Recapping 20 Winning Projects from ETHShanghai 2023 Hackathon
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Recapping 20 Winning Projects from ETHShanghai 2023 Hackathon
In this hackathon, projects in the AI & Blockchain and Layer2 & On-Chain Gaming tracks have attracted particular attention.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsCompiled by: Mask Network
ETHShanghai 2023, initiated by Mask Network, is an event dedicated to promoting the Ethereum network and encouraging more builders to join in constructing the Ethereum and Web3 ecosystem. This year's ETHShanghai was jointly organized by core teams including Mask Network, Moonshot Commons, ChainIDE, and THUBA (Tsinghua Blockchain Association).
The event brought together nearly 600 developers from around the world, with a strong focus on Asia-based participants. Within two weeks, 84 teams formed and created their projects on Gitcoin’s hackathon platform, Buidlbox.io.
This year’s main tracks were divided into five themes: ETH Infra & Public Goods, Layer2 & On-Chain Gaming, Application, AI & Blockchain, and Developer Tools—covering multiple critical areas of blockchain technology. The track design aims to deepen understanding and application of the Ethereum network while integrating emerging technological trends to help mature and advance the Web3 community.
During this hackathon, projects in the AI & Blockchain and Layer2 & On-Chain Gaming tracks attracted particular attention. The integration of AI technology with blockchain is gradually demonstrating its potential and practical value. Meanwhile, On-Chain Gaming, as a rising trend in the blockchain space this year, has shown vibrant project activity.
After intense competition, 20 winners have been selected. These participants demonstrated outstanding technical capabilities and innovative ideas in their projects. We hope these winning entries inspire new insights and thinking for our readers.
Below are introductions to the winning projects:
Ethereum Infrastructure & Public Goods Track
First Place: IZAR
IZAR is a privacy-preserving interoperability protocol between the Ethereum and Aleo ecosystems. As a pioneering privacy-focused interoperability solution, IZAR seamlessly connects Ethereum and Aleo. It provides comprehensive support for arbitrary cross-chain messaging across heterogeneous chains, enabling liquidity flow between ecosystems using industry-leading zero-knowledge cryptography to achieve fully private cross-chain transactions. Additionally, the protocol introduces a novel governance model (with 1,000 decentralized validators) and zkSnark multi-signature verification to address centralization issues in current cross-chain bridges, further enhancing bridge security and user trust.
Second Place: Lumi Finance
Lumi Finance is an investment platform focused on long-term wealth preservation. By using LUA as collateral, Lumi Finance offers loans with zero liquidation risk and negative interest rates, allowing borrowers to earn returns on their debt. These loans carry no liquidation risk because the total LUA debt never exceeds the token's floor price (a guaranteed minimum value). Borrowers avoid paying ongoing fees to liquidity providers, resulting in negative interest accruals.
Third Place: ChainFood
Reducing food waste starts with blockchain. ChainFood is the first public welfare dApp on Ethereum that combats food waste by connecting users with free nearby food.
ChainFood is the first non-profit dApp in the Ethereum ecosystem addressing food waste. Users can access information about free food via their ERC address, post listings, and verify identities. FoodCoin tokens incentivize users to receive or donate food. Layer2 tokens can be airdropped based on SBTs earned by users. On-chain mechanisms ensure 100% transparency of charitable funds.
Fourth Place: BitPoW
BitPoW is a product built upon the first practical proof-of-work mechanism, aiming to drive significant progress in blockchain consensus. With this innovation, public blockchains could theoretically achieve greater decentralization than Bitcoin, eliminate mining pools, and offer users lower gas costs. The BitPoW team is committed to ensuring such advancements do not compromise blockchain security, nor provoke an arms race in mining or unnecessary energy consumption.
Layer 2 & On-Chain Gaming Track
First Place: Cellula
Cellula is a fully on-chain artificial life simulation game where players explore, nurture, evolve, and collect unique life forms.
In this game, Conway's Game of Life rules serve as genetic code determining the shape and vitality of life forms. Using the in-game crafting station, players freely create various gene sequences and give birth to their own on-chain lifeforms. These lifeforms possess unique appearances and attributes, exhibiting diverse biological patterns.
Second Place: GasLockR (by GasSubscribe Team)
Based on real-time gas pricing models, GasLockR serves as on-chain infrastructure offering derivative services like gas insurance and gas fee subscriptions. GasLockR uses ZK coprocessors to retrieve historical gas prices and provides real-time, verifiable pricing models to hedge against gas price volatility. As foundational on-chain infrastructure, it enables building protocols and services that improve blockchain reliability and user experience. We introduce the term "GasFi" and position GasLockR as the first trustless GasFi derivatives protocol. With GasLockR, other wallets or services—such as account abstraction (ERC-4337)—can offer SLAs to users, enabling individuals and organizations to reliably depend on the blockchain ecosystem. Services enabled include tradable gas insurance, which sets premiums for future gas prices, and gas fee subscriptions, where users pay in ERC20 tokens or fiat to subscribe to DApp interactions based on transaction volume or time periods.
Third Place: Age of Navigation
A fully on-chain game combining real-time strategy, predator-prey dynamics, and dark forest survival elements. The game map is Satosea, a territory covered in fog of war encrypted using mimcHash. Hidden beneath the fog are resources, artifacts, and other players. Anyone can freely explore Satosea. The game uses MUD as its engine, storing all scene data within on-chain smart contracts. As players navigate, they compute corresponding parameters in the contract to reveal sections of the fog. Players use PoW algorithms to mine resources or pick up artifacts. Resources become tokens used for in-game trading and staking, while artifacts enhance gameplay abilities. Players can attack each other and plunder assets. When performing actions like mining or attacking, players temporarily expose their location, requiring stealth and intelligence gathering. This creates rich strategic depth and gameplay variety.
