Ergohack Participants - The Future of Finance

Ergohack VII: The Future of Finance - Ways of Adoption has just concluded after running from October 13-15. For those who are unfamiliar with ErgoHacks, they are an important Ergo ecosystem event that takes place multiple times a year. These hackathons serve to inspire creativity and collaboration amongst developers and entrepreneurs for the purpose of bringing new utility, tooling, and/or dApps to Ergo. With Ergohack VII, our contestants were tasked with designing and creating products that further the mainstream adoption of the Ergo Platform.

Ergohack VII Participants

Satergo - NiPoPoWs

The Satergo wallet on Ergo is a unique wallet that acts as a full node wallet. Full node wallets have an excellent reputation for strong security assumptions but can often be painfully slow to load/refresh. However, NiPoPoW (blockchain compression technique) integration into the Satergo wallet will allow the wallet to load swiftly while maintaining strong security assumptions.

SideChainProto

Ergo co-founder Alex Chepurnoy (Kushti) and community developer Ross Weir teamed up to explore the implementation of sidechains on Ergo. Chepurnoy stated on Twitter: “During the ErgoHack VII we've proven (with real contracts) that Ergo <-> Ergo-like sidechain transfers can be trustless (so [the] security is reduced to consensus issues).” Utilizing thorough and concise research in their whitepaper, Chepurnoy and Weir aim to show that it is possible to use Ergo sidechains for exchanges with other cryptocurrencies and that it can be trustless. There is also an emphasis on keeping the consensus on Ergo alone.

Lilium: Event Ticketing

Lilium is a project spearheaded by community developers MGPai and Lgd. Originally, their primary focus was on creating a mass minter and sales distributor for NFTs. Upon having delivered this product seamlessly, they wanted to add more to the Lilium protocol with a feature called event ticketing. Lilium co-founder Lgd states that “Users can create an event and have a corresponding ticket sale. This ticket will be a minted NFT that the buyer will own. Sale creators have full customizability of their sale similar to our NFT collection sales.”

Atomic Swap: Web Interface

Community developer Analog Ergo (Deathgripson) has been working on implementing an atomic swap web interface on Ergo. Atomic analog swap is a platform for cross-chain atomic swaps. It is a cryptographic protocol that enables multiple parties to exchange without trusting each other. The protocol relies on off-chain and on-chain scripting conditions. In staying true to Ergo’s principles, this protocol is open source and can be viewed on GitHub.

Metamask Integration

Ergo developer Captain Nemo and the Nautilus wallet team have implemented metamask integration on Ergo. Watch the video for a visual on how to integrate your Ergo wallet with Metamask. This is a significant milestone because it allows users from other ecosystems to access their $ERG in a popular mainstream wallet. The Nautilus team believe that this project can make it much easier for users to do things like atomic swaps and bridge between different blockchains. They will essentially be able to do it all with just one wallet.

Hodlbox

Hodlbox is a unique project that was built during this ErgoHack. It is an open source dApp that brings gamification to the Ergo ecosystem. It is a decentralized DeFi game that has users deposit $ERG in a hodlbox. This hodlbox is then locked for a period of time, attempting to force the user to hold their $ERG long term. The inspiration for this game is that it keeps $ERG stored long term, discouraging a user from selling early. Users pay a nominal fee of 1% for the use of this dApp.

Disclaimer: Users should always know their assumptions when using this protocol and understand that price appreciation is never a guarantee.

ReputationSystemTeam

For this project, the team’s primary focus was on developing a reputation system. They stated that this system plays a crucial role in blockchain because they seek to address the fundamental requirement of trust. Trust is vital in any ecosystem, and their goal is to create a decentralized, user-driven solution that fills the trust gap through reputation assignment and transfer. Within crypto, users need to be able to trust the entities they engage with, whether it be smart contracts, addresses, URLs, or other off-chain elements. This reputation system's goal is to build and sustain that trust. To learn more about how this reputation system works please visit the GitHub.

Ergo Poor Man’s Wallet

“The Ergo Poors Man's Wallet (EPMW) project is a simple, DIY, low-cost hardware wallet for [the] Ergo cryptocurrency, which was created during ErgoHack VII hackathon from the Ergo Hackathon series in October 2023. The wallet is designed to be affordable, with a total cost of around $10, including shipping cost of components to Europe.” This wallet serves to be a fantastic budget option for those who do not want to use a Ledger. As always, the user should know their security assumptions when using any wallet. Verifying that a wallet is safe is an essential step in keeping your funds secure.

Auction Coin

Auction Coin (a project by anonreal#2768) is designed to be a fair, decentralized, and free market token distribution protocol. During ErgoHack, all components for the protocol were designed, implemented, and are now fully functional. Following the end of ErgoHack, next steps include gradually moving in the direction of making the protocol accessible to anyone. Users will be able to “lock tokens, set auction parameters, and purpose actions (distribution, providing liquidity, raising funds),” through the security of smart contracts and off-chain code.

Conclusion

Open sourced code, decentralization and DeFi tooling is what Ergo is all about, and this most recent Ergohack offers some impressive tools to further the adoption of the blockchain. Judging will commence in the following days and we look forward to announcing all the prize winners for ErgoHack VII!

To learn more about Ergohack events, visit the Ergohack website.