Web3 Hackathon sponsored by Toyota on Astar Network
In February, Astar Network announced the first Web3 hackathon sponsored by Toyota Motor Corporation and hosted by Hakuhodo Key 3. Regardless of where in the world you live, the name Toyota probably sounds familiar, as it’s one of the largest corporations in the world, with over 330,000 employees globally.
Two months later, the hackathon concluded successfully. Read on to learn more about how it went, why Toyota decided to sponsor and have a look at some of the winning products. A huge thanks to everyone joining us, the sponsors, hackers, and supporters!
Some background
The focus of the Web3 hackathon was DAO tooling, based on a need that Toyota saw. Toyota recognized its immense innovation potential as one of the largest corporations worldwide with massive internal talent. However, leveraging that and finding processes empowering employees can be challenging. In addition, evaluating ideas increases the time burden placed on reviewers. That’s where DAOs come in.
DAO = decentralized autonomous organization, a way to make decisions in a decentralized manner.
DAOs present a way for Toyota to innovate from the inside and more readily decide which ideas are worth pursuing. And what better way than a hackathon where devs from all over the world submit their ideas? That’s how the web3 hackathon was born.
Web3 Hackathon in Numbers
Overall, we received over 420 applications roughly evenly split between English and Japanese. Forty-one teams submitted their ideas for a first review, and 12 passed the first round.
In the end, eight teams received awards, 1 Grand Prize winner, five excellency awards, and 2 Polkadot/web three foundation awards were given out. Congrats to all the winners🎉
During the kick-off event hosted in the first Polkadot-based Metaverse Cosmize, over 100 people joined to listen to Toyota explain their vision and hear more about Global web3 trends in 2023.
Winners
Congrats the winners! 🎉
1st place: Teritama
Excellency awards:
- Simplex Blocks
- Teichaku
- Digital Value
- NOT a DAO
- Team Pangea
Polkadot/Web3 Foundation awards:
- GAOGAO
- RnDAO
Teritama
Teritama’s Innovation support application allows any employee or DAO member to create proposals and quickly gain approval or collaborators. Once submitted, each proposal is turned into an NFT attached to the wallet of the proposer. A big challenge for DAOs is voter apathy, where people simply can’t be asked to vote. To prevent that, Teritama has added a feature where people voting will receive tokens based on providing detailed reasoning for their decision.
An AI scoring system aids the evaluation process, and the Teritama smart contracts ultimately settle the vote and distribute tokens to the proposer.
Proposers can then exchange their tokens for cash via the company and execute their idea. Voters can use the points they received from explaining their decisions on internal training and other benefits.
You can check out their prototype here: https://innovation-support-d391e.web.app/lists. Log in with your MetaMask, set up a nickname, and you’re ready to go.
Note currently, all descriptions are in Japanese.
Simplex: T3 DAO
Simplex’s solution addresses the problem that there is usually a lack of time to spend on non-work related innovation in big corporate. Even though bottom-up ideas benefit organizations, employees often lack time to establish the improvements they’d like to, leading to frustration. Similarly, corporates have difficulties balancing such activities with their primary business.
With T3DAO, Simplex created a DAO where anyone can propose ideas, submit them and receive approval from the collective. However, instead of receiving monetary value for the approved ideas, the more tokens a proposer gets, the more time they’ll be able to spend on their idea.
This application facilitates the process of allocating time to critical bottom-up initiatives without requiring direct financial input from organizations. In its current iteration, a demo of it is live running on Microsoft Azure. Check out the team’s Github if you’re interested in running it.
Teichaku
Anyone who has ever spent time in DAOs is aware that one of their biggest downfalls is that stuff does not always get done, and if it does, contributions aren’t rewarded fairly. With a background in web2, Teichaku resolves this by providing a DAO framework combining the Agile method from software development with DAOs.
Teichaku can be added to existing DAOs to establish a history of each member’s contributions, maintain the record on-chain, and facilitate the review process. Whenever a member has contributed, they submit their work and have it reviewed by reviewers. These reviewers vote on the contribution, and consequently, tokens are issued after successful approval with a split between the contributor and the reviewers.
You can try it here: https://teichaku.vercel.app/
What’s next?
Toyota is reviewing all the submissions and exploring which ones they’d like to try. At Astar, we’re continuing to push the adoption of Web3 and showcase further enterprise use cases, such as our recent collaboration with Calbee to issue evolving NFTs.
About Astar Network
Astar is Japan’s most popular smart contract platform supporting both EVM and WebAssembly (Wasm) environments, and interoperability between them using a Cross-Virtual Machine. Astar Network is friendly to all kinds of developers, and the tools and languages they already know. Backed by the shared security of Polkadot, Astar shines brilliantly on its own within a vibrant and healthy ecosystem, and in the blockchain industry overall driving international corporate adoption, and consumer interest in Web3 technologies.
Astar’s Build2Earn program is designed to grow the network in an innovative way, while simultaneously rewarding participants and builders. It allows developers to earn incentives for building and maintaining their decentralized applications, and users to earn incentives for supporting their favorite projects, all while encouraging growth of the ecosystem overall.
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