Bitcoin Association Announces Three BSV Hackathon Finalists

Bitcoin Association, the Switzerland-based global industry organization advancing the enterprise adoption of the BSV blockchain, has announced the three BSV Hackathon finalists. The following has been judged to have submitted the best final project among the six semi-finalists who have been shortlisted:

• CATN8 – Marcel Gruber from Canada, Dave Foderick from the United States, Thor
• Bitcoin Phone – Joe Thomas from Canada
• TKS Pnt – Meta Taro from Japan

With the fourth BSV Hackathon’s theme being peer-to-peer applications, entrants have been tasked to develop P2P platforms or services on the BSV blockchain that also leverage the recently released SPV Channels and Merchant API (mAPI). Although the theme and requirements are more difficult this time around, participants are still able to impress judges with their final projects.

“Working with all-new technologies—just like we tasked participants in the 4th Bitcoin SV Hackathon with doing with SPV Channels—is never an easy proposition. But challenging situations often lead to innovative solutions, which we’ve certainly seen with the standard of entries in this year’s Hackathon. Having worked intimately on introducing the Bitcoin SV implementation of SPV Channels, I’ve been intrigued to see how developers would approach it—and for a first foray with this new technology, I’ve been impressed with the early returns we’ve seen so far,” nChain CTO and BSV Technical Standards Committee Chair Steve Shadders said.

CATN8

Creators of CATN8 dub it as the “Money Button of video players,” an online video streaming platform that leverages micropayments, allowing it to offer a full-feature SPV wallet implementation. “This enables the project to offer secure data delivery and routing for video streaming content, as well as integrated micropayments on the BSV digital ledger.

Bitcoin Phone

Bitcoin Phone is similar to the Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP). Tagged as an application of the new Voice-over-Bitcoin (VoB) protocol, it allows live voice chats for participants on the BSV blockchain. “Voice data is wrapped in a non-finalized Bitcoin transaction that is then broadcasted to the network. Listeners use a bloom filter set to receive the data, unwrap the transaction and play the audio data directly through their speakers.”

TKS Pnt

Made for merchants and their customers, TKS Pnt is a point tokenization system that acts as a portal for accessing these points and tokens on the BSV blockchain. “The TKS Pnt application includes the transaction history of point transactions as well as a way to contact various service providers if needed. Points can also be spent and received from within the application itself, with these transactions being written to the BSV blockchain.”

To date, BSV Hackathon has seen a total over 1,100 participants and more than 100 projects submitted. And this year, a total prize pool of $100,000 is to be given away, with the winner getting $50,000, the second place $30,000 and the third place $20,000 in BSV. 

On top of these guaranteed prizes, the three BSV Hackathon finalists will be flown in to the upcoming CoinGeek Conference in New York on October 5 to 7, where they will present their final projects in front of a live audience. The live audience, together with the panel of expert judges, will then cast their votes for who they think has developed the best P2P application.

The three BSV Hackathon finalists will also be able to attend the three-day blockchain conference and meet potential investors. BSV Hackathon has maintained its goal of discovering new developer talents, as well as providing a stepping stone for new developers to be able to launch their apps on the BSV blockchain.