Meet the winners: Golem Gitcoin Hackathon 2020

María Paula Fernández -

The wait is over! We’ve now checked all the projects and we are ready to announce the winners of the Golem Gitcoin Hackathon 2020. But first, a recap: the past year has been a pivotal one for Golem. After shipping the Clay Golem Task API on March 10th, 2020, exactly two years after the mainnet launch, we announced we were building a brand new protocol with a new codebase, dubbed simply The Next Milestone.

In August 2020, we shipped the first iteration of the reference implementation of the New Golem platform, Alpha I. We began collaborating with Gitcoin to onboard developers via bounties ranging from basic tasks to building applications. With Alpha II, we saw the very first apps built atop of the protocol, and finally, with Alpha III we launched our hackathon, which took place from December 8th 2020 to January 5th, 2021.

The Hackathon’s Judging Committee was formed by several individuals from the Golem team (Kuba K., Kuba M., Radek, María Paula, Mattias, Phillip, Piotrek S., and Marek, and one of our most veteran and prolific community contributors who’s been there from Day 1, that our community knows as EthereumCPW or Agnolo. In the future iterations of the hackathons, we will be adding more community judges as well as people from other backgrounds!

The hackathon had a total of five categories: Open Track, DeFi, Gaming on Golem, Golem4Social Goods, and Hack New Golem. We had 295 sign-ups and 29 projects made the final cut. Now, without further ado, let’s announce the winners (and keep reading because we’re also inviting you to the show & tell where the winners will be able to tell you about their hacks at the end of the announcement!)

Hack New Golem (four prizes of 1000 USDC)

Best DeFi App (one prize of 3000 USDC)

  • Magic Doll / Sumer by Bakaoh: a fascinating DeFi platform called Sumer that doubles as a game, Magic Doll with an amazing storyline and great graphics!

Gaming on Golem (two prizes of 3000 USDC)

Golem for Social Good (one prize of 2000 USDC):

And finally, the four winners of the Open Track -  main prize of 4000 USDC each!!

  • Golem Slate by derekjarvis and shumagorath86: a codepen-like app built atop the Golem Network, featuring a slick UI, and a SPA (Single Page Application) that utilizes dockerized yagna environments to communicate with the Golem Network.
  • Decentralized Machine Learning by Anshuman73: utilizes concepts from federated machine learning to combine the sub-steps of models trained on the proof of concept of this app built atop of the Golem Network.
  • Golem Array by John Grant: this app lets people design, simulate, and analyse antenna arrays without the need to utilize commercial and expensive applications.
  • Golem Cargo Test by Ladislav Sladecek: Is an adaptive distributed test executor that splits up Cargo tests into multiple batches and runs them on top of Golem. It collects run-time statistics to improve batch distribution next time it’s run.

But that’s not all. The judging committee worked really hard to provide feedback to all contestants, and we will be contacting all the fearless hackers shortly (we are still consolidating the comments!).

All winners have been invited to take part in the Golem Gitcoin Hackathon Online Show & Tell to explain their projects, on January 21st at 5 PM CET (on the internet, of course!). During the Show & Tell, some of our judges will also be able to provide commentary to the hackers and ask questions, so get ready! Click here to sign up for free.

A month has passed since we started this hackathon, and our tech team keeps on building, and getting closer to our upcoming release, which will as always, feature incentivized activities for developers and providers. If you did not win or missed the opportunity to participate in this hackathon, don’t fret, this is our very first one and we’re so pleased, humbled, and excited about the results we’ll be soon back with more!