Meet the 2023 NEARCON IRL Hackathon Winners
NEAR FOUNDATION
November 22, 2023
The wait is over! After a week of intense, dedicated work from the NEARCON hackathon judges, the winners of the 2023 NEARCON IRL Hackathon have been chosen. 

For the NEARCON IRL Hackathon, DevHub issued travel stipends to the most experienced hackers from all around the world. From Brazil and Canada to Spain, the UK, and beyond, the best builders traveled to NEARCON to celebrate NEAR’s global ecosystem. Those hackers who choose to stick around and keep building on NEAR will be eligible to apply to NEAR Horizon’s pre-acceleration program or the accelerator itself.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the amazing projects that were built on NEAR. 

Developers Track Winner: Quex
Quex is an AI-powered NEAR Grant program treasury. A smart contract can automatically fund a project if a pre-configured ChatGPT concludes that it will satisfy the grant program criteria.

“The idea of a fully autonomous AI-controlled treasury captivated our imagination. We envisioned a system where AI, not humans, would have the sole discretion over the allocation of funds, paving the way for an unbiased and efficient distribution of resources,” wrote Quex developers Dmitry Meshkov (3x) and Alejandro V. Betancourt (Biz Dev, Metapool / Co-founder NEAR Misfits). 

“We aim to achieve the fully autonomous and secure DAO — even being the developers of this DAO, we should not be able to fund our own project until we get a ‘funded’ response from AI, and we’re not able to censor transactions to fund projects good enough from the chosen AI point of view.”

More details on Quex. 

Entrepreneurs Track Winner: ClickDapp
ClickDapp, a B.O.S-powered no-code tool to easily create, customize, and deploy dApps, was the winning project for the NEARCON IRL Hackathon’s Entrepreneurs Track. 

“ClickDapp was inspired by how easy it is to start a Web 2 company,” said developers João Veiga, Pedro Destri, and Rafaeldkb Borges. “No-code tooling empowers a set of different players, from devs to PMs, to entrepreneurs, allowing them to create and iterate on their products with zero to no difficulty, low cost, and faster development speeds.”

“ClickDapp is a no-code builder connected to the Near BOS library, giving devs, PMs and entrepreneurs the superpower of building entire blockchain applications and products without writing a single line of code.”

More details on ClickDapp.

Creators Track Winner: B4B 
An influencer-marketing protocol for Near Social Graph, B4B collects on-chain data about channel activity and enables the amplification of new and existing projects in certain NEAR communities.

“We have built a protocol that simplifies searching, analyzing, and managing influencer marketing through Near Social Graph,” said developers Anton Pecherkin, Ann Chuhnina, Gregory Melnikov, and Aleksandr Sokolov. “Additionally, it provides new monetization opportunities for content creators and influencers in the ecosystem.”

“B4B is a Web3-native influencer ad network that connects advertisers with influencers willing to create and publish ads on their channels. The B4B protocol protects advertisers and influencers by escrowing the budget and maintaining a transparent history of ad orders owned by users. During the NEARHACK, we connected the protocol with the Near Social Graph.”

More details on B4B

Regulators Track Winner: Proof-of-Reputation
Proof-of-Reputation is a mechanism that enables any user to get a loan using their on-chain activity as collateral and accomplishing the regulator’s requirement. In other words, it’s a simple, on-chain, and transparent loan protocol for underbanked regions. 

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of many economies. Still, they often face challenges in accessing loans — this is especially true in underbanked regions, where people may not have access to traditional banking services,” said the developers Luis Daniel Mendez Castellanos, Irving Yair Nava Hernández, and Alan Estrada. 

“Avoid complicated, bureaucratic, and lengthy loan application processes. All tracking is done on-chain using a Soul Bond Token,” explain the developers. “If necessary, complete anti-money laundering (AML) procedures by completing quests for proof of identity, proof of citizenship, and other requirements provided by third parties. Allow anyone in regions with limited access to banking services to get a loan.”

More details on Proof-of-Reputation.

Pitch Competition Winner: DeFi Builder
Using AI, DeFi Builder allows users to effortlessly launch powerful DeFi projects without coding. Its intuitive code-less tools unlock the doors to the next DeFi entrepreneurs on NEAR and Aurora.

