviewed all of the projects and each selected their favorite.

Our esteemed judges — Alexis Gauba (left), Hart Lambur (middle), Tom Schmidt (right)

Hackathon Projects

Winner of Judge Alexis’ Choice 🏆 + Judge Tom’s Choice 🏆 + Most Liquid 🚿

Options AMM by Gene Aumson, Paul Vienhage, & Ron Bernstein

A team of options nerds on a mission to bring liquid DeFi options to Matcha. We made progress towards that by building a set of tools to value options. To support our exploration of valuation models, we crafted a SQL query to produce historical volatilities from existing hourly price data, across many assets and time frames.

We also surveyed the open-source landscape for any web-ready (JavaScript-native) valuation implementations for American options, finding only one, option-pricing-tree, which we experimented with. In addition to off-chain tools, we explored an on-chain options automated market maker, achieving promising trial results with a model combining options pricing models with the features of AMMs.

Winner of Judge Hart’s Choice 🏆 + Most Likely to Drive 1,000 New Users 🍵

Ritual (Recurring Buys) by Alex Kroeger, Alex Towle, Brandon Millman, & Michael Zhu

Trustless, automated dollar-cost averaging on Matcha. In just two transactions, users can set up a recurring trade with their choice of trade interval and amount. 0x API takes it from there, surfacing these recurring trades as competitively priced limit orders in Matcha and other integrators.

Winner of Best Technical Achievement 🛠 + Most Ready to Launch 🚀

Depth Chart by Amir Bandeali, Greg Hysen, John Johnson, Jacob Evans, & Theo Gonella

The team worked on a primer for DEX aggregators: a market depth chart to help Matcha users get more details about the liquidity available for the specific pair. And that’s not all: the chart comes with the breakdown of all the different sources used. We’ve already implemented the chart on some of the Curve and Keep markets — more to come!

Winner of Best Non-technical Achievement 🛠

Matcha Through History by Clay Robbins, Matt Taylor, & Rui Zhang

Matcha not only caffeinates and powers the entire 0x Labs team but also the decentralized exchange ecosystem. This project explored how Matcha, a mystical, finely ground tea, influenced key events from the dawn of time to today. The team uncovered graphical artifacts from the Big Bang through the industrial revolution, to the age of cryptocurrency that shows just how critical Matcha has influenced history. Learn more about Matcha through History by this agglomerate timeline.

Winner of Most Interdisciplinary 🤝

ZOO Token by Alex Browne, Ben Burns, Daniel Pyrathon, Kim Persson, Max Torres, & Steve Klebanoff

The ZOO token is an experiment in fractional ownership, tokenization, and community incentives. We commissioned the creation of a virtual zoo in The Bronx neighborhood of Cryptovoxels. We are depositing the parcel into our custom ZOO smart contract, which will mint 10,000 tokens, which represent fractional ownership in the ZOO. The token will be distributed to the Cryptovoxels community — including neighbors, artists, and architects.

On January 30th, 2021, the ZOO smart contract will automatically initiate a dutch auction to sell parcel in its entirety. Upon the sale completing, all proceeds will be distributed amongst ZOO token holders based on proportional ownership. Visit zootoken.club to learn more and get notified of the launch!

Winner of Best Rap 🎤

Matchaton by Brent Oshiro
A Hamilton-inspired rap in honor of the entire Ethereum community who are architecting a new global banking and economic system

BTC On/Off-ramp Within Matcha by Will Warren

This project provides a path for Matcha users to seamlessly convert their BTC into a tokenized representation that exists on the Ethereum blockchain, and vice versa, without relying on a centralized custodian.

There is a significant demand for tokenized bitcoin within Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. At the time of writing, over $178M of BTC has been tokenized on Ethereum, and this number is rapidly increasing. A number of solutions have been developed to bring BTC onto Ethereum, the first and most popular being wrapped bitcoin (WBTC). To mint WBTC a user must complete a lengthy sign-up process, which includes a collection of personal information for KYC, before sending their BTC to a centralized custodian who then issues a corresponding number of WBTC tokens to the user’s Ethereum wallet. While WBTC is a practical solution, it is missing two key characteristics that make decentralization valuable: permissionless-ness and censorship-resistance.

Through a combination of cryptography magic (Shamir’s secret sharing, secure multi-party computation) and mechanism design, it is now possible for a network of nodes to serve as a decentralized BTC custodian that can issue/redeem tokenized BTC on Ethereum. RenVM and Keep have both developed open, permissionless networks for the purpose of bridging Bitcoin to the Ethereum blockchain. Conversion requires no sign-up process, no KYC, and can be completed in about 20 minutes (2 bitcoin block confirmations).

The hackathon project included pulling GatewayJS into Matcha, which leverages RenBridge to support conversions between BTC and renBTC, similar to wbtc.cafe. Second, mockups were created for a BTC conversion flow within the Matcha checkout widget that provides a user experience that is consistent with other assets supported on Matcha.

Lombard Credit Bundles (LBC) by Henry Harder, Jason Somensatto, & Liam Kovatch

Lombard Credit Bundles (LCBs) are ERC-20 tokens redeemable for bundled loan payments secured by valuable NFTs. LCBs provide borrowers a way to leverage asset value for liquidity and provides investors a unique yield opportunity. LCBs are permissionless, transparent, easy to use, and fungible. Check out our presentation and GitHub repo for more details.

Re-establishing the DeFi Meme by Blake Henderson, Brent Oshiro, Nicole Setter

An exploration into the competitive landscape of DeFi project memes.

“0x hackathons have quietly earned a reputation for being one of the places where innovation happens in this industry, and this one was no exception. Super inventive ideas coupled with impressive technical feats — I’m looking forward to seeing some of these come to market this year!”

Tom Schmidt — Partner at Dragonfly Capital

Summary

Congratulations to all of the winners and a huge thank you to our judges! We were blown away with the creative and diverse projects that came out of the event. It was also inspiring to see many groups formed with team members who don’t typically work closely with one another. Be sure to follow Matcha (@matchaxyz), as you’ll likely see some of these hackathon projects implemented soon!

If you’re interested in joining an upcoming 0x Labs team hackathon, check out our Jobs page.

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Legal Disclaimer: None of the 0x Hackathon products, services, projects, etc. described in this blog post are in production or are otherwise intended for public use, or represent any plan to do so by ZeroEx Intl. ZeroEx Intl. reserves all intellectual property rights associated with any ideas, concepts, techniques, inventions, and works of authorship developed during the Hackathon.

All links to third-party websites are for convenience and informational purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). ZeroEx Intl. is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by ZeroEx Intl.