Ergohack 9: Innovations in UI/UX and Mining – Meet the Visionary Winners!

The latest annual Ergo hackathon, ErgoHack IX, was a six-day event held at the end of October. The theme for this year was enhancing user experience and mining innovation within the Ergo ecosystem.

Ten teams entered, building a range of different projects, with eight of them delivering a solution at the end of the hackathon. The judging process is now completed. This involves three judges – @markglasgow, @ergomorphic, and @mgpai – giving their opinions, as well as input from an ongoing community vote.

Meet Your Judges

Mark Glasgow, Ergo Foundation

Mark is an Ergo Foundation member and works across various roles in Ergo. As a Computing Science graduate with a personal passion for improving inclusive systems, he is also the Technical Director for Disabled Students UK CIC - a non-profit that was named as one of the most influential disability-led organizations in the UK.

Alex Slesarenko AKA morphic, Ergo Foundation

Alex Slesarenko (morphic) is an ERGO Foundation Board Member and graduate of Applied Mathematics from Udmurt State University. He has extensive experience in software development as a team leader, architect and researcher. He worked as Team Leader at Huawei Research Lab, focusing on developing languages and compilers for high-performance big data processing. Alexander is a Blockchain Core Developer and Lead Developer of ErgoScript at Ergo.

@MGPAI (Shishir Pai), Ergo Foundation

MGpai has a background in computer science and is a well-known Ergo-community developer. He is involved with several projects across the ecosystem including Zengate, Lilium, Phoenix Finance, ErgoNames, Rosen Bridge, and Oracles.

During this ErgoHack 9, contestants had the opportunity to present their work to some of the most innovative and creative minds in the crypto space. Now, as they deliberate, judges will consider the following criteria to make their final decisions:

• Innovation and originality
• Technical execution and code quality
• User experience and design
• Potential impact on the Ergo ecosystem
• Alignment with the theme of “Innovations in UI/UX And Mining”

At the end of the adjudication process, the judges select three winners, and they will each receive a portion of the prize pool. Winners will earn a share of 18k SigUSD as well as several other prizes.

1st Prize - $5,000 in ERGs
2nd Prize - $3,000 in ERGs
3rd Prize - $1,500 in ERGs

Aaand Winner Places Go To:

1st – Satergo Offline Vault
2nd – Stable Benefaction Platform
3rd – Last Byte Bar

Special Recognitions to Minotaur: swag pack, which include a T-shirt, sweatshirt, MMGA hat, and some cool stickers!

About projects

1. Satergo Offline Vault is an Android app that acts as a secure hardware wallet key, installed on an offline device to protect users’ seed phrases. It connects via Bluetooth to the Satergo desktop wallet, allowing users to enter their password and sign Ergo transactions safely on their mobile device, keeping sensitive data isolated from malware. The app is transferred manually, avoiding app stores, and allows users to reuse old devices for secure, cost-effective storage.

2. Stable Benefaction Platform is a decentralized application that allows projects to seek funding in ERG in exchange for participation tokens, providing a transparent mechanism for community-driven financial support within the Ergo ecosystem.

3. Last Byte Bar is an innovative system that automatically generates and issues NFTs and tokens upon block discovery, using smart contracts to verify block finders, create unique identifiers, and mint digital assets from block data. Each NFT is algorithmically generated as blockchain-native artwork, while fungible tokens are minted with attributes influenced by block data. With every mined block, assets are distributed to miners, providing a flexible reward structure that enhances engagement and introduces new tokenomics possibilities within the Ergo ecosystem.

4. Minotaur Wallet focuses on enhancing multi-sig wallet transactions by improving communication and reliability among wallet signers, making multi-sig signing faster and less vulnerable to mistakes.

You can find more information on each one of the projects, as well as all the other (fantastic!) entries on docs.ergoplatform.org

Looking Ahead

Thank you to all of the participants for their hard work and innovative proposals. Keep an eye out for the next ErgoHack announcement! There is an incredible amount of development happening on the Ergo blockchain, and as Rosen Bridge opens new doors to cross-chain interoperability, Ergo is poised to lead the way with new and innovative tools and products.