“For the NEAR hackathon, we introduced an innovative feature: the AI Smart Contract Generator,” said its developers  Ravi Rasadiya, Alexe Spataru, Lorenzo Castagnone, and Daniel Morosan. “Utilizing the latest AI technology — which has been trained and fine-tuned on NEAR Rust smart contracts, JavaScript smart contracts, and Aurora EVM smart contracts — NEARAI can generate a variety of smart contracts tailored to the user’s specific requests.”

“The platform’s design focuses on automating complex processes like smart contract deployment, while offering integration across various blockchain networks, thus streamlining the journey from concept to market-ready DeFi project.”

More details on DeFi Builder.

Main Track Winners
Three winners took home prizes for the NEARCON IRL Hackathon Main Track. 

1st Prize — Obrigado
Obrigado allows seamless execution of heavy computational tasks, distributed across multiple computational resource providers.

“NEAR is aiming to be the OS for an open web with the on-chain frontend (B.O.S) and backend (WASM/zkWASM),” said the developers William S, João Vasco Pestana, Igor Perić, Souheila Sidennas, and Hojay Lee. “The missing piece is a way to process heavy computes such as training a LLM or analyzing DNA data.”

“Obrigado will allow seamless execution of heavy computational tasks, distributed across multiple computational resource providers (Task Runners), ensuring efficient processing and integrity of results, all within NEAR. Computing happens off-chain and book-keeping like job queue handling, result validation, node reputation, slashing and balances happen on-chain.”

More details on Obrigado. 

2nd Prize — Magic Build
Magic Build is a powerful tool designed to streamline the process of generating front-end interfaces for smart contracts on the B.O.S. It will help developers on B.O.S to deploy products faster without coding. 

“Our B.O.S Composer is a tool that helps create widget connections within the BOS ecosystem. It enables infinite scalability of nested widgets, increasing the depth and resource utilization of a website,” said the developers Hai N and Kuro Denjiro. “With B.O.S Composer, you can create multiple pages, export them as widgets, and then select and link these widgets together.” 

“Magic Build also supports horizontal widget connections through the “self customize” section, where you can input the URL of a widget, export it, and import it to establish connections with other widgets. B.O.S Composer simplifies the process of creating widget connections, enabling the creation of intricate and resource-rich web experiences within the B.O.S ecosystem.

More details on Magic Build.

3rd Prize — Web3 Plugin
A web3.jd plugin for NEAR Protocol and its ecosystem, Web3 Plugin provides the functionality of near-api-js but in the web3.js style.

“Developers who already use web3.js can quickly start working with NEAR technology with fewer things to read and learn,” said the developer, Muhammad Altabba. “All they need to do is provide the web3.js library with a link to a NEAR provider, add it with the plugin, then they can start working just like they are used to. Even though there will be slight differences that they’ll have to adjust for, we do our best to reduce them to the minimum.”

More details on Web3 Plugin.

Thanks for joining the NEARCON IRL Hackathon
Thanks to all of the participants who joined the NEARCON ‘23 hackathon! As you can see from the winners, there was no shortage of great, cutting edge projects built on NEAR. The NEAR community and ecosystem are strong and creative because of each and every project like yours. 

A big thank you as well to the NEARCON IRL Hackathon judges: Max Zavershynskyi (Leader, NEAR DevHub), Eric Winer (CTO, Pagoda), Alex Shevchenko (CEO, Aurora), Nate Geier (CEO, Mintbase), Laura Cunningham (General Manager, NEAR Horizon), Samantha Bohbot (Chief Growth Officer, RockawayX), Oleg Fomenko (Co-founder, Sweat Economy), Bowen Wang(Head of Protocol, Pagoda), Sandi Fatic (Co-founder, Calimero Network), Joe Spano (Co-Founder, ShardDog), MJ (Head of Product, Proximity Labs), and Diogo Monica (Founder, Anchorage Digital). 

The NEAR Foundation and the entire NEAR community looks forward to you participating in the hackathon at NEARCON ‘24! 

Keep hacking and building on NEAR.