A few weeks ago we hosted a 10-day virtual hackathon with teams already building in the Nervos ecosystem, including LeapDAO, SECBIT Labs, NerBRos, GrowFi, and Rebase.
We were very impressed with all of the projects, but ultimately only three teams could be named the winners.
- 1st Place: SECBIT team for Clover protocol, a lightweight zkRollup approach for Nervous CKB
- 2nd Place: NerBRos team for Pictosis, a NFT auction marketplace on Nervos
- 3rd Place: LeapDAO for Spin-DeFi, borrowing and lending CKB on Nervos
To get the story and process behind these incredible projects, we talked with the teams about how they came up with their ideas, using the Nervos development tools, and their plans for their prototypes.
Q&A with SECBIT
- Tell us a little bit more about your team.
SECBIT Labs aims to build high-confidence and trustworthy protocols, applications, and facilities on the blockchain and focuses on the research of formal verification, practices of zero-knowledge proofs (zkps), and blockchain security. Five of our team members participated in the hackathon.
2. How did you come up with the idea for your hackathon submission?
We’ve focused on the research and practice of zkps for a long time. Recently we discovered a new technology called aSVC (aggregatable subvector commitment) for stateless cryptocurrencies. It can aggregate multiple proofs into a single, small subvector proof. We thought about whether we could use it to implement a zkRollup scheme.
3. Tell us a little bit more about your project.
The project originated from exploring an aSVC, and it’s also the starting point for us to explore Layer 2 solutions privacy payments based on zkps. For the next step, we’ll continue to improve the current scheme for better performance, stronger practicality and higher security. We will also be working on more rollup solutions, such as Merkle tree, etc.
4. Why do you think aSVC is significant for zk rollups?
For one, aSVC can aggregate multiple proofs into a single, small subvector proof. It’s also very simple to verify.
5. What are the immediate opportunities you see for your prototype?
The need for Layer 2 scaling is the most urgent need. It is also an inevitable need for the development of blockchain. Our projects can be used directly for Layer 2 payments, transfers, and other scenarios.
Learn more about SECBIT Labs:
Website | GitHub | Twitter | Medium | Zhihu
Q&A with NerBRos
- Tell us a little bit more about your team.
We are all strong believers in the unrealized potential of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We also have a deep respect for the creative process and creative communities and wish to use our respective backgrounds to build a system and platform that provides new ways to express, engage, and earn as a creative contributor. Our founding team has a strong set of complementary skill sets in design, web3 ecosystem, and blockchain engineering.
2. How did you come up with the idea for your hackathon submission?
The idea came naturally since we had been researching and testing blockchain infrastructure that could provide unique capabilities/features such as scalability, real data ownership, and interoperability. We found all of this was part of the core infrastructure design of Nervos CKB. So we decided to take the invitation to participate in the NervosHack, use the CKB agnostic dev tools and continue building the NFT playground to give back real empowerment and value to the design and crypto art ecosystem.
3. Tell us a little bit more about your project.
We are a crowdsourcing design platform and open ecosystem where thousands of talented people from around the world solve creative tasks based on a briefing to get paid and rewarded for their outstanding work & community engagement.
And now we’re building a creative NFT playground for design and crypto art on top of the Nervos blockchain.
4. What was your experience using the Nervos dev tools?
The Nervos Dev tools provided useful abstractions over CKB primitives, as well as workflows. Capsule and its libraries, especially the higher level abstractions over system calls, made it manageable to translate our workflows into verification scripts. The fully-featured testing framework within Capsule was also wonderful to use. The fact that a developer can set up a context of a pre-deployed state somewhat declaratively made it easy to customize the granularity of different tests, which was indispensable.
5. What opportunity do you see for Nervos and NFTs?
The main opportunity we see is having interoperable NFTs to create ecosystem bridges for a real decentralized experience, and as we continue to develop the NFTs standards and smart contracts we are more convinced that Nervos is the supernova network for the NFT space. The Cell (generalized UTXO) Model solves most of the issues that crypto-artists and collectors currently encounter on the popular blockchains. For example, crypto-artists won’t have to wait for exorbitant gas prices to go down in order to mint and post their art on the marketplace.
6. Will you keep exploring or developing your prototype from the hackathon?
Yes, we are building Pictosis NFT Playground all the way. Keep an eye on our communication channels for upcoming announcements.
Learn more about NerBRos and Pictosis:
Website | Twitter | Telegram | Instagram | Medium | Facebook
Q&A with LeapDao
- Tell us a little bit more about your team.
The team was a subset of the LeapDAO team working on the Nervos Grant.
Johann was the master of the system architectural design tasked with translating the hackathon idea into actionable work.
Jan was the resident expert of the Capsule dev tool and led the development of scripts for the Nervos Network.
Lastly, Joseph led frontend development and integration using the Lumos [dev tool].
2. How did you come up with the idea for your hackathon submission?
The idea came as a result of seeking to grow the ecosystem with something new and unique in Nervos Network. We also wanted an idea that would introduce some challenges that would grow the team’s skill set. The learnings would translate to better deliveries in our grant work.
3. Tell us a little bit more about your project.
Spin-DeFi, as the project was named, borrows from Compound’s protocol design. Spin-DeFi provides a token market with algorithmically set interest rates, allowing users to lend and borrow blockchain assets.
People that have a surplus of assets can lend to people that don’t have the asset, but have a productive or investment use for it. This creates value and introduces the ability to short assets, providing better price discovery and less volatility to the ecosystem.
4. How was the experience using the Nervos dev tools?
The experience was good with a bit of a learning curve. The dev tools are well documented, and the support provided by its creators was on point.
5. Did you encounter any challenges?
We spent a lot of time doing design work to ensure our project fit the Cell Model. With this we were able to have the supply of assets ready for a demo. Some of the notable challenges were:
- Minting sUDT tokens via script and having ownership of the sUDT be attributed to the script.
- Implementing a state identity to protect sUDT minting.
- Our design limited us to a single transaction per block (without external coordination).
6. We know building on Nervos is a different experience. What challenges and opportunities do you see for DeFi on CKB?
Right now, the limit in the Nervos DeFi space is lack of readily available price oracles.* The ecosystem still lacks enough tokens and liquidity providers for a healthy DeFi project to thrive.
However, one of the opportunities is that incentives in the space can easily be integrated with a secondary offering of CKB through the DAO.
Learn more about LeapDAO:
*Nervos is currently working with Chainlink and Band Protocol to bring oracles to the ecosystem. Stay tuned for updates on our progress!
For more information on the hackathon, check out our recap.
Read our co-founder Kevin Wang’s thoughts on the future of DeFi.
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