Build the next killer app: Registration is still open for sCrypt Hackathon 2024

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The sCrypt Hackathon 2024 is open for developers to register and compete to find Bitcoin’s true “killer app.” There are monetary prizes for the winners at the event, but the real reward would come from discovering and then building a blockchain solution that onboards thousands (or millions) of average users. If you’re a developer looking for the right moment to get involved, head over to sCrypt and sign up.

sCrypt just completed a two-day introductory event in San Francisco that was full of inspiration and ideas for Hackathon participants. Co-Founder Xiaohui Liu highlighted the generational gap in blockchain between developers wanting to build large-scale enterprise-tier apps attractive to the VC world and those with more radical ideas about tokens and all-digital lives that were often hard for the tech world’s “boomers” to grasp. That gap isn’t as wide as some think, and there’s even a lot of overlap. Blockchain provides opportunities for everyone to test their ideas.

The CoinGeek YouTube channel has complete recordings of all San Francisco presentations for those wanting to watch them. But it’s important to note that this was just the introduction—the main component, and the Hackathon itself, is a one-month online event that takes place from March 25 to April 25, 2024. Registrations for the Hackathon are free and still open.

The Hackathon theme “revolves around merging sCrypt (Bitcoin smart contracts) with Ordinals (Bitcoin tokens) to pioneer innovative solutions in the blockchain space.”

Ordinals—tokens registered by inscribing unique data on single Bitcoin satoshi units—generated a lot of online buzz in 2023-24 for both BSV and BTC. BSV blockchain’s
1SatOrdinals protocol makes these tokens far cheaper and easier to create, inscribe, and keep track of. sCrypt’s contract layer and Ordinals SDK make them even more versatile.

Speaking to CoinGeek, Xiaohui Liu seemed happy to shift the focus back to the building and tinkering with blockchain technology following months of 24-hour non-stop spaces tracking COPA-related courtroom distractions and drama. None of this affected the way the tech works and ultimately built nothing.

“It could be the turning point where we shift our focus from law/legal to tech,” he said. “Imagine if we spent as much time (developing) as people did on COPA.”

In his San Francisco presentation, Liu described sCrypt as a “platform layer” for blockchain, similar to operating systems like Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS or cloud computing backbones like AWS. Developers build apps on these platform layers and need to exploit their unique advantages. Just as mobile phones put GPS, touchscreens, accelerators, and cameras in everyone’s pocket, blockchain makes micropayments, smart contracts, tokens, timestamping, and data immutability available to build apps with.

Taking advantage of mobile phone features, devs could build new games and other interactive experiences that had never been possible on desktop machines. Suddenly, the general public could move around, swipe, and create more immediate multimedia content—inspiring new waves of creativity for app builders and their users. Blockchain features are still mostly just words on a page. It’s the app builders who need to show people what they really mean.

“Think about how you can combine the unique features,” Liu said. “You’ll have to guess. It’s probably not going to take just one iteration.”

Also of interest to devs were the “overlays vs. indexers” discussions (also available on YouTube). With unbounded blockchain scaling and massive amounts of data, there must be some way to query it and retrieve relevant information. Big data blockchain needs a new kind of search engine, and a definitive solution has not yet been found.

Visit sCrypt’s website here to register and read the Hackathon rules. You’ll also find links to sCrypt’s most active discussion groups.

Watch: sCrypt makes smart contracts possible on the BSV blockchain