Introducing the winning teams from ETHOnline
By: Christina Norgard Rud
Tags: Data Visualization, Derivatives, Crypto, Hackathons

We sponsored our very first hackathon this year, and it had to be no other than ETHOnline! It was a great month, loaded with interesting deep-dive sessions and teams from around the world coming together to pitch and build projects.

We were especially excited to see hackers interact with the Vega protocol, and take on the challenge we set to come up with innovative, useful and whimsical ways of visualising testnet trading and market data emitted from the Vega blockchain. Given the first integration with the Vega blockchain will be with Ethereum, we were eager to see what such a creative community could imagine up with data from Vega.

Even if you didn’t take part, you still can catch up on what we shared with the participants. During the course of the summit, Barney introduced Vega to the ETHOnline community, hosted a workshop on how to get set up with the APIs, and hosted a live AMA 👇

Since Vega is a trading-specific blockchain and all derivatives trading data is fully transparent and live (a stark contrast to existing marketplaces), there’s no reason to stick with traditional, delayed and pigeonholed data feeds. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for visualising risk, capital flows, trading PnL, market opportunities and so much more. When choosing the winners, we looked just as much for creative solutions as informative ones. Maxing out the prize allocation pool of $5000, we offered $3000 to the winner, $1500 to the runner-up, and $500 to third place.

The winning project was … 🥁

Vega Markets Explorer! It’s a blockchain explorer that focuses on exposing information particularly useful for traders, created by Bitcoin Bill. Using GraphQL, the application shows the whales, top and bottom 25 traders by PnL, and really awesome liquidation charts across three of the markets on the Vega testnet.

When asked why he chose Vega’s challenge Bitcoin Bill said..

“The fact that Vega operates as a pseudonymous decentralised network means that the entirety of information about activity on Vega markets is publicly available to everybody. This should serve to level the playing field in markets in the long run, where typically today large institutions are constantly looking for ways to access data that leads to an information advantage over the average market participant. Vega opens up a wide spectrum of game theoretical possibilities when you consider that nobody trading on Vega will have an information advantage over anybody else at the microstructure level of the market. I find this to be a fascinating concept, and wanted to build a tool that highlighted the fact that this information is available and can potentially be used to inform trading decisions in a way that is not currently possible on other centralised exchanges (or even DEX-based AMM marketplaces) today.”

In second place…

Darth Vega! A self-described doubtful art project by Charlie Morris and Andrey Petrov, it shows live trades happening through Vega both visually and sonically. Set to the Imperial March from Star Wars, trades from Vega fly by, and you can see if they’re sells or buys, as well as the number of trades per block.

I also asked the team behind Darth Vega to comment on their experience working with Vega to which they said: “We enjoyed working with the Vega API and the creative freedom that the Vega team encouraged. Looking forward to mainnet going live.”

And in third place…

Blockhead! A decentralised wallet manager and DeFi interface using Ethereum, Vega, Compound, Chainlink, and Pocket Networks amongst others. The interface lets you build a local portfolio, trade, and explore various DeFi protocols. It’s very cool to see all the options this interface offers.

Overall, it was a fantastic event to be part of and we’re looking forward to participating in more hackathons, and seeing what other creative and inspiring projects people build to interact with Vega. If you have any ideas of something you’d like to build with Vega, or any questions come hang out in the Vega Discord.