ETHBerlin04

<<H<ACKER MANUAL

This section aims to help you to prepare for the hackathon.

TL;DR

Overview

Before the Hackathon

During the Hackathon

After the Hackathon

Before the Hackathon

Travel and Accommodation

Travel to Berlin

Berlin has one airport called Berlin Brandenburg Airport "Willy Brandt" (BER) and is well connected with railway. You can take a train from European cities such as Stockholm or Paris to travel with the convenience of comfortable high-speed trains with internet access, avoid the long security lines, missing luggage, and decrease your CO2 footprint. Check the Deutsche Bahn website for routes.

Urban Transport

Berlin is a bike friendly city. Most of the times the quickest and easiest way to getting from A to B is by bike. If you are staying longer than just a few days, you might want to consider renting a bike from Swapfiets or buying daily/monthly subscription from nextbike (bike sharing). You will also find many scooters and bikes that you can grab around the city. On the Jelbi App you can conveniently find the public transportation tickets and info as well as carsharing, scooters, bikes etc.

Accomodation

Finding a hotel or other affordable accommodation in Berlin can be quite a challenge in itself. Since this year's ETHBerlin is coinciding with the German Cup Final and the Euroleague Final Four, it can be particularly difficult to find a place. We recommend you to look for a suitable shelter as soon as you receive your hacker confirmation! If you haven't booked anything yet, best do so asap.

Aside from hotels and Airbnbs, you can check offers on local options like WG-Gesucht and Facebook groups or post your own requests post there. However, please be wary of the risks and potential scams. Join our #couchsurfing chat and fill in the coordination sheet if you are offering or looking for a place to sleep.

Our venue is open 24/2 and welcomes hacking through the night. There are many cozy corners with sofas, beanbags etc. However, we still would recommend to look for a place to leave your stuff, sleep, and take a shower.

Find a Team/Hacker/Idea

Are you missing a team, a hacker, an idea? Or you have an idea that can be implemented during the hackathon? Find a match on Github or join the Hacker Matchmaking session on Friday after the opening ceremony.

Generate your Zupass PCD

This year, we have a PCD (proof-carrying data) integration with Zupass for ETHBerlin04. You can prove your attendance to the hackathon by generating a zero-knowledge proof through the Zupass web application.

Visit zupass.org and sign up (or log in) with the same email address you used to register for the hackathon. You will find an active ETHBerlin04 subscription in your account.

You will require this PCD for the faucets (if needed) and the final submission of your hackathon project as well as voting on other people's projects after the hackathon concluded.

Connect and Chat

The only official communication channel is the ETHBerlin Matrix space. Use it to connect with hackers and mentors, and to get updates from the organizers throughout the hackathon: #ethberlin:dod.ngo

There is no Discord or Telegram.

Food and Drinks

As per usual, this one is on us! ETHBerlin will cover all meals and drinks for the entire hackathon! This includes breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and midnight snacks as well as various soft drinks, mate (of course!), water, coffee and beer. In addition to regular food, there will be vegan and vegetarian options provided. Just come with an open mind, a knowledge-thirsty brain and enthusiasm. Meal and snack times will be on the program.

During the Hackathon

Hacking and Rules

Read the fine manual or regret it later.

Hacking Rules

  • A team can not be more than five people.
  • You must be present at the ETHBerlin venue for your project to be eligible for submission.
  • You can plan ahead of time, but all code for your project has to be written during the event. Code can only be committed after hacking officially starts and only until the submission deadline.
  • You cannot use another team's source code.
  • The decision of judges is final for determining prizes and awards.
  • Breaking our Code of Conduct leads to the exclusion from the event.

Minimum Submission Requirements

  • A link to the open-source code must be provided.
  • A short presentation file must describe your project.
  • If applicable, the contract address(es) of your deployed demo must be provided, either on a testnet of your choice or mainnet of a platform of choice.

Faucets for Sepolia and Holesky

Dedicated testnet-token faucets are available for ETHBerlin04 hackers.

