Three individuals, Attila Aros, Luke Rohenaz and Austin Rappaport, saw the potential for huge, disruptive change in Bitcoin SV (BSV). Thanks to the first ever BSV Hackathon, they are now a team with an application, with all-expenses paid tickets to attend the CoinGeek Toronto scaling conference as competition finalists.
The TonicPow team joins Polygot and UptimeSV as the three finalists of the Bitcoin Association’s first ever BSV Hackathon. They got there by beating out over 200 entrants from 19 countries, and faced stiff, but friendly competition.
The three team members came to Bitcoin in very different ways. Aros always knew there was potential in it, and wants to achieve things with programmable money that haven’t been possible before. “My dream has been to build a profitable business that increases Bitcoin adoption,” he said. “I’ve learned recently that Bitcoin has more than everything needed for massive scale and the potential is limited by only my imagination.”
Rohenaz (a.k.a Satchmo) fell in love with Bitcoin early, but was unimpressed with its constrained block sizes. That changed when Bitcoin was finally allowed to start scaling again. “I had a lot of ideas, but the network wouldn’t allow for the things I had in mind at that time,” he explained. “It wasn’t until after the first fork that I really dove into building on Bitcoin. A lot has changed since then, and BSV is now in a place where those crazy Ideas are beginning to come to life. It’s amazing to finally see it happening and I’m happy to be a part of it.”
Rappaport (a.k.a. MrZ) wasn’t impressed at all by Bitcoin originally, but then he realized that Bitcoin wasn’t the problem. “After lots of research I realized that I wasn’t a fan of Bitcoin Core,” he explained. “In the past months since the necessary BSV fork, there’s been a plethora of development in Bitcoin, more than many other chains. My personal mission is to help people in poverty create and own value easily using the rudimentary tools they already have.”
They weren’t a team before the Hackathon was announced. Rappaport and Rohenaz were on the same engineering team, and Aros had collaborated with Rohenaz on a few projects. When the competition was announced, they agreed to form a team of three and start planning TonicPow.
TonicPow disrupts internet advertising in a way that was previously impossible, but is quite easy to understand. “TonicPow is a peer to peer advertising platform that allows you to earn Bitcoin with your website,” Aros explains. “A website owner reserves a spot on their website by embedding a line of code. Advertisers can then pay to book a spot to display an ad to promote their product or service.”
This provides an easy to use service for advertisers, a profit stream of websites, and achieves the onboarding goal of the hackathon by making BSV implementation easier for website developers. “Our ultimate goal is to create a better advertising network that is more open, transparent and profitable than the legacy advertising systems,” said Aros.
These Tonics are easily implemented, and an easy pitch as well. Aros offered the following pitch:
“Earn Bitcoin (SV) directly with your website. Embed one line of code into your website and allow advertisers to promote their product or service in exchange for paying you in Bitcoin.
“With TonicPow, a website owner can get started in a couple of minutes and start receiving Bitcoin payments immediately.”
They weren’t the only finalist though, and they were impressed by the work of many other projects in the competition. “We were excited to see MetaVibe,” the team said. “It is similar to a concept we had talked about when developing MAP protocol, so it was really cool to see that one and they did a great job with it. “
They were also excited to see UptimeSV, the crowd computing application. “It provides a simple and powerful way for people to earn Bitcoin by contributing their computer’s network resources,” they explained.
This isn’t the only project the team is working on. They’ve also got BitIndex, a Bitcoin Blockchain API for developers, progressing nicely. “I originally designed it for myself to have a reliable and scalable API for my other applications,” Aros said. “It turns out that many application developers are using it to power their Bitcoin SV applications. It includes features like a full REST Insight API, Javascript SDK, and also payment notifications.”
The team also has the All Aboard BSV onboarding site. “Developers can create private Bitcoin “faucets”, which are pools of funds that can be tapped to write transactions on behalf of the user,” he explained. “The user doesn’t even need to know they are using Bitcoin. MetaLens was created as a demo to showcase the power of the faucet API. Users can interact with Metalens for free because it is backed by a faucet.”
The team doesn’t plan to waste their finalist prize; whatever they win, it will be re-invested quickly. “We have an aggressive roadmap and this helps us bootstrap the next phase of the roadmap,” Aros said. “The old advertising model is ready for disruption and we are working towards our vision to make it a reality.”
They’ll find out what the finalist judges think of their work at the CoinGeek Toronto scaling conference, held at the Carlu in Toronto between May 29 and 30. Registering will get you into the crowd that helps decide the hackathon grand prize, and you’ll also get to attend a historic Fireside chat with Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen and Satoshi Nakamoto himself, Dr. Craig Wright.
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