Building DApps for the Masses with Torus at Asia’s largest Ethereum Hackathon
ETH India 2019 was both exhilarating and intense as more than 300 student developers, professional coders and start-up entrepreneurs took part in the weekend-long hackathon. With more than 60% of the participants developing on the Ethereum blockchain for the first time, this was one of the most diverse hackathons we have ever been a part of.
Our team was stirred by the passion that the developers brought to the hackathon as they hacked through 36 gruelling hours with little to no sleep. The community was inquisitive and fielded questions throughout the workshops and hackathons about issues they were fervent to solve.
We were fortunate to be able to witness India’s buzzing collective of student developers, several of whom would later go on to win our API prizes. Zhen was interviewed by YouTuber and student developer, Sreeram FillerInk, to share insights of Zhen’s journey within the blockchain industry with his audience.
ETH India was a good time for the team to catch up with fellow sponsors like NuCypher, Lendroid, Kyber Network, Matic Network, ENS, Aztec Protocol, Aave, QuikNode, and Daostack. We were glad to forge new relationships and start new collaborations. With several integrations planned out, we are excited to make several partnership announcements within the coming months.
Hackathon Workshop: Increasing Your DApp Userbase with Torus
Torus co-founders Leonard and Zhen conducted a workshop where we introduced our new front-end user interface. Our solution was simple for developers to integrate, and provided the projects with an alternative user-centric wallet solution.
The community was extremely supportive of Torus and eagerly took part in our usability tests and surveys in exchange for some of our swag. We swallowed up all the feedback we got and lined up our pipeline with reasonable requests from the participants. This small exercise gave us a good yardstick of where we were at and reinstated the value in the ease of use that users were looking for in Torus. Apart from providing utility to users, this was another vital factor to onboard mainstream users into the decentralised ecosystem.
The participants were not the only ones pulling long hours as our developers accompanied the teams to help them debug their code and iron out their kinks with their integrations.
Meet the Torus Winners of ETH India 2019
From the total of 53 project submissions from ETH India 2019, Torus saw 15 integrations from teams vying for our API prizes. The competition was close and our judges had a challenging time determining our winners. We awarded API Prizes totalling ₹180,000 in ETH to five deserving teams, two of which were top project finalists of ETH India 2019.
Grand Prize for the Best DApp that incorporated Torus: KyberCallCollect
The Torus API Grand Prize winner proved to be an outstanding project with intuitive user flow. KyberCallCollect sought to onboard new users who did not have any ETH prior, and let them start transacting with DAI and ERC-20 tokens with the recipient fronting the ETH.
Aligned closely with our mission to bring new users into the ecosystem, Calvin leveraged on Torus to provide potential users with a user flow that they are used to; logging in with Google. With such an innovative concept and its practical possibilities, our team fell in love with KyberCallCollect’s impeccable implementation and felt that they deserved our API Grand Prize.
DApp that Best Fulfills an Industry Need: 1lend
Crypto Maniacs are true veterans within the ETH Global Hackathon scene. Anton and Sergej previously hacked at ETH New York 2019 and proved to be strong contenders for our API Prizes. One of the top six finalist projects of ETH India 2019, 1lend provides users with a single interface to aggregate and make informed decisions on the best crypto lending providers. Suitable for frequent crypto traders and financiers, 1lend provides a viable solution for the decentralised finance industry.
Not resting on their laurels, Anton and Sergej improved upon their project from ETH New York 2019, 1Inch Exchange. In 3 months, the decentralised exchange aggregator has processed an astounding volume of $1.8 million. Having recently integrated Torus with 1Inch Exchange, we are looking forward to the next big thing that Crypto Maniacs are planning to build.
DApp with the Most Seamless and Intuitive User Onboarding: Always for Sale Ads
Denham and JonJon led their development of Always for Sale Ads; a DApp plugin for advertisers to buy, sell and earn from digital advertisement space on websites. With a seamless user interface, Team Wildcards used Torus to simplify the onboarding process and let digital marketers start trading online ad-spaces in just a few steps. The solution seeks to improve market efficiency in advertising and we hope that the team continues to build upon their project and possibly turn it into a business.
DApp with the Best Overall User Experience: Pocket Bank
Pocket Bank is an intuitive digital bank that converts the users’ digital tokens into DAI for them to earn interest. The project’s integration of Torus was perfect for the use case of giving new users a simple and secure experience with decentralised finance. Complete with an integration with Wyre, Pocket Bank has the potential to be the first point of contact for users interested in getting their feet wet with cryptocurrencies.
Pocket Bank was led by Thrilok and Vishva from InstaDApp, an autonomous banking portal on the blockchain, was one of the top projects that garnered huge traction since its inception from ETH India 2018.
DApp with the Best Creative Design for Implementing Torus: Credeth
Another one of the top six projects of ETH India 2019, Credeth was accomplished by a team of Polymath Network Developers, Satyam, Saad and Mudit. A concept that reminds us of Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode, Credeth aims to make on-chain governance easier through an anonymous social scoring system.
Credeth allows developers and DApps to implement Sybil protection to determine a public wallet address’ credibility and legitimacy, which would help facilitate informed decisions. Users are able to maintain their anonymity and build their reputation by lending digital assets, repaying loans, completing KYC and contributing to the decentralised ecosystem.
With several governments wary of the illegal activities conducted on the blockchain, Credeth seems to provide a small step in setting up the framework for regulating cryptocurrencies. We hope to see a commercial version released for the decentralised ecosystem soon!
Next Steps for Torus
ETH India 2019’s organizers, Devfolio and ETH Global, put on an amazing show and set a new standard for in-person hackathons.
Our team was impressed by the quality of projects built within the short span of 36 hours, and we want to give these developers the opportunity to spend more time and resources to build upon their code. The potential for DApps remains huge, but the user-base of DApps still remains relatively small as not many users have yet to see the value that DApps provide.
This leads us to our next initiative: Torus 4 Everyone. We are planning to host an online hackathon where developers can build DApps and tools that give a reason for mainstream users to venture into the decentralised ecosystem. We would be releasing more information on Torus 4 Everyone in the coming week, so keep a look out for our update!