Fourth Place: Autochessia
Autochessia is an auto-chess game running entirely on the blockchain—meaning not only are all game states read from and stored on the blockchain, but all game processes are executed through smart contracts.
We believe fully on-chain games will enable the next generation of UGC models, so we built this game with scalability in mind.
To make the game operable on-chain, we implemented JPS (jump point search) in Solidity, designed minimal game intervals, and introduced VRF for true randomness.
Applications Track
First Place: Lumiterra
Lumiterra is a multiplayer online open-world adventure game where you can battle alongside other players, grow crops, capture monsters, craft equipment and weapons, and discover new wonders!
But Lumiterra is more than just a fun game. Past blockchain games often mixed different user types, leading to conflicting interests and Ponzi-like dynamics. We innovatively place DeFi users, GameFi users (gold farmers), and traditional gamers into a coexisting system where each user type can pursue their own goals. Through fulfilling these diverse needs and leveraging an integrated in-game commodity economy, we’ve built a healthy economic system composed of three reinforcing flywheels.
Second Place: Non Fungible Time
An experimental Web3 protocol that empowers every passing day with the power of a time capsule. By allowing users to publish and mint each day as an NFT, time itself becomes tokenized. Preserve those profound moments and cherished memories that weave the fabric of your life.
Third Place: Soulcial
Soulcial is a self-generating social metaverse based on on-chain behavior and real-world data. Leveraging our proprietary social activity evaluation model, users co-create personalized social assets with AI, bind their social scores, and engage in AI-driven social activities, thereby building a unique soul-based social metaverse. The project helps users find kindred spirits while continuously accumulating their decentralized social graph.
Fourth Place: PeopleEquity
EquitySwap pioneers a new market-cap growth model, ensuring strong liquidity even as project prices rise. It reduces impermanent loss and trading slippage, and with precise incentive mechanisms, ushers in an era of DEX rebates—gradually replacing CEXs and achieving full decentralization of trading.
AI & Blockchain Track
First Place: ProtocolSign
A Web3 privacy-enabled e-signature, asset, and identity carrier. Sign contracts privately—the content known only to you. We also built an AI-powered contract generator that creates customized contracts from a single sentence. But this goes beyond signing. E-signatures are carriers of assets. What we fundamentally aim to do is create programmable credentials on-chain for real-world assets, giving users ownership, freedom, and liquidity over their identity and assets.
Second Place: Megaxis
We've created a prompt marketplace on a decentralized on-chain platform, powered by Web3 token economics. By tokenizing prompts, we unlock their latent market value. The MEGAxis marketplace incentivizes engineers to earn tokens by creating and selling high-quality prompts. The better their prompts perform, the more valuable their tokens become. MEGAxis also leverages Web3 tokenomics to build a community around the platform—for example, token holders gain voting rights in platform decisions and can vote to approve or reject prompts.
Third Place: Metavoice
Metavoice is a MetaMask wallet product with voice functionality, specifically designed to empower visually impaired individuals. We recognize a major challenge faced by people with limited or no vision—navigating complex interfaces and managing transactions is daunting. We set out to create a seamless, direct access solution to crypto wallets for these users, and Metavoice is the result. Metavoice is more than a product—it’s a step toward a more inclusive future, where technology serves everyone equally.
Fourth Place: Allditors
An AI large model public auditing infrastructure and DAO community. We comprehensively measure the alignment of AI models with human ethics, showcasing model performance—including bias levels and values—through rankings and profiles across different topics. Contributors can provide test data, propose audit criteria and methods, earn NFTs, and profit from the marketplace built atop this system.
Developer Tools Track
First Place: Sodium Wallet
Sodium Wallet leverages zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and multi-party computation (MPC) technologies, enabling users to access decentralized applications (dApps) without complex workflows or cryptographic expertise.
Additionally, Sodium Wallet provides wallet-as-a-service solutions for decentralized applications.
Second Place: zkGATE
A privacy-preserving login protocol that allows users to log into any third-party application using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). In the digital age, privacy and data security are paramount concerns. When users click “Sign in with Google,” third-party apps gain access to all personal data in the Google database, potentially storing unnecessary personal fields in their own systems.
zkGATE is a login protocol that third-party apps can integrate—only the information required by the app is shared, while all other data is encrypted into a zero-knowledge proof and stored in an NFT that acts as an access pass.
Third Place: ChainEye
A free, open-source, cross-chain analytics tool. ChainEye aims to build the world’s leading free, open-source, full-chain analysis tool for retail Web3 investors. Users can leverage the tool to discover interesting opportunities such as yield farming, trading and lending, NFTs, airdrops, token monitoring, and DAO governance. We currently support Optimism, Starknet, Arbitrum, and zkSync Era, with plans to add more Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains soon. To support thriving ecosystems on Layer 1/Layer 2, we also provide RPC lists as a benefit for developers and users.
Fourth Place: WASM Cairo
WASM-Cairo is a Cairo runtime and development toolkit based on WebAssembly. WASM-Cairo is a Starknet Layer 2 infrastructure built on WebAssembly, enabling any Cairo-written application to run anywhere—locally, on backend servers, or directly in the browser. We can even run Kakarot zkEVM inside a browser without any configuration or hardware/server requirements.
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