Hack Africa Summary and Prizewinners

Published in

Encode Club

4 min readSep 9, 2021

After over 10 weeks, Hack Africa has come to a close with a fantastic finale event featuring the best projects.

Hack Africa focused on developers based in Africa and on solutions dedicated to Africa. The hackathon was organized in partnership with Web3Bridge.

In our last two hackathons, Euler and Reflexer (amongst others) have gone on to raise large investment rounds following the final! We hope several of this cohort go on to achieve great success also.

About Encode Club

The purpose of Encode is to educate, support and catalyse the emergence of new talent into the blockchain space. We work across 75 universities worldwide, running hackathons, accelerators, education series as well as investing and recruiting the best to join leading blockchain companies. Read more here.

About Web3Bridge

Web3Bridge is designed to identify people who are passionate about Web3, train them in a collaborative and supportive remote environment, and create an African Web3 community. Web3Bridge has reach across several African countries and has successfully trained and supported several cohorts of Web2 and Web3 developers. You can join the Web3Bridge telegram community here.

Hackathons

This was our sixth hackathon to date! You can check out our previous hackathon summaries below:

Previous hackathons:
Future of Blockchain 1
Future of Blockchain 2
Spark Summer
Encode Hack Club
Hack the System

How it worked

Students, hackers and researchers had 10 weeks to learn and answer challenges offered by our awesome sponsors! Our sponsors also organised deep-dive workshops, introducing students and hackers to their technologies.

Full Video

Finalists and prizewinners

8 finalists were chosen to compete for the top prizes. Here is the list of finalists and winners:

1st ($3k) — Kotani Pay (Hack Africa and Stellar Winner)

Kotani Pay is a technology stack that enables the transfer of stablecoins to local payment channels without the need for internet connectivity, a bank account, or a high end smart phone. Kotani Pay provides a reliable on ramp and off ramp service to reach a wider customer base in Africa.

Their mission is to serve as a frictionless bridge between cryptocurrency and fiat currencies for new adopters in search of alternative payment systems.

2nd ($1.5k) — Harpie (2nd Place Overall)

Harpie helps users protect their crypto for life. Harpie aims to solve one of the biggest problems in the crypto space — custody — and give people the confidence they need to confidently be a part of the DeFi community.

They provide peace of mind by providing redundancy on top of existing wallets. Harpie users create a protection plan using information only they know. If they ever lose access to their wallet or funds, say by losing their seed phrase, they can leverage Harpie to get access to their crypto again. They leverage smart contracts to keep the process zero-trust and custody-free.

3rd ($500) — NFT World (3rd Place Overall and Polygon Runner-up)

NFT World is mapped to real world places with the Polygon blockchain. Users can buy and sell land anywhere in the world. There are NFTs that can be used to make the user’s land more beautiful and increase its value such as cars, trees or houses. Users can move and place their property NFTs on their land NFTs. They can also embed property NFTs on top of their lands to sell with a high price.

Honourable Mention — Borsa App

Borsa App (which translates to bag/wallet in Amharic), is a platform that allows users to store and exchange tokenized Ethiopian Birr (ETBT) on their mobile devices. This is done through pegging each issued token against an equivalent Fiat Ethiopian birr.

Other Finalists:

Bondible is an application that produces decentralized corporate bonds. Each bond is deployed as its own smart contract on the Polygon blockchain. The bond can be subscribed to and withdrawn using an ERC-20 coin.

Decentralised Thrift is a decentralized thrift/cooperative system where people come together to contribute funds for each member.

Gasless Voting is a gasless e-voting protocol on the Polygon network. The protocol consists of identity registration, identity verification and voting.

Sushi Index is a non-custodial, four-asset index that sits within BentoBox. The index comprises four tokens — Sushi, Matic, Ether and Bitcoin, all equally weighted, and rebalanced monthly. Users buy into the index via the dapp interface, using USDC. The dapp swaps their USDC into the four tokens, and then re-deposits those tokens on BentoBox so that they can earn yield. Users can withdraw their funds into USDC at any time.

Bounty Prize Winners

Stellar

1st prize ($6k in XLM total, $1.5k each)— KotaniPay, Zarpay, Borsa App and Skylar

Sushi

1st Prize ($2k)— Decentralised Thrift
2nd Prize($1k)— Sushi Index

Arweave

1st Prize (A spot in the Arweave Accelerator) — ArMock

Polygon

1st Prize ($1k)— Tebs
2nd Prize ($500 each)— Decentralised Thrift System, Votechain, NFT world by Phoenix team
3rd Prize ($250 each) — Foodprint, Xeda, Bondible, Subot

Upcoming Events

If you’re keen to join another hackathon, take a look at our upcoming programmes.

The Polkadot Hackathon (started on 9th September, running until 31st October) — This hackathon is part of Polkadot Club, our long-term programme dedicated to Polkadot. Sign up here.

Hack DeFi with Wintermute (Hacking begins Mon 18th October 2021)— Open to hackers worldwide who want to build DeFi solutions on any chain they wish, in partnership with Wintermute. Sign up here.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements!

Questions

If you have any questions, please email: questions@encode.club