ParaDAO Wins $5000 Zeitgeist Bounty

Zeitgeist is proud to take part in the 2022 Polkadot Global Hackathon series, with the North American edition happening between 30 May and 12 July 2022. Parachains on Kusama and Polkadot came together and posted bounties for some really neat solutions that proved challenging and intriguing for participants, no matter their engineering experience.

This edition saw no less than 46 winners out of 17 categories (including specific parachains and projects), with over $362,000 granted in prize money! It was a monumental event, and one that highlights the energy and enthusiasm of the Polkadot ecosystem.

If the energy surrounding the event highlighted the enthusiasm, then the submissions highlighted the high caliber of people working with Substrate. The submissions were astounding, and will no doubt go on to make incredibly helpful tools for this ecosystem.

Zeitgeist’s primary focus in the participation of this hackathon was to incentivize DAO governance tools that leveraged the power of prediction markets. In preparation for supporting the hackathon, we open sourced our Kusama Derby testnet application as part of the first component of our SDK, and ensured that our documentation was comprehensive enough for developers to build useful apps. Our Frontend Developer Jørn Tangen hosted a livestreamed Crowdcast event where he outlined what is currently possible with our SDK, and how one could theoretically go about building a full stack application using it.

The Winner

The project that came forward with the best utilization of our SDK was ParaDAO! The team are made up of three developers (Belsy W, Jake Lyons, and Javier Aceña) and has the aim of providing a tool for communities to create events based on fair governance instead of single decision-makers (eg. the event host).

The application is a “no code” platform allowing anyone to create a DAO that would direct a new event. Communities can create proposals and have members vote on items surrounding their events, and leverages prediction markets for the voting process.

The ParaDAO team clearly comprehend the possibilities of “Futarchy” (governance based on Prediction Markets), and wanted to build their DAO with Futarchy as each community’s governance mechanism instead of standard democracy.

The team put together an impressive interface that is intuitive, clean, and interacts smoothly with Polkadot.js. On their app, users would be able to sign up as members of specific communities, pay membership fees from their Polkadot-based wallets, engage with community events, and best of all: Vote on what should happen at these events.

As per their proposal page on Devpost, the team said that the UI was a challenge because of connecting two different blockchains using different SDKs, but they thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the powers of Polkadot, and how powerful XCM is as a communication tool for cross-chain integration.

We were impressed to see a small team like ParaDAO put together such a useful tool, and are proud to grant them an “Honorable Mention Award” which includes the bounty of $5000, and hope to see their idea improved and expanded in the near future.

It is developers like this who are the future of the Web3 industry, and it is imperative we as Web3 stakeholders support work of this nature. It was a privilege to participate in Polkadot’s North American version of the Global Hackathon with some of the other leading parachains of Polkadot and Kusama. We are committed to a decentralized future, and will gladly be participating in the European version of the Polkadot Global Hackathon to be announced in November.