A Sneak Peak at the Future of ETH

In the chaos of August, everyone in the space was stalking Crypto Twitter and Zapper’s token request page for the newest farms where they could earn unsustainable yields. Since then, there has been quite a decline in the amount of food-coins popping up…but that doesn’t mean builders have stopped building. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

One of my favorite places to look for promising projects and teams building the future of crypto are hackathons. In the past, hackathons have introduced the world to names like 1inch.Exchange, DeFi Dollar, and Tornado Cash. That’s why I was really intrigued earlier this month when Ethereum’s annual developer conference ETHOnline kicked off.

As part of the summit, a hackathon with ~$100,000 in prizes started on October 2nd and is concluding tomorrow. The participation this month was pretty incredible to see. Below are some key stats, some of which I leveraged from this thread by Anthony Beaumount.

• There were over 200 projects which were submitted. You can see all of them here.
• Around 25% of participants used Ethereum and nothing else.
• Not surprisingly, experimentation with DeFi was by far the most popular theme. Protocols Aave, Compound, Balancer, MakerDAO, and Uniswap were the most popular. About 25% of participants used at least one of those projects.
• In terms of oracles, Chainlink still leads the way (according to Anthony around 26 projects used them in some way). Meanwhile, we also saw Tellor being used in a few situations.
• When it comes to Layer 2s, Matic Network was the most popular (18 projects used them).
• Other notable projects being used were Filecoin and IPFS. 12.5% of participants used them in some way. Meanwhile, 7.5% of teams used The Graph protocol.

The Hackathon Finale & Finalists Demos will be presenting demos tomorrow at 12 PM EST here.  I wanted to spend this Daily highlighting a few projects I found interesting as well as touch on what role I think they play in the future of the space. Right as I was about to send out this post, ETHGlobal tweeted ou