You can receive 500 testnet Ether on Sepolia and Holesky:

You will have to sign in with Zupass to authorize a faucet drop to any of your addresses. Thank you, pk910 <3

Prizes and Bounties

Track Awards

The track awards are centered around themes that align with our manifesto, and what we believe the industry needs to re-focus on. The winning teams of the track awards receive 7,000 DAI.
  • Defensive Tooling: This track is the right choice for you if you want to hack on tools that enhance security and privacy. It's about building projects that prioritize defense, decentralization, and resilience to create a more secure and freer world.
    Think topics like encryption, counter-surveillance, identity protection, anonymity, anti-identity, security, local data handling, and anything that armors the individual against intrusive data collection practices.
  • Freedom to Transact: This track is for you if you want to ensure that anyone, anywhere, anytime can facilitate unrestricted transactions.
    We're looking for projects that enable people to access and send money, or value, across borders without restrictions, promoting financial inclusion. This track is for those who want to hack on peer-to-peer solutions, build censorship-resistant applications, and ensure that transactions can be private and secure.
  • Social Technologies: This track is all about platforms and tools that enable informed and collective decision-making, transparent governance, and collaboration and coordination among decentralized communities.
    If you want to build credibly neutral systems for voting, governance, and social interaction, and systems that counter disproportionate influence of centralized powers then this track is for you and your team. Other ideas you could hack on are consensus-finding algorithms, sybil resistance, and decentralized social reputation.
  • Infrastructure: The backbone of the revolution. This track is dedicated to the architects and builders laying down the underlying infrastructures that robust distributed public goods need to run efficiently and reliably.
    Projects could include protocol specification and implementations, networking, developer tools, and hardware.

Excellence Awards

Back by popular demand, please welcome the Excellence Awards. The winners of each of these get 5,000 DAI and these are to recognise the following:
  • Best Smart Contracts: Outstanding smart contract code quality and documentation, security and gas-optimization.
  • Best Social Impact: Outstanding positive impact on underserved communities and society as a whole.
  • Best User Experience: Outstanding user experience that does not sacrifice on security, privacy or self-custody.

The Meta Award

We'd like to introduce a new category this year, the Meta Award, as an ode to ETHBerlin being powered by many awesome open-source projects. So for this one we invite you to go meta by building contributions that improve the ETHBerlin experience itself! Projects eligible for this award can either pick from our wishlist of contributions, or can build an entirely new thing that they consider to be a positive impact for future versions of ETHBerlin. The winner of this track will receive 4,000 DAI and DEVCon7 tickets.

The Hacker's Choice Award

A prize to be picked by the ETHBerlin hackers. After the hackathon weekend, hackers will review all the projects and cast their votes for their favorite project. Redistribution of the prize money cannot be the essence of the project. The winner of this award will receive 7,000 DAI.

Help from Mentors

TL;DR
  • To get help ask questions in the Mentor Matrix room: #eb4-mentors:dod.ngo
  • Or go to the Mentor Helpdesk located in the Node Café on the ground floor.
  • Helpdesk opening hours:
    • Friday from hacking start (19:00) until midnight
    • Saturday from 08:00 to midnight
    • Sunday from 08:00 to submission deadline (11:30)

Details

As with all previous ETHBerlins we've made sure to have a team of amazing mentors ready to help you build the best possible projects throughout the weekend. No questions are too small or too big to ask. As a hacker you can find the mentors in person as per the TL;DR above. You can also contact them with any questions you might have in the Matrix room that's also listed in the TL;DR. If you ask the question in the middle of the night you might not get a reply right away, but we will make sure to address it first thing in the morning.

We encourage hackers to help each other out and keep an eye on the mentoring matrix channel. There might be some hackers with very specific expert knowledge and it would be great if this could be shared.

You might also see the mentors throughout the venue. They'll be wearing a button/badge on their shirt saying "Mentor". They're all very friendly so don't hesitate to ask them a question or get their feedback on something.

Submissions

This year thanks to our amazing Kirill, we've built our own tool for submissions and judging. The tool is open source, simple to use and should make the job of judging and tallying scores simple and fast.

If you run into any problems or have any feedback it would be much appreciated if you would open an issue in the github repo.

