Web3athon, an annual hackathon event hosted by CoinDesk with partners Alchemy University and HackerEarth, has announced its latest cohort of winners. Six teams building in five blockchain ecosystems will take home over $200,000 in grants to help fund further protocol development.
With over 6,400 participants, the winners were selected from over 160 final submissions. The winning projects addressed a wide range of needs around protocol infrastructure and applications, including network privacy, zero-code development and e-commerce. Nearly half of applicants were building on Solana and XDC, with the next most popular networks being Polkadot and the Ethereum and Cosmos-compatible OKT Chain .
“I didn't go into Web3athon expecting to win a prize. Instead, I used it as a deadline and motivation to get the first version developed,” Hale said. Built on Cosmos-based OKT Chain, Obsidian uses elliptic-curve cryptography and other cryptographic techniques that will enable users to send ERC20 tokens, perhaps the most popular token-type on Ethereum, with discretion.
– one of the largest multi-chain networks – in Rust, a programming language used widely outside the world of crypto. ZK proofs are a type of privacy-preserving cryptography that crypto developers push to theoretical limits for use in blockchain scaling and security.