Highlighting the Chainlink Spring 2023 Hackathon SxT Winners

Earlier this year, Space and Time supported our partners at Chainlink by offering $25,000 in bounties for the Spring 2023 Hackathon. We were inspired by the creativity and innovation of the 98 submitting projects and are excited to announce those awarded Space and Time bounties.

This blog post contains project descriptions adapted from content authored by the submitting teams.

Grand Prize ($15,000): Fractional Ownership for Gold Claims by Instruxi

ION.au Gold Digitization is a result of a strategic partnership between Instruxi, a new Web3 solution design firm, and ION Digital Corp (OTC: IONI), an industry leader in precious metal digitization, tokenization, and securitization. Together, they are revolutionizing the way unmined, unrefined, and refined gold is owned and traded.

Generally speaking, the tooling provided in this project submission provides a robust, semi-autonomous, and transparent approach to building fractional ownership schemes for real world assets. They demonstrate the end-to-end process for digitizing, tokenizing, and ultimately fractionalizing one of ION Digital’s gold claims. A gold claim refers to a legal right or entitlement to possess and exploit a specific area of land for the purpose of extracting gold or other valuable minerals. Thus, a gold claim has a value correlated to the amount of in situ gold in that plot of land. The toolkit makes use of Chainlink Functions enabled smart contracts on Avalanche, the Space and Time decentralized data warehouse, Storj object storage, and Cloudflare workers.

Using this solution, gold claim bearers such as ION Digital, digitize their gold reserves by representing claims as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These NFTs serve as digital certificates of ownership for a specific, validated, and assessed amount of gold. Investors can participate by buying fractionalized ownership of these NFTs and the ION Gold Digitization utility facilitates the fractionalization process, allowing investors to acquire ERC20 tokens that represent a fraction of the underlying gold asset. These ERC20 tokens can then be easily traded, providing liquidity and flexibility for investors.

You can read more about the project here.

Best Integration ($5,000): Card.Club

Web2 companies that specialize in memorizing tools/flashcards use data to paywall students, which creates an extra barrier for students with low-income. With the current AI improvements of ChatGPT and other LLMs, this team decided to build a platform that rewards the creators without charging students.

In order to make the platform free, they had to devise a way to cover maintenance costs and reward creators that produce excellent flashcard decks for the platform. Instead of relying on traditional advertising, they used Chainlink Functions and Space and Time to build Web3 cryptographically verified analytics that guarantee honest advertising.

You can read more about the project here.

Most Creative ($1,000)

ChainlinkGPT

Developers need an easy and secure way to interact with the Chainlink ecosystem. ChatGPT is the perfect solution, allowing developers to make calls to Functions contracts, manage subscriptions, and use the Space and Time data warehouse to index blockchain data. With the plugin, developers can now quickly build secure, reliable and efficient projects with just a few clicks! Chainlink ChatGPT is a revolutionary chatbot that was built using the power of Chainlink. The project has an express server for the ChatGPT plugin, and a client for running state change transactions. By leveraging viem, it ensures that wallet transactions run smoothly.

You can read more about the project here.

AI:1301

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was and continues to be a strong fascination of many intelligent people. There is, however, an ever growing major problem in the field since all of the innovation is controlled by a small group of powerful companies. The world needs to have an enormous number of dedicated, focused, and incentivized people which will contribute to humanity's well being. In order to achieve this, AI:1301 provides an economic incentive as well as an open and fair playing field for everyone.

Most AI models are based on Machine / Deep Learning (ML/DL) architectures that require large scale datasets in order to effectively train them. Coming by such datasets is a rare opportunity since companies have no interest in openly sharing them, while the infrastructure for performing the training/validation/testing of models is also centralized.

To combat this, AI:1301 creates a completely on-chain game of Football where AI models operate as the brains of opposing football teams. They position individual players and issue commands to pass the ball or take a shot. Since all of the blockchain data is open to the public, anyone can gather all of the data from previous matches. This can be used for a thorough analysis of the game, as well as for the experimentation with and the creation of powerful new AI models.

You can read more about the project here.

Island of Space and Time

This project strived to take Web3 gaming out of the browser and into a format many gamers expect: standalone apps downloaded from a marketplace and played locally. Rather than web wallets, embedded keystores on the game's backend would handle players' connection to the blockchain, and instead of game servers, decentralized storage platforms and databases would allow players to share a game world they create together.

This team built the Island of Space and Time with these ideas in mind, using a SxT table to store images that players have generated using artificial intelligence. Controlling the rules of this interaction is a smart contract, which restricts the kinds of queries that can be made to the AI image generator, and which holds various pieces of information that affect the off-chain game world. Player keys are generated by the game and used to sign transactions when certain in-game events are triggered.

You can read more about the project here.

Kash

Cashless technology is an electronic payment system utilizing specific technologies and software. It allows users to load funds onto a chip, typically integrated into a wristband provided upon event entry. This eliminates the need for cash, as users can simply recharge the wristband via card payments, contributing to a cashless society. However, this technology is solely utilized for events and festivals, limiting users' ability to recharge or employ it as a payment method across other platforms. Moreover, losing the device carrying the balance poses a risk, and the plastic waste generated by cashless solutions also impacts the environment.

Kash allows users to load money into their account through debit or credit card payments and store it in their personal wallet. In addition, unlike other systems, the balance in Kash does not expire, allowing users to reuse it for future events or reload it as needed. The solution is not only limited to end users; merchants and event organizers are also very important. With Kash, they will be able to obtain detailed analysis of each event, accessing information about the transactions made by users, realtime statistics per event, and a complete history of Kash usage in different periods of time.

Zenith

Zenith is a decentralized advertising platform that connects advertisers and publishers through smart contracts, eliminating the need for middlemen. Advertisers enjoy secure, verifiable transactions, while publishers are rewarded fairly for their user engagement.

To create a campaign, the advertiser needs to provide the budget (which will be transferred to the smart contract) and a base cost per click. This base cost per click will be used for the ad bidding auction as well as deciding the cost of an ad click. Campaign metadata like name, description, url and created_time are stored in Space and Time (SxT) tables. A SxT identifier to this metadata is returned which is stored in the smart contract. The advertiser can enable or disable a campaign at any time.

You can read more about the project here.

Closing thoughts

We were blown away by the quality and creativity of every project built on Space and Time throughout the Spring 2023 Chainlink Hackathon. We look forward to engaging with the community in future hackathons and seeing more incredible use cases leveraging Space and Time and Chainlink. Congratulations to the winners!