We invite entrepreneurs and builders to accelerate the future of Defi and Cross-border finance.

Devpost is a familiar brand amongst developers, especially in the blockchain community. We’re excited to be collaborating with them for this hackathon. Devpost’s community is made up of 900,000 developers and technology professionals. Its community has built thousands of projects on Ethereum, Bitcoin and other blockchains.

When is the Hackathon?

The hackathon will take place from August 9, 2020 (10:00am Pacific Time) to September 28, 2020 (6:00pm Pacific Time). During this period we will schedule community & networking calls and connect teams with mentors to accelerate products. Our goal is to create working products with real users to transform international payments, emerging market finance, and global remittances.

Background and Theme

There are 6 billion people living in developing and emerging countries that account for 60% of the world’s GDP and 80% of global growth since 2008.

People and businesses in these countries face tremendous economic challenges, including:

• Weak and volatile currencies that are not accepted globally, making it difficult for people and businesses in these countries to store value or initiate global transactions.
• Limited access to foreign exchange, making it almost impossible to transact globally.
• Poor access to banking services. More than 2 billion adults do not have a bank account (more than 80% of adults in Africa do not have a traditional bank account). Even those adults who are lucky enough to have a bank account, usually have limited access to Credit.

Why Harmony?

Harmony is the ideal solution to solve these problems.

• Harmony is already in the process of launching two audited stablecoins, BUSD (Binance USD) and Rupiah Token and working to on-board new partners to unlock new markets.
• 5-second block finality, faster than most other public decentralized solutions in the market.
• Ultra-low fees.

Our Wish List

While we prefer your application fit with the theme of the hackathon, you are eligible to submit any type of Dapp on Harmony’s mainnet to compete for the lower tier rewards.

Let us be clear — we are not being prescriptive, but here are some ideas you can consider.

Cross-chain interoperability, bridges, & stablecoins

Harmony needs bridges between itself and Ethereum or Bitcoin, so that assets can freely flow. This means we need a way for assets from another chain to be minted/swapped on Harmony via some sort of bridge. Be creative here.

Cross-border finance

Being able to seamlessly send assets (money, etc.) on-chain from one country to another is one of the big opportunities for blockchain. For builders, consider integrating stablecoins with existing e-commerce plugins, cash-back reward systems, and integrations with in-country services or exchange partners.

Potential Ideas:

• QbitPay: move revenue for e-commerce platforms like amazon to china by providing favorable fx rate and fast settlements
• Integrate with Circle API for payments, wallets, marketplaces
• Integrate w/ Ripple PayID and on-demand liquidity (see 2020Q2 report and India policy)
• Bitcoin/Lightning: Strike
• India universal ID (payment gateways), forex quotes, p2p liquidity, kyc
• freelancer payroll, fiat toolkit, e-commerce

Integrations with fiat gateways & regional partners

In order to send money from one country’s currency to another requires an exchange of assets. This can be done with many available on-ramp and off-ramp companies with available API’s.

Prizes — What’s in it for you?

We want there to be many winners and so we’ve structured the prizes with as broad as a criteria as we can. We have 36 different prizes and everyone will have a chance to win something. In total, we are giving away $27,500 USD total rewards to be distributed to winners!

Fintech Challenger: (1 Winner)

• $5,000 USD equivalent of Harmony ONE token
• Free advertisement of the product in 100,000 subscribers/community members
• Publication from external partners and media
• Connections with investors

Fintech Agents of Growth (5 winners)

• $2,000 USD equivalent of Harmony ONE token
• 1:1 meeting session with Harmony team
• Opportunity to present in the Harmony community
• Connections with investors

Wildcard Prizes (Up to 10 winners)

• $1,000 USD equivalent of Harmony ONE token

Harmony Participation Reward (Up to 20 winners)

• $250 USD equivalent of Harmony ONE token

To the first 20 eligible Dapps deployed on Mainnet, whether finance-related or not.

Participation links and guidelines will be released as we come closer to the kick-off day of the hackathon!

Requirements

Makers must do the following to participate in the Hackathon:

Build functioning end to end software utilizing Harmony Smart Contracts and/or interfacing with the Hackathon Protocol. The software can be a standalone app (front end + back end), SDK to be used with the Harmony protocol, or web integration.

Development of smart contracts must be done on the Harmony Mainnet.

In order to support teams, we have created a dedicated Telegram channel to invite the participants: https://harmony.one/devpost

Looking forward to 6 exciting weeks of building! Join our Telegram groups to get support:

Focused Telegram Group: https://harmony.one/devpost

General Community Group: harmony.one/telegram

Harmony Developers Group: https://harmony.one/telegram-dev

$4,000 in prizes

• Quality of Idea
  (Includes creativity, originality, and relevance to the hackathon topics);
• Implementation of Idea
  Includes how well the idea was executed by the developer and the quality of the UI/UX
• Potential Impact
  Includes the extent to which the solution can benefit the money remittances and international payments industry
• Deployment on Harmony Mainnet
  Dapps not deployed on Harmony mainnet will not be evaluated