The first Accumulate Hackathon was a success with over 2,300 total registrants and 30 final project submissions. Out of all of the participants, the judges have chosen three teams who stood out to create great features for Accumulate and enable other developers to build on Accumulate. Throughout the hackathon, teams were on a quest to build the best open-source projects related to Accumulate’s blockchain! Let’s see what they did. 

This summary includes: 

• The Accumulate Hackathon 
• The Accumulate Blockchain Hackathon Winners 
• What is a Blockchain Hackathon? 
• What makes Accumulate special? 

Visit the hackathon’s homepage here. 

The Accumulate Hackathon 

First, a little more about Assembly, Accumulate’s first Blockchain Hackathon. To encourage developers to build applications that utilize Accumulate’s novel features, the developers of Accumulate sponsored a two-month-long Hackathon. Accumulate’s Hackathon, hosted on HackerEarth, was an entirely virtual competition that began November 8th and wrapped up in January. Participants created teams where up to five developers competed to build meaningful and useful applications on Accumulate’s blockchain. The three best projects will receive cash prizes.

Competitors in the Acculumate Hackathon were encouraged to create software development toolkits for popular programming languages and command-line interfaces to help the Accumulate developer community reach new heights. Other suggested projects included apps on the Accumulate, novel wallets, and new bridges between Accumulate and other chains. 

Hackathons are typically organized around themes and main objectives, such as the case with Accumulate’s hackathon: 

• Tools that make it easier for developers to build on Accumulate
• Projects that help users interact with Accumulate 
• Decentralized apps built natively on Accumulate 

The projects were evaluated by several judges working at DeFiDevs on the Accumulate project. Three winning teams received cash prizes, with a grand prize of $5,000.

The Accumulate Blockchain Hackathon Winners

1st place: Python Wrapper Software Development Kit

Based on the Development Tools theme, this project has a built-in Python Software Development Kit (SDK) that serves as a wrapper for Accumulate methods. The Python SDK was built by Ratnesh Chandak. The highlight of the project includes a methods-based version 2 API. The repository link for the project can be found here. 

2nd place: C# SDK 

Second place was a .NET Core Library for Accumulate built using the programming language C#. The team leader of the project is a developer named Nestor Nicolas Campos Rojas. The repository link for the project can be found here. 

3rd place: Accumulate Web Explorer 

The third-place team designed a web application using React allowing users to query Accumulate authored by the team of Anil Kumar and Sudhanshu Kaul. Using the app, you can do things like explore account types and account balances, but also explore faucet details. Information can be viewed by filtering such as signature IDs and transaction amounts. The repository link for the project can be found here.  

What is a Blockchain Hackathon? 

Part social and part work, a hackathon is a programmer-event held in-person or virtually, that is typically hosted by a tech company. Hackathons are commonly set for a short period, a few days, weeks, or at most a couple of months. While some are shorter in duration and appear closer to a sprint, others are much longer. During the hackathon, participants create software application prototypes. An example of one of the most famous hackathon winners of all time is the messaging app GroupMe, which Skype purchased for $50M. 

The definition of what a hackathon is can differ from one hackathon to the next. While some are in the school of thought that hacking is more of a creative demonstration than retroactively or proactively fixing a security breach, other definitions of what a hackathon is are more along the lines of an objective-based, problem-solving competition where programmers work together to deploy software solutions in what is usually a short amount of time. 

What Makes Accumulate Special? 

Accumulate’s developers set out to create a practical blockchain that will be more user-friendly for traditional financial institutions like banks or processing transactions such as payments for real estate. Unlike most blockchains, which use a randomly generated hash as addresses for token transactions, Accumulate’s identity-centered addresses are human-readable from the ground up. 

Thus, instead of asking a bank to send crypto to an address like “bc1qar0srrr7xfkvy5l643lydnw9re59gtzzwf5mdq”, Accumulate addresses are formatted like URLs and look more like “Acc://Bob”. Known as Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs), Accumulate ADIs are more user-friendly and allow developers to work with datasets and addresses in a more practical way than chains like Ethereum. ADIs can be mapped to anything from an organization to a team to a document to a building, and organized hierarchically, to allow for companies to utilize blockchain tech and map out their corporate structure on a blockchain exactly how it appears in real life. 

Accumulate offers a variety of other novel features, such as using anchoring to secure the blockchain against 51% attacks, creating an on-chain discussion feature called Scratch Spaces that can be used to facilitate conversations around achieving consensus, and utilizing sharding to improve processing times. 

Not to mention that Accumulate processes 70,000 transactions per second for pennies on the dollar.