HackAtom VII 2022: Challenges Overview

As HackAtom VII 2022 comes in less than a month in Seoul, we at Citizen Cosmos decided to give you overview of this event. Before the event starts on July 29th, we’ll do occasional reviews related to HackAtom. Today, let’s talk about what we should expect during the event.

HackAtom VII precedes the BUIDL ASIA event and will host South Korea's best hackers. Teams will compete for a diverse range of prizes, rewarded to the best teams that build the Interchain vision aside from the hackathon. There will also be a series of free educational workshops throughout the event.

There are three main challenges that participants will have to take part in to get the main prize. The first one is called Interchain Prize: Interoperability. The mission is to build anything that would push IBC forward. The event organizers confirm that this could be an application that leverages IBC in a novel way, a new IBC application-level packet type, improvements or modifications to lower levels of IBC, or implementation in new environments. The competitors should demonstrate their skills and talents to show how interoperability unlocks ingenuity.

The second challenge is the Hub Prize: Interchain Security. Its mission is to spin a Consumer Chain that showcases the power of the Cross Chain Validation (CCV) protocol and experiment with the application layer. The developers are encouraged to play with Interchain Security and innovate on the application layer. The task is open-ended, and the participants should show their creativity in how Interchain Security will reimagine the Cosmos-SDK chain and how the Cosmos Hub can evolve as a chain for application development and deployment. The main requirement of the challenge is to leverage Interchain security design in the project.

The third general challenge is the Application Prize: Cosmos-SDK. The task here is to build either a blockchain with the Cosmos SDK, a rewrite of an existing module, or a tool that improves the user experience of developing with the SDK. The organizers are mainly curious about determining how well contestants work with SDK. The requirement is to use the Cosmos SDK repository or a codebase like Atlas, Lens, or any other tool that provides UX improvements to SDK.

Don’t forget to apply for the Hackatom and keep reading our digests. Next time we’ll talk about the event’s sponsors and their challenges!

Event’s sponsors and challenges (pt.2)

The Hackatom VII is coming in just ten days in Seoul, so it’s time to get to know who sponsors this event. Moreover, we shall cover the special challenges for the participants that the sponsors have prepared.

There are several sponsorship categories. The main one is the Platinum which includes Juno and Osmosis blockchains. Next is the Bronze, with Celestia, Crescent, Provalidator, Konstellation, Agoric, and Persistence. The Citizen Cosmos podcast is also a sponsor! We provide media coverage for the event and help promote it. You can learn more about sponsors and their contributions on the official website.

Let’s look at the challenges the Platinum sponsors Juno and Osmosis have provided for the contestants. The Osmosis challenge is called “Osmosis track: CosmWasm-related challenge. Its mission is to build a CosmWasm application that will interact with Osmosis AMM using its custom bindings. The participants will have to write a contract leveraging this functionality to produce some helpful protocols to enhance the Osmosis ecosystem. Finally, the app should be deployed to the Osmosis testnet and provide a UI. The requirements for winning the challenge are pretty straightforward, but the Osmosis team also shares their ideas for inspiration: Maker DAO like stablecoin using Osmosis for TWAP price oracle and liquidation Autocompounder for Osmosis LP shares Futures or options on a token using the AMM for settlement

The Juno challenge is also related to CosmWasm. It has a mission to write a CosmWasm contract that runs on Juno testnet and demonstrates the power of CosmWasm IBC to create a meaningful product-level application (not just R&D). Juno is currently the largest deployment of permissionless CosmWasm in the Cosmos ecosystem. They encourage many projects to build on their chain and focus on governance and composability. In addition, they are looking at IBC to enable more composability of DAOs and other protocols with other Cosmos blockchains. The recommendations Juno gives to the participants are the following: Leverage Interchain Accounts for a DAO to stake assets on a remote chain (that doesn’t have CosmWasm) Write a custom protocol to move NFTs between Juno and Stargaze testnets (both have CosmWasm) Build an “AMM router” that swaps tokens either on JunoSwap (local) or Osmosis (via custom IBC protocol), depending on the best current rate. Stay with us and learn more about Hackatom VII in Seoul. Next time we’ll talk about the judges who will decide the winner of the challenges!

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