The Future of Blockchain Hackathon – Applications still open!

Get started building on NEAR

Berlin, Oxford, Cambridge and London – 4 cities, one goal; build an amazing application (on NEAR). We have been travelling across the UK, introducing our challenges for the Future of Blockchain Hackathon, organised by StakeZero Ventures.

The rules are simple

• Be enrolled in any of the universities based in respective cities;
• Live or be connected to any of the respective cities (for reach);
• Build an application in three months focused on either of the challenges provided by the partners.

This post will focus on Near’s challenges for more information please refer to the official website.

No matter your background, partner up with a diverse team of engineers, designers and managers to develop an amazing product on NEAR. Note that you can sign-up as an individual or as a team. If you are still looking for team members, please get in touch with Anthony ([email protected]), one of the organisers of the FOB hackathon.

Quick recap of NEAR

NEAR Protocol is a community-run platform which allows developers to build applications from shared state components. The underlying blockchain is:

• Public and permissionless
• Proof-of-Stake
• Dynamically sharded

Our ultimate goal is to make development on NEAR as simple as utilising any other stack and development platform. Neither the developer nor the end-user should be unnecessarily challenged by a blockchain layer; crucial components to achieving this is our wallet and our development resources.

The Hackathon Challenge

The wallet provides single sign-on (SSO) for any application built on NEAR. Similar to the way users utilise Facebook to sign into applications, services built on NEAR may utilise our wallet.

This leads us to the first part of the competition: Rewards are given to any project implementing SSO, $100 for any implementation, and storing user information against the user’s account ID on NEAR. The latter will be rewarded with $500 and 100 tokens at the discretion of the judges. For more information on requirements, please get in touch.

The final prize of $5000 and 5000 tokens will be granted to one project with the best user experience. Ultimately, we want to see that you (and your team) have put a lot of thought into the application. Meaning, the average user has to be able to understand and participate in the entire user flow without help. 

Sounds amazing – what next?

1. Apply
2. Check out our online IDE.
3. Read into our documentation (outlining how to get started, local set-up, and example tutorials.)
4. Reach out to us for additional information and to clarify any doubts. Our team is available 24/7 on Discord for questions, help, to provide guidance and additional resources.
5. Lastly, check-out our Beta Program to learn more about ways to get involved with Near post-challenge.
6. Applications close on the 1st of November – Sign-up now and decide on your application later. (Late applications may still be accepted.)

APPLY

We are looking forward to working with you!