The general flow for using the tool is as follows:
  • Go to projects.ethberlin.org and sign in with your Zupass credentials to receive your role as "hacker".
  • Create or join an existing team
  • Now you can submit projects and join team.
  • To submit a project click the "Submit a project" button in the top bar.
  • There is a simple template with information you should add, but feel free to add whatever additional information you find relevant for your submission.
  • Make sure to submit everything before the deadline Sunday 26th at 11:30, when submissions close.
  • Once submissions are closed keep an eye on the general matrix channel, where we will provide further instructions for when your team will have to present to the judges.
Some things to keep in mind:
  • Put as much information into the Github, Radicle, or whatever code collaboration platform you use, about the project so that judges and other hackers only need to look in one place to learn as much as possible about the project.
  • Dedicate some time to make a crisp and precice presentation and don't forget to submit it too.
  • Make sure to select the track that fits best to your project.

Judging

Judging Timeline on Sunday

  • 11:30 AM: Hackathon submission deadline
  • 12 PM - 4:30 PM: Pitching sessions
  • Hacking teams will pitch in a 10 min rhythm
  • Judges will have 3 min to pre-review your submission
  • You have 3 min for your pitch
  • 2 min Q&A after the pitch
  • 5:30 PM - 7 PM: Closing ceremony with winner pitches
  • The winning teams of each track, each excellence award and the meta award will present briefly at the closing ceremony. Be prepared to come to the stage and describe what your project does (similar to your pitch for the judges).

When and where do you present in front of the Judges?

Judging takes place on the 1st floor. There are six clearly marked judging rooms located directly next to each other. Volunteers can help you find the way! Once the hacking phase is over and the judging phase begins, you can check the Submissions Tool to find out the room and time for your team's presentation.

Judging Criteria

The 4 Track Awards

You will pitch your project in front of a group of 3 judges. There will be a Technical Judge, a Product Judge, and a Concept Judge. They will each focus on different parts of your project.

Technical Judges:
  • Technical complexity and quality
    • What technical challenges does the project address?
    • Is the code and architecture well-designed and high quality?
  • Implementation and execution
    • Is the code efficient and optimized?
    • Is the codebase clean and maintainable?
  • Functionality
    • How well does the project work?
    • Is the solution complete and functional, or does the team have a clear plan on how they would finish it?
  • Innovation and creativity
    • Does the project use new technologies?
    • Is there a creative approach to problem-solving?
Product Judges:
  • Innovation and creativity
    • Is this something completely new or are there already existing projects working on a similar scope? What is the differentiator?
    • Does the project demonstrate creative problem-solving?
  • Practicality and feasibility
    • Does the project have the potential for real-world impact?
    • Is the implementation feasible in practice?
  • Communication and presentation
    • Is the team able to clearly communicate the project and its value?
Concept Judges:
  • Idea, concept, and vision
    • Does the concept have a strong vision?
    • What is the wow or fun factor of the idea?
    • How well does the project fit the hackathon track?
  • Manifesto and values
    • How well does the project align with the overall theme of the hackathon and with the stated values in the ETHBerlin04 Manifesto?
    • What is the impact and purpose of the project?
The Meta Award

This track is being judged by ETHBerlin core team members. Apart from regular technicality and usability, the Meta Award judges will look at:

  • Improvement of the ETHBerlin experience
    • How does the project improve the overall ETHBerlin experience?
    • Does the project address specific pain points?
    • How well does the project align with the values and goals of ETHBerlin?
  • Practicality and scalability
    • How well does the project integrate with existing tools and infrastructure?
    • How does the project perform under typical hackathon use cases?
  • Creativity
    • How creative is the approach to solving ETHBerlin-specific challenges?
    • Is the project original or does it enhance existing tools in innovative ways?
  • Contributions
    • Does the contribution address a critical issue or add a valuable feature?
    • How will users or developers benefit from this contribution?
    • Is the code well-written, clean, and maintainable?
    • Is the contribution well-documented?
    • How well does the contribution integrate with the existing codebase?
The 3 Excellence Awards

You will be able to select what you are most proud of about your submission: the smart contracts, the social impact or the user experience. A group of expert judges per excellence-award will digitally review and judge the respective projects. You don’t have to pitch in front of the excellence award judges.

After the Hackathon

Voting

In addition, all submissions will be reviewed by you, all ETHBerlin attendees, after the hackathon! Within a one week time window you will be able vote on the overall winner. The voting process will be explained soon.

After party

It would not be ETHBerlin without an after party. Read more.