Milestone 3 Proposal: Polkadot x EasyA Hackathons at Harvard and in London (#60DaysOfPolkadot)

Hey Everyone!

We’re excited to post up our referendum for our successful completion of Milestone 3! We would like to express our gratitude to everyone who gave their feedback on our original referendum. We have incorporated your comments into our report as well as the below summary. If you’re new to this referendum, this report is therefore fully comprehensive, but you can also review our earlier referendum and the original comments here.

Background context

This referendum is the third milestone in a detailed, multi-phase initiative that started under Gov1. Details for this milestone were discussed in our original discussion post here, with the precise milestone and allocation breakdown here. Our first milestone was approved here and our second milestone was approved here. This third milestone is to cover the costs EasyA incurred in hosting the in-person hackathons at Harvard and in London.

We are committed to bringing more builders into the Polkadot ecosystem and building on the huge momentum we've created with #60DaysOfPolkadot. We have already had huge demand from all the parachains involved to continue our work, as well as from new ones who heard about it along the way. Their only question is: ‘When is the next one’! We can’t wait to continue working together with all the parachains and Polkadot teams to grow the ecosystem!

We have addressed all the community feedback comprehensively in our full and updated report. However, for ease of reading we have summarised the answers to the two most commonly asked questions here.

1. Where are the hackathon teams now: Case studies

We are delighted to share that teams from both our Harvard and London hackathons are continuing to build. In just four short months these teams are already becoming valuable members of the Polkadot ecosystem. Three teams are particularly worth highlighting.

a. Flybloc: http://www.flybloc.com/

Created by Harvard PhD Yefei Jin, Flybloc came out of our Polkadot hackathon at Harvard. Since the hackathon, they have successfully recruited even more stellar team members, and now have one of the strongest teams we’ve ever seen: their successful previous exits are valued at over $1 billion. Their CTO is a former VP at Algorand, and their team has deep experience building successful startups. They are building the future of Web3 brand engagement, leveraging AI. They have received grant funding from Massachusetts-based non-profit Qubic labs, and will be raising venture capital funding this Fall.

b. DotIAM: https://www.dotiam.com/

Led by Tom Rowbotham, a full-time software engineer at one of the UK’s fastest growing startups, Gousto, DotIAm first launched their idea for decentralised KYC built on Polkadot at our Polkadot hackathon in London. They have now been successfully executing on their roadmap, and have received grant funding from Astar via the Unstoppable Grants.

c. Aegis Protocol: https://www.aegisprotocol.io/ 

Harvard Computer Scientists Ethan Tan and Douglas Yang first launched Aegis Protocol at our Polkadot hackathon at Harvard, winning first place. They have continued to build on it since, making huge progress over this summer, connecting with ecosystem teams and projects to iterate on their vision to build decentralized dispute arbitration to safeguard crypto users. They have now added two members to their team (from MIT and Duke) and are planning to raise venture capital funding for their startup, alongside applying to join accelerators. Their deck is publicly available here: https://docsend.com/view/vihm997vknj43gtv

We have included more of the hackathon teams in our full report below!

1. Why not go to the events bounty

For the hackathons themselves, we recognise that these might fit within the events bounty. However, in consultation with the ecosystem teams (including one of the curators of the Polkadot events bounty) we reached the consensus that overall #60DaysOfPolkadot would best fit as a referendum under this treasury track.

The main reason for this is that our #60DaysOfPolkadot campaign was not purely events. #60DaysOfPolkadot was a fully comprehensive developer acquisition campaign. It involved EasyA’s content team creating written material for developers to learn about Polkadot and the parachains, EasyA’s engineering team integrating it into the EasyA app, and a full campaign on social media to grow developer awareness. The app was also tightly integrated with the hackathons themselves, such that it doesn’t make sense to split the referenda into two different ones (one for the app and one for the hackathons). The full scope of #60DaysOfPolkadot is available in the original discussion post as well as Milestone 1 and Milestone 2 which were all approved by the Council in a detailed multi-part proposal under Gov1.

In short, the engineering and educational content-creation aspects of this #60DaysOfPolkadot campaign mean that the events bounty is not the best fit. Under Gov1, this was agreed and approved.

Progress Summary

As an executive summary, we have now successfully achieved Milestone 3 (holding the two in-person Polkadot hackathons in the US and UK) including surpassing our KPIs! As outlined in our Milestone 1 and 2 report, by the end of those two milestones we had collected key feedback from developers and parachain/project teams, and created the challenges to get developers building on them in the EasyA app!

In this milestone, we held two spectacular hackathons at Harvard University (in Boston, USA) and in London (UK) which attracted top developers both from within the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond, with Web3 enthusiasts keen to learn more about Polkadot attending and hacking.

Our #60DaysOfPolkadot campaign (which we’re continuing to run) has to-date brought over 40,000 developers to build in the Polkadot ecosystem via the EasyA in-app crash course. The sheer number of builders meant we were in the fortunate position to be able to select the very best developers to attend our two IRL hackathons. As a result, at the hackathons we had founders backed by a16z and YC, with multiple previous exits under their belts, as well as professional software engineers all coming together to create some of the best projects we’ve ever seen. In addition, we had a strong focus on students too, who came from nearby Harvard, MIT, Yale and Brown, and even as far away as from UChicago, Georgia Tech and Stanford. These students are the key to unlocking the next generation of Web3 builders, and they were inspired by the opportunities unlocked by Polkadot. Many of these brilliant teams are continuing to build on Polkadot after the hackathon.

What did it look like in numbers? In summary, we brought hundreds of new developers into the Polkadot ecosystem through these two hackathons:

Polkadot x EasyA Hackathon at Harvard (17-18 June, 2023):

Hackers: 300 Final dApps/projects created: 35 Colleges/companies represented: 45 Social media impressions: 1.5M+

Check out the final video summary for the hackathon at Harvard here!

Polkadot x EasyA Hackathon in London (24-25 June, 2023):

Hackers: 250 Final dApps/projects created: 36 Colleges/companies represented: 38 Social media impressions: 1M+

Want to see the lines for the hackathon that stretched all the way down the road? Here’s the wrap-up video for the London hackathon here!

At both hackathons, participants attended world-leading workshops held by Polkadot experts such as Kevin Neilson (Developer Relations at Moonbeam), Dave Bean (COO of Gear), and Kahori Razzell (UX at Astar). They received 24/7 support, both at a code-level and also in preparing for their presentations at the final round of selection!

We were keen to involve as much of the ecosystem as possible, so in addition to the Polkadot parachains and projects whom we got developers building on around the world via the EasyA app, we also had the pleasure of hosting Moonbeam, Gear and Astar in-person. Each of them held their own track at the hackathons too, which was a massive success; this enabled developers to see the strength of the Polkadot ecosystem in-person as well as the vibrant technologies they could leverage beyond just the Polkadot relay chain itself.

In conclusion, the excitement created about Polkadot by these two hackathons was incredible. We put a huge amount of effort into encouraging developers to continue building in the Polkadot ecosystem after the hackathon, and are currently supporting several teams with making connections within the ecosystem so that they can thrive (e.g. get technical expertise, know-how and funding)! This will ensure these two hackathons support the long-term growth of the Polkadot ecosystem!

Full Progress Report

If you want to dive into the details of the hackathons, we’ve put everything together into this full report here!

This includes the projects, budget allocation, pictures and everything else!

Milestone 3 Requested Allocation Breakdown Summary

Demonstrating EasyA’s commitment to the Polkadot ecