sTorgate, Takoyaki, and More: Meet the ENS Winners at ETHNewYork
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is proud to be a 2019 Season Partner with ETHGlobal. This means we’ll be at all of their hackathons this year, helping new and old Ethereum developers alike learn about ENS, and offering special prizes for the best projects that integrate it.
Chris Remus and I from the ENS team attended the ETHNewYork hackathon which took place May 17–19.
This was the first big hackathon ENS participated in after the launch of our permanent registrar, so it was a great chance to ask participants to try out our new manager on the spot and get usability feedback.
Prior to the permanent register, it was very difficult for hackers to get ENS names to use for the hackathon because it required a 5 day auction process.
Thanks to the permanent registrar and new ENS manager, you can do the entire process in just a few minutes, even from a mobile phone.
However, we noticed a small side effect of making it too easy to buy ENS names: we had a couple of team applied for bounties by just registering an ENS name and sticking the name onto their website.
While we were busy supporting hackers, we also received a lot of support from Ethereum library authors helping participants interacting with ENS via their tools.
Tips for hackathon participants
1) If you are going to apply for specific bounties, consider going to their workshop or talking to their developers
This is not only a chance to get familiar with their toolset but a way to validate that your idea actually qualifies for the bounty.
As I mentioned earlier, there were a couple of teams disqualified for not actually integrating ENS. However, if they would had spoken to us earlier, we could have advised them on what they could do to qualify.
2) Use us as a pitching practice
Sponsor pitching is done at a scheduled pitch time. At ETHNewYork, the team Takoyaki came at the very beginning so that they could practice their pitch with us.
In general, it is a great promotion to sponsoring companies if your hacks which feature their products get into one of finalists, so sponsors can give lots of great advice to help you win. We hope the advice Chris and I gave made a little bit of contribution for the team Takoyaki got into the final 5 teams.
And the ENS prize winners from ETHNewYork are….
1inch exchange
1inch exchange is a great Price Token Swap Aggregator. The name was inspired from Bruce Lee’s 1 inch punch.
He is one person who originally came with a wrong assumption about what ENS integration meant, but listened to our advice so that he ended up integrating properly by displaying a logged-in user’s ENS name with reverse resolution.
Authereum
Authereum brings the simplicity of Web2.0 logins to Ethereum dapps. By removing addresses, constant signing, and adding a server-side firewall, users can interact with Ethereum in the same way they would with any other website. To demonstrate the power of easy on-boarding, they actually forked Kickback (event management app used during ETHNewYork) and integrated on Rinkeby which was mind blowing for me (I also run Kickback).
Their integration was to use ENS as a login name. They deployed their solution in Kovan for Wyre integration but ENS didn’t exist on Ropsten network, so they ended up deploying ENS contracts on their own.
Takoyaki
Takoyaki makes ENS registration easy by letting you register an ENS name with only a single signed transaction, while still properly having a complete commit/reveal period. It does this by using a technique called one-time keyless transactions. It also makes the registration fun by showing cute Takoyaki (Japanese pancake with Octopus) animation being bone. It resembles the birth of CryptoKitties, and it makes perfect sense as all new ENS names are now ERC 721 non fungible token compliant!
Last (but not least) is that it bootstraps a RandDAO-like random-number generator, using the ENS commit-reveals. Creating random numbers are vital on games, NFT minting, gamblings, etc, and this gives people even more reason to buy ENS name as a way to generate uniqueness.
And congratulations for being selected as one of top finalists!
Nacho files
Nacho Files is a decentralized IPFS file tracker, and they used ENS’s reverse record to show the file owner name. The solution is perfectly fine to qualify to our prize, but if they could have set the IPFS hash into ENS contenthash, that could have been even more awesome. Having said that, their demo was very slick!
Storgate
sTorGate opens the portal to the Tor network! Register your hidden service .onion address on the ENS, use Metamask to explore Tor directly from your search bar, or just use their search engine.
It’s worth noting that they raised PR to both Metamask and ENS manager, which is amazing!
***
We totally enjoyed participating the hackathon and being able to see so many jaw-droppingly amazing hacks!
To integrate ENS into your dapp, see our documentation.
