The W3Transfer hackathon by Apillon and Encode is completed & winners announced

The four-week program of W3Transfer Educate Series, organized by Apillon and executed by Encode Club, helped ideas turn into new Web3…

Apillon

Jun 24, 2024 • 5 min read

The four-week program of W3Transfer Educate Series, organized by Apillon and executed by Encode Club, helped ideas turn into new Web3 projects on Polkadot.

W3Transfer Educate Series
Coding challenge
And the winners are…
Building the future, one integration at a time

Back in April, Apillon joined forces with Encode Club, a global community of top developers, to launch an educational series and a building challenge for everyone to test their development skills and earn for their contribution to the Web3 space.

Now, with the series completed, it’s time to recap the aftermath of the week-long Web3 building community initiative.

Let’s jump right in.

W3Transfer Educate Series

The general objective was simple. To incentivize developers to build fully decentralized file-sharing applications on Polkadot using the Apillon platform and the technologies provided by partner parachains.

Indeed, the tools were readily available. However, since the initiative addressed developers regardless of their previous experience with decentralized technologies, providing them with as much support as needed along the way was imperative.

This is where Encode Club stepped in and kicked off the W3Transfer Educate Series.

Throughout five technical sessions, the collaborating platforms and parachains gave participants the necessary insight into critical topics before they could join the coding party:

Intro to Polkadot by Bill Laboon
Introduction to IPFS and Crust Network by Brian Wu
Phat Contract Introduction & Schroedinger’s NFT Concept by Joshua Waller
KILT Protocol’s Introduction to DIDs by Andrés Rodríguez
Introduction to the W3Transfer Back-end Architecture by our very own Nino Kutnjak, Apillon CPO

Thousands of views underscored the public interest in bringing ideas to a decentralized life, and ultimately resulted in over a dozen projects showing their Web3 cards on the table.

Coding challenge

It’s one thing to get a grip on the theory but quite another to put the knowledge into practice.

(And to build an MVP that has the potential to grow into something bigger.)

The Polkadot parachains have honed their offering through niching down, specializing in solving a specific problem and delivering a decentralized solution to it. But it’s the combination and merge of multiple such solutions that brings the possibilities of building in Web3 to a new level.

WeTransfer but make it Web3

The objective of the mini hackathon organized by Apillon and Encode was for participants to build a decentralized platform for sharing files. Think WeTransfer but free from centralized drawbacks or impact.

Why WeTransfer? For starters, it’s an easy-to-use platform that is very familiar to Web2 audiences. But most importantly, its simple onboarding and straightforward user flow make it a go-to source for stress-free file sharing.

For Apillon, it’s all about making Web3 serve people and ease their daily tasks. With this challenge we wanted to demonstrate that Web3 products, too, can be user-friendly while shifting power from the platform to end users through decentralized technologies.

Technical framework

The participants in the coding challenge were encouraged to adopt and integrate the Polkadot parachains’ technologies, namely Crust Network with IPFS for decentralized hosting, Phala’s Phat Contract for computing, and DIDs by KILT for decentralized user authentication.

These have all been abstracted and provided by the Apillon platform, simplifying the development process and accelerating the MVP release trajectory for the projects involved.

And the winners are…

By the end of the coding challenge, Encode and Apillon received 13 fully completed project submissions.

Big thanks and congrats to all for making it to the finish line! 💪

Together with collaborating parachains, the Apillon and Encode teams evaluated the projects based on compatibility with technical prerequisites, usage of Apillon-provided services and features, UI friction, innovation, and other criteria.

We’re excited to announce the top two projects that stood out among the rest, and that will take the cream of the prize pool — meet FileFusion and W3Transfer — Decentralized File Sharing. 🎉

FileFusion

Filefusion is a decentralized, Web3 file-sharing and storage platform that offers secure and private file storage and sharing akin to WeTransfer and Dropbox.

It also provides end-to-end encrypted file sending and receiving capabilities for enhanced confidentiality.

At Apillon, we were impressed by the versatility of the provided features and sleek UI, which demonstrates the project’s understanding and consideration of what users need and value.

Check out the project’s code base 👉 on GitHub.

Submission video by FileFusion

W3Transfer

W3Transfer is another decentralized file sharing platform built on Polkadot powered by the Apillion platform.

It resembles WeTransfer but improves the file-storing part with encryption and decentralized access, so that the files can only be decrypted by a receiver’s signature.

Plus, it is hosted through decentralized hosting, earning them extra points from Apillon.

Check out the project’s code base 👉 on GitHub.

Submission video by W3Transfer

Due to a near-tie score for both projects, they will be awarded USD $3,500 each, congrats! 🎉

Other projects

The idea of a decentralized file-sharing platform manifested through many other solutions submitted to the coding challenge. In no particular order, these are:

Foresta
WaveTube
Apillonium
FileShare
FileX
web3-file-transfer
WaveTube
NetherSync
Signfi
clover
Sharefilesonpolkadot

We appreciate all of them and value their contribution to the first coding challenge of this kind. 🎉

Building the future, one integration at a time

The first coding challenge by Apillon and Encode has shown that both the Web2 and Web3 spaces can greatly benefit from knowledge sharing and creating solutions for ordinary people.

We extend our appreciation to our partners, Encode Club, collaborating parachain teams, and all the participants that took the plunge into the Web3 pool. Here’s to more coding opportunities coming up!

Stay tuned for future events, get inspired by fellow coders, build decentralized solutions, and make Web3 serve everyone.

⧓ About Apillon

The Apillon platform serves as a unified gateway to the Web3 services provided by linked Polkadot parachains. Following the multi-chain vision, Apillon powers the transition of developers to Web3, simplifying its adoption in the real economy, and expanding its versatility as the ecosystem grows. With Apillon, Web3 services are within reach for every developer, regardless of their background and experience with blockchain technology.