Falling For Defi On Findora Onboard

🍁 Be sure to join the Findora Discord for hackathon discussions, 🍂

🍂 answers to your questions, and all things DeFi on Findora! 🍁

🍁 $50,000 worth of prizes up for grabs! 🍂

It’s DeFi, but with built-in privacy.

TBH, privacy is coming soon (like, this-year-soon), but that just makes NOW the best time to build on Findora. Findora is a Layer 1 protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs, Bulletproofs (which our original founding team invented), and multi-party computation to provide programmable privacy at Layer 1. This means users have a choice in what information is masked. Just last month, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) was integrated into Findora’s Devnet, and as of October 27, it’ll be available on testnet.

This is where you - the Gitcoin Community - come in.

With three development tracks, generous prizes, and amazing judges, the Findora hackathon has something for everyone in the Gitcoin developer community.

Keep scrolling to see how you, too, can get involved!

TL;DR

🎃 The hackathon will begin on October 29th and will conclude with a demo day on December 9th .
💟 Teams, groups, and individuals can register for the hackathon now!
🏆 A total equivalent of $50,000 USD in prizes will be won, paid out in FRA ERC-20 token.
🤖 There’s a dedicated Discord channel just for hackathon participants.
💼 There will be “open office hours” throughout the event where key team members can be reached one-on-one
📆 Check out the schedule further down for more info on important dates and happenings

Prizes & Prize Partners.

Total Prizes: $50,000

Prizes will be awarded across 3 tracks:

Track 1:

$25,000 in Prizes (1st - $15,000; 2nd - $7,500; 3rd - $2,500)

Liquidity - Port a popular DApp and/or NFT platform using Findora EVM. Add your favorite protocol to increase yield and enhance liquidity. Combine the two with privacy using Findora SDK.

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Track 2:

$15,000 in Prizes (1st - $7,500; 2nd - $5,000; 3rd - $2,500)

Tools - Bring your favorite existing tools, build new tools, enhance libraries, write documentation -- and do it all to improve the developer experience for yourself and everyone else.

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Track 3:

$10,000 in Prizes (1st - $5,000; 2nd - $3,000; 3rd - $2000)

Cryptography (optimizations) - Design and execute tools for privacy preservation and auditing using Zei and Bulletproofs cryptography libraries. Help bring more privacy to DeFi.

*Note: Prizes will be awarded as the U.S. dollar equivalent, fair market value amount of FRA ERC-20.

Development Tracks.

Participants are encourage to choose from one of the following three tracks that most inspire you:

1. Liquidity Track

Port a popular DApp and/or NFT platform using Findora EVM. Add your favorite protocol to increase yield and enhance liquidity. Combine the two with privacy using Findora SDK.

Here are some suggested popular tools and DApps:

Trustless Bridges - i.e. Anyswap, cBridge, Chainsafe, DeGate, Hop Protocol, RenBridge, etc.
Oracles - i.e. Chainlink, Band, etc.
DEXs - i.e. DyDx, Sushiswap, etc.
DeFi Lenders - i.e. Aave, Compound, etc.
Stablecoins - i.e. Terra, Tether, etc.
Cross-Chain Tools - i.e. IBC, Parachains, etc.
L2 Solutions - i.e. Polygon, etc.

2. Tools Track

Bring your favorite existing tools, build new tools, enhance libraries, write documentation -- and do it all to improve the developer experience for yourself and everyone else.

SDK/Documentation and Tutorial Guides - Create tools that abstract some of the complexities of developing on Findora, create tools that even a “non-blockchain” engineer can use to build a Dapp on Findora

a. UTXO SDK

Identify/document important functions that should be accessible as APIs in the UTXO SDK
Abstract multiple functions into a more convenient/higher level API for ease of use.

See Github Repo - Platform

b. UTXO Tutorial Guides:

Create videos or long-form (Medium.com) articles to explain how to configure various Findora tools or build an “off-chain” app utilizing Findora UTXO side.

