CryptoSnap: Analyzing the Award-Winning Projects of the Solana Renaissance Hackathon

Author: dt, DODO Research

As the overall cryptocurrency market is bleak, only Solana and its on-chain ecosystem continue to thrive. This time, the Solana Renaissance hackathon competition had as many as 1,071 projects participating, of which only 34 projects won awards. This week's CryptoSnap Dr.DODO will introduce you to the projects in various tracks!

Grand Champion

Ore

Last month, Ore caused a temporary paralysis of Solana due to mining, and it is the overall champion of this Renaissance conference across all tracks. Ore is a new way of issuing on-chain assets, using an innovative proof-of-work algorithm for mining on the Solana chain, ensuring that temporary miners are never deprived of the opportunity to earn rewards. Supported by a tweet from Solana co-founder Toly, Ore attracted a considerable number of retail participants to mining at its launch last month, causing significant congestion on the Solana chain. This issue was later resolved through a patch upgrade, reflecting the high popularity of Ore within the community.

Consumer Applications Track

Banger.lol

Banger.lol is a creator economy platform, with the biggest feature being that tweets can be bought and sold on-chain, allowing you to support your favorite creators by purchasing their tweets.

Infrastructure Track

High TPS Solana Client

This is a new Solana client that improves TPS through proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimization. It not only provides fast transaction capabilities but also increases rewards by 30% through shared block rewards.

Gaming Track

Meshmap + City ChampBanger.lol

This is a new type of 3D map network integrated through gaming, creating a world 3D map through community-submitted 3D scans, and rewarding users through token incentives and engaging gameplay.

As the first proof of concept, we developed a mixed-reality first-person combat and tower defense game, City Champ, using Unity and Solana for Meta Quest 2/3/Pro. As a player, you must defend your city against terrifying creatures arising from urban social issues. Strike down enemies, protect the city core, and collect reform achievements to win; as a scanner, you can use your phone's built-in LiDAR scanner to scan the grid, discover new game areas, and submit them to the grid map, increasing the possibilities for endless level locations.

DeFi and Payment Track

Urani

Urani is a Solana-based intent-driven trading aggregator that provides protection against toxic MEV at the application layer and ensures secure transactions for the next billion users. By designing limit orders, competitive liquidity markets, and novel price optimizations, Urani establishes a positive-sum game for seekers, market makers, and users.

Depin Track

Blockmesh

This is a bandwidth Depin network that allows you to monetize excess bandwidth. Blockmesh resells this bandwidth to institutions, companies, and individuals, enabling bandwidth providers to earn income. On the other hand, Blockmesh allows consumers to gain more privacy to meet the demands of businesses seeking data for artificial intelligence, e-commerce, web crawling, search engines, and other data-hungry enterprises.

DAO and Community Tools Track

DeTask

This is an AI task management tool that intuitively funds and manages ideas, AI agents, and Taskers from concept to product, all done within a chat. DeTask breaks down complex ideas into interconnected smaller parts and allocates provable execution to AI agents and humans, democratizing knowledge through artificial intelligence, and filling the gap for achieving a truly decentralized internet.

Author's Perspective

To be fair, it is too early to look at the awarded projects and judge their future success. Many projects, such as Bang.lol or DeTask, have appealing concepts, but they will face significant obstacles in realization or promotion in the future. Attracting users in the early stages is a major challenge, and the simplest way is to use well-known capital as a backing to draw attention. Personally, I will continue to track whether these awarded projects can successfully gain the favor of venture capital!