Cosmos and Blockstack hackathons showcase the future of DeFi

HackAtom V and HackDeFi hackathons focused on projects that showed promises for advances in tooling, interoperability and composability in decentralised finance (DeFi)

Hackathons organised by blockchain projects Cosmos and Blockstack (STX) respectively announced the winners last week with advances in tooling, interoperability and composability being the common theme in the winning DeFi projects.

An overwhelming majority of DeFi development presently remains concentrated on Ethereum where over $16 billion in digital assets are currently locked by various DeFi protocols. The organisers— Cosmos and STX are currently the 25th and 59th ranked projects by market cap respectively. Events like the hackathons—HackAtom V and HackDeFi, are crucial in the blockchain projects’ strategy to capitalise on emerging trends and to convince future projects to consider alternate blockchain networks (other than Ethereum).

Cosmos, whose blockchain is focused on interoperability and scalability, awarded the HackAtom V prizes to projects that could enable cross-chain staking, as well as a time-locked “clawback account”. Tomas Tauber, one of the engineers working on Crypto.com’s forthcoming blockchain, was declared the winner.

The clawback account refers to a smart contract-linked pair of accounts that offers secondary access to funds for a certain period of time. The potential use cases for such linked accounts include cryptocurrency exchange wallet management, cashback and other digital asset reward programs.

Osmosis, a project that pitched itself as a “Balancer meets Interchain Staking” was another promising DeFi submission in the hackathon. It presented an automated market maker, like that of Balancer with the key feature being its “custom staking token design tool” that allows users to create tokens that can be staked on multiple chains. This can potentially offer developers access to liquidity across multiple ecosystems.

Blockstack’s project is aimed at bringing Bitcoin as collateral to decentralised applications (dApps) development. DualX, a project that enables users to pre-program trading logic into normally locked staking funds was awarded the first place by Blockstack’s hackathon.

DualX presents itself as a new kind of exchange that “provides the opportunity for an investor‘s capital (denominated in BTC) to earn a yield on their funds while passively waiting to buy an investment asset (say STX)”.

The idea behind the project is to allow a BTC depositor to earn yield until STX reaches a certain price, whereupon the depositor would have the option of purchasing STX.