Indexing - Accessing blockchain data can be slow. Indexing the Findora’s blockchain data will speed up Dapp performance (ex) thegraph.com)

Index Findora UTXO blockchain data
Index Findora EVM blockchain data

Node Hosting - Managing a Findora node is time consuming. Having an Infura-like node that can connect Dapp developers to the Findora network will save them time (ex) infura.io) from having to set up their own Findora node

Setup Findora node that is publicly accessible by Findora Dapp developers which solves data access speed, scalability, and data storage issues for Dapp developers

Block Explorer - Develop block explorer with “advanced” features

Users can fork the existing “vanilla” Findora block explorer as a foundation.

Findora Block Explorers:

https://forge.findorascan.io/ (UTXO Explorer)
http://blockscout.findorascan.io/ (Dapp Explorer)).

High priority “advanced” features include:
PoS APY calculator for Findora FRA stakers
Findora network statistics

See etherscan.io homepage and etherscan.io/chart for example statistics

3. Cryptography Track

Design and execute tools for privacy preservation and auditing using Zei and Bulletproofs cryptography libraries. Help bring more privacy to DeFi.

The crypto libraries below form the foundation of Findora’s cryptography features. These features include confidential transfers (hiding amount sent, hiding asset type sent and hiding the sender/receiver addresses on the ledger).

Bulletproofs (Github repo)
Zei Library (develop branch) (Github repo)
BLS12-381 library (Github repo)

You are recommended to work on a fork of these repositories. Some ideas for references are as follows, but we welcome all kinds of optimizations.

More efficient pairing with prepared G2 elements for BLS12-381
More efficient scalar multiplication of points via endomorphisms for BLS12-381
More efficient Pedersen commitment using the Bowe-Hopwood technique
Newer ZK-friendly hash functions including Poseidon, Reinforced Concrete, and Grendel, in addition to Zei’s Rescue hash
Flexible Merkle tree framework with a dedicated leaf hash and a dedicated two-to-one compression hash
Sparse Merkle tree with a bounded height

Judges & Judging Criteria.

Judges of the Findora Hackathon on Github hail from all over the blockchain community - and all over the world!

Judging Criteria

1. Execution - how well did the project execute?
2. Creativity - how creative is the project?
3. Design - how good is the user experience?
4. Impact - how impactful is the project for the ecosystem?

Developer Resources

Developer Workshop & Office Hours

Hold developer office hours every Tu/Th 12-1p Pacific Time and Tu/Th 12-1p Beijing Time. Visit our #Hackathon channel on discord for details (https://discord.gg/swUJ8tQmWu).

Documentation/SDK

- Findora EVM Docs

- wiki.findora.org (see “Findora EVM” section)

- Findora UTXO Docs (and SDK setup)

- wiki.findora.org (see “Findora UTXO” section)

“FN” CLI Tool

- wiki.findora.org (see “EVM Integration” doc for details)

Schedule

In addition to the hackathon, we will host a series of workshops. Here are the key dates:

11/5 - Falling for DeFi on Findora Kickoff Party (recap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD1POYD2-Bs)

- Walkthrough of the Findora EVM / UTXO SDK / crypto libraries and other hackathon resources, code templates, followed up by a live dapp deployment demo.

11/12 - Scaling Solidity Dapps to the Findora EVM

- This workshop discusses how to deploy smart contracts to the Findora EVM. Topics covered include the “Findora EVM” documentation located on wiki.findora.org which discuss setting up Metamask, Remix, Truffle and other Ethereum tools to work with the Findora EVM.

11/19 - Using the "Rialto" Liquidity Bridge

- Rialto liquidity bridge goes 4 ways: Findora<>Ethereum and Findora<>BSC. This workshop discusses how to transfer Ethereum ERC-20 (or Binance BEP-20) testnet tokens to the Findora EVM testnet as FRC-20 tokens.

11/26 - Using the Findora UTXO SDK's Confidential Transfer Feature

- This workshop discusses how to setup the Findora UTXO SDK and call its APIs which include features such as confidential transfers.

12/3 - Understanding Findora's (Zei) Cryptography Library

- This workshop gives an overview of Findora’s zei cryptography libraries, how they are used to support confidential transfers as well as the theoretical & practical improvements needed.

12/8 - Project submission: all bounty submissions must be received no later than 11:59 PM pst on Dec 8th, 2021, or earlier.

12/9 - Demo Session: Finalists will be invited to demo their project via Zoom on Thursday, December 9, 2021 at 9:00 AM PST.