Build Polkadot: Network Launch Bounty Challenges

Polkadot is live! Be among the first to build on it

The genesis block of the Polkadot network was launched on May 26th. To celebrate, we have created the first builder’s bounty with over $6000 DAI to be won↗, split over three challenges.

The initial phase of Polkadot will run as a Proof of Authority (PoA) network. To honor the occasion, Web3 Foundation has created a challenge for developers covering three distinct areas: visualization, user tools and everything else in the Polkadot ecosystem.

The Challenges

Visualization: The first challenge is for those with a talent for the visual. With a wide scope to choose from, the goal is to create anything related to visualization and the Polkadot ecosystem. Share your vision with the world!

User Tools: This challenge is for those who delight in making complicated, difficult processes simple. The goal is to create a tool that helps the Polkadot user. This could be anything from ways to observe the governance bodies to tools for validators. Let’s make things even more efficient and easier to use.

Surprise Us: The third challenge gives free rein to build whatever you want for the Polkadot ecosystem; from building your own blockchain using Substrate (Parity’s framework for blockchain development) to creating a cool wall of LEDs that change color based on the number of extrinsics in the latest block. It’s a chance to let your imagination go wild.

Ready to win?

This bounty↗ is worth $6000 DAI, split equally among the three challenges: $1000 DAI for first place; $600 DAI for second place; $400 DAI for third place. The bounty will run for two weeks, from 28.5.2020 to 11.6.2020 11.59 pm CET.

Our judges are Bill Laboon, Technical Education Lead at Web3 Foundation and Joshy Orndorff, Developer Advocate at Parity Technologies. They will evaluate all the submissions we receive using the criteria of technical soundness, usefulness and relevance, as well as design and usability. The winners will be announced a week after the closing date.

Find out more

Get more details on each challenge on the Gitcoin↗ page.

We look forward to reading your submission. Good luck!

Announcing the Winners

Build Polkadot was a major success! Thirty developers rose to the challenge and we received a total of 15 submissions. Due to the high quality, our judges Bill Laboon and Joshy Orndorff had a tough time deciding on the winners. After a week of  consideration, they made their final decision.  We are delighted to introduce the winning submissions below.

Visualization

1st place: Network2network↗ built by milonite - a very cool visualisation tool that maps every Kusama address to a static anime face, maps Polkadot addresses to a human face and visualizes block heights with an ageing man.

2nd place: FlappyTips↗ built by ltfschoen - a cute game that allows you to fly the DOT character through block gaps. The game also incentivises users to create an on-chain account and deposit sufficient funds to cover the transaction costs required to share their game results.

3rd place: Polka Pulse↗ built by mariopino - a visualization tool that currently uses the Kusama network and shows block time, session progress, era progress and day progress as well as the current block height and last finalized block.

User Tools

1st place: Dotvanity↗ built by hukkinj1 - a CLI tool for generating Substrate (or Polkadot) vanity addresses. It comes with a few neat features!

2nd place: Polkadot Telegram Query Bot↗ built by ayobuenavista - this tool is a Telegram bot that queries data from Polkadot and other Substrate-based chains. There are a total of 20 commands that you can run, including returning account balances, election information, council information and many others.

3rd place: Stakers payout kubernetes cronjob↗ built by nicolasochem - a good validator pays its nominators every era. This tool is a cronjob to pay stakers every three hours for the immediately preceding era, making it an essential part of a good Polkadot validator solution.

Surprise Us

1st place: Substrate Identity Module↗ built by dvc94ch - keybase-like identity system for Substrate using a small embeddable IPFS implementation

2nd place: Kusama Automated Registry Identity built by yangwao - a great tool for an automatic identity judgement process using common services such as telegram and phone numbers.

3rd place: Shoot your old validator↗ built by branciard - this tool was built to prevent double signing of multiple running validators, using sms and the Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH) algorithm.

Thank you

Congratulations to all the winners. We’d also like to thank everyone who took part, working towards our common goal of building open source projects and a better, safer internet for all. We will shortly be beginning a series of Hackathons on both Polkadot and Kusama, so we hope to meet you there again. Keep an eye on our Telegram ↗and Riot ↗channels.