Fedi Launches Hackathon Celebrating Bitcoin’s 14th Birthday With 2.5 BTC Prize

Fedi is teaming up with Epoch to reward 2.54 bitcoin in a hackathon that aims to boost its Fedimint-based community custody and privacy platform.

Technology company Fedi is launching a Bitcoin hackathon that will pay out 2.1 BTC to the winner in celebration of Bitcoin’s 14th birthday.

Fedi, which is focused on building a Fedimint-based community custody platform, wants to encourage developers to build out a Fedimint module that will help bring real world benefits to users.

The bounty is open ended, meaning that developers can code the functionality they want; but they are, of course, incentivized to work on what would drive the most impact. Fedi shared some ideas of what those could be, including modules that would enable a communal savings pool to accumulate bitcoin for a large project, storing value in a local currency like dollars, receiving payments privately via static QR codes or links (similar to CLN’s BOLT 12 offers), or operating a communal vote based spending pool.

Fedimint is an open source custody platform that allows users to not only store their bitcoin, but also extend the functionality of their bitcoin with privacy, smart contracts, and more. It is based on the concept of second-party custody, which involves trusting family members or friends with the custody of one’s bitcoin in a way that improves the trust and security models inherent in the classic centralized third-party custody solutions. And it leverages Federated Chaumian Ecash, which means users also gain privacy. In a nutshell, Fedimint wallets have the potential to bring strong privacy to Bitcoin users with better security than third-party custody setups and more ease of use than fully-fledged self-custody solutions.

"At Fedi, we believe that Fedimint will become the ideal open platform for the delivery of consensus-based applications on the internet," said Obi Nwosu, Fedi CEO, in a statement sent to Bitcoin Magazine. "Bitcoin was created to be a peer-to-peer sound money with full privacy, and that's what we want to offer to everyone globally. We're excited to see what the broader Fedimint community can achieve and what ideas there are to extend Fedimints to solve real world problems using bitcoin."

Fedi is launching the hackathon in collaboration with Epoch, an upcoming capital provider for Bitcoin projects with the goal to support layer 2 and 3 protocols that enable the global adoption of bitcoin.

Winners will be announced within five days of the submission deadline –– January 31, 2023. First place will get 210 million satoshis (2.1 BTC) and a commitment to support their module in the Fedi product; two runners up will receive 21 million satoshis each, and three honorable mentions will get 2.1 million satoshis each.

Find more details about the contest and how to participate on Fedi’s official web page here. Project submissions can be done through this form.