Sino x Arweave Hackathon In The Works?
It seems that Matthew Graham, CEO at Sino Global Capital, is teasing an Arweave hackathon via his Twitter account.
Sino Arweave hackathon?
— Matthew Graham (@mattysino) January 23, 2022
A hackathon can be seen as an event in which participants – including developers, designers, creators and other people involved in the industry – aim to build the best new use cases for the tech at hand, in this case Arweave.
Hackathons usually involve nice incentives for anyone involved, from monetary prizes all the way to exposure to other people in the industry. This exposure could mean individuals landing a role they wanted within an existing project, lead to fresh collaborations between projects, or even give birth to a new project altogether.
Sino Global Capital prides itself in helping the best blockchain and digital asset companies enter the Asian markets. Amongst the things they offer the companies they are invested in are product localisation and translation, formation of Asian contacts channels as well as helping with the tokenomics design of those companies.
They offer strategic investment to a wide portfolio of known companies in the blockchain world.
Some of their existing investments include:
- FTX – A cryptocurrency derivatives exchange.
- Solana – A high performance blockchain.
- Serum – A Decentralised Exchange built on Solana.
- Polygon – Best known as the leading Ethereum Layer 2 solution.
Graham also recently tweeted about Solana and Metaplex, noting them as Sino’s latest portfolio project:
Sino's newest portfolio project. Fired up to be involved! #SolanaNFTs with @Metaplex are the future. https://t.co/6JCkBPLZRt
— Matthew Graham (@mattysino) January 18, 2022
Solana and Metaplex are highly linked to Arweave – Solana backs up its entire ledger of transactions to Arweave, and Metaplex is a suite of open source tools built on Solana for use by NFT developers and creators. One of Metaplex’s major NFT creating tools is called The Candy Machine, which uploads all the creator’s NFT assets directly to Arweave. It’s worth noting that with Metaplex you can use your Solana wallet (e.g. Phantom) to upload to Arweave using SOL tokens – the native Solana utility token.
Graham’s tweet caught the attention of many important figures in the Arweave ecosystem, including Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, who replied to Graham’s tweet, simply saying:
Let's do it!
— 🐘🔗 sam.arweave.dev (@samecwilliams) January 23, 2022
Other Arweave figures that replied included Tate Berenbaum (Founder of Verto Exchange), ArDrive, Bundlr and Redstone Finance.
With such high profile figures interested, could this hackathon be inevitable? If the hackathon goes ahead we could see a large sudden growth spurt in projects that are involved in the Arweave ecosystem. Seeing as hackathons usually involve large sums of money as prizes for the winners, it could also help grab the attention of new developers looking to enter the Arweave and web3 development world.
Past Hackathons
Arweave is no stranger to hackathons. The Arweave Open Web Foundry (OWF) hosts hackathons from time to time and the result is a number of successful projects emerging from them. You can check out all the previous winners of Hackathons held by Arweave’s OWF by going to their profile on Gitcoin.co here.
One project that managed to get funding through the hackathon was ArDrive. ArDrive is a storage solution with its own file system called ArFS built on Arweave. ArDrive were part of the original Open Web Foundry hackathon – known then as Open Web Incubator. As a result they were able to get a funding amount of $50k from angel investors.
Other projects that have successfully managed to get funded include:
- Evermore – A storage solution for Arweave that also makes NFT creation simple.
- Weve – An email client that allows you to send messages to anyone with an Arweave wallet address.
- Rawrshak – Making NFTs cross chain with all assets built on Arweave.
Via the OWF, developers are able to get their ideas off the ground. The OWF has so far helped supply roughly $20m in funding to projects. It usually offers a set amount of funding, but then there are also third party investors that can jump in to supplement the funding.
In the case of Sino holding a Hackathon with Arweave, it might involve Sino offering a fixed amount for the winning projects that build on Arweave. All in all, if you are a developer with an idea for something that can be built on Arweave, a hackathon is one way to jumpstart it.
We look forward to seeing how this plays out.
