Chainlink 2021 hackathon

How it all started from a tweet

The idea

I was browsing twitter randomly on some day then I stumbled upon a tweet by the Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Hmmm… A light bulb went on in my head. This could be a great project idea.

The 2021 Chainlink hackathon was starting in a few days, so I thought why don’t I participate in it?

The rest of the twitter thread is me getting a basic idea of how it could work.

Link Marines Assemble

Next step was to try and recruit a team. I posted on Discord. The reception was great. My dms were hit up by people wanting to be a part of the project.

“ Hey, great idea.”.

“Do you already have a team?”

“Is your team full?”

When it came down to it, only one person actually came through, me.

The design and coding

The tools used were:

Solidity — an evm smart contract language

Chainlink — an oracle to provide inputs to smart contracts

Commodities API — an API to get prices of commodities which has support for Chainlink.

The cost to mint is dependent on the price of the commodities rather than the amount of collateral in the smart contract(Unlike a decentralized exchange - dex). In this way, we subtract inflation from the equation. Instead of the collateral being a commodity, the collateral is a stablecoin.

Trust me, 18 units of USD are much easier store on chain than one ton of sugar.

The premise is that the basket of goods accurately represents inflation and the price to mint a flatcoin would go up accordingly i.e would preserve purchasing power and is more stable than using a single commodity.

For the source code and a more in depth explanation.

#The hackathon

Submission required the source code or a website and a submission video describing the project. I tried to create an unconventional video. One that would catch judges attention. Life without flatcoin vs life with flatcoin. Here’s the link.

Winning?

So I felt that I had a pretty good chance of winning a prize, but sadly didn’t win. It got about 10+ votes, so I called it a day.

“Winning doesn’t always mean being first. Winning means you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before.” -Bonnie Blair.

Should I sue Patrick(from the tweet above) for misrepresentation? It was supposed to be a hackathon winning idea but it didn’t win!