First-Ever Web3 ATL Hackathon Hosted in Tech Square
The first weekend in November, Blockchain at Georgia Tech hosted a three-day premier Web3 conference at The Clubhouse for attendees to explore, network, and compete for prizes!
The weekend marked the very first Web3 ATL Hackathon, an event aimed at onboarding technical talent into the Web3 space. As part of the larger Web3 ATL conference hosted by 404 DAO, a non-profit in Georgia focused on making Atlanta a Web3 hub, the three-day event boasted over 60 speakers and 400 attendees.
A kickoff party at The Clubhouse to welcome and thank all the sponsors jumpstarted the festivities, with other gatherings happening around Tech Square and the Georgia Tech campus all weekend.
As for the main attraction, the hackathon consisted of four problem sets provided by the following company sponsors:
1. Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that is critical to providing truthful information to smart contracts on blockchains. Participants built projects that utilized data feeds, verifiable randomness, automation, and API calls to modify the state of the blockchain.
2. Forta protects Web3 through their network of detection bots. Participants developed solutions using Forta's SDK to deliver protection or detection value through bots, libraries, or data insights.
3. Ocean Protocol democratizes data through the tokenization, trade, and analysis of data in an open marketplace. Participants built predictive modeling tools to publish data models on the Ocean marketplace.
4. 404 DAO is a non-profit in Georgia focused on making Atlanta a Web3 hub. 404 DAO sponsored a Solidity Sprint, which was a competitive programming competition to help teach and motivate hackers to learn solidity. Participants raced to solve a series of increasingly complex problems involving solidity and smart contracts.
Each problem set had a prize pool of $2,500, distributed to qualified teams who completed the problems or placed in the solidity sprint. An astounding 20 teams submitted projects across the four problem sets, with the following reigning supreme:
First Place : Sea
Ray Hung
Aditya Singhal
Thanh Trinh
Second Place Team: Outliers
Yuma Tanaka
Jongwon Park
Third Place Team: Something Cool
Thinh Vu
Jacques Dilla
Additionally, there were three workshops to help teach students about developing in Web3:
1. Web2 vs Web3 Development Stack taught by Matt Wyatt from Nucleo
Showcased the differences between the traditional Web2 tech stack that students were familier with and the Web3 tech stack.
2. Solidity Crash Course taught by Josh Weintraub from Revest Finance
Taught students the basics of Solidity, the programing language for Ethereum Smart Contracts, in order to prepare them for the Solidity Sprint.
3. OpenZeppelin Defender Workshop taught by Emanuel Solis from Forta
Showcased the applications of OpenZeppelin's security incident response automation system and tools.
Students from all over, including Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, NC State, Emory, Georgia State, and Morehouse participated, with several applying to jobs at the sponsor companies, only further showcasing the rising interest among students to work in Web3. More so, Web3 developers had a chance to connect with faces new and old, further increasing collaboration amongst those in the industry.
The hackathon was a complete success and we’re so proud of our student partners for pulling off such an occasion!
Would you attend a hackathon in the future? Let us know in the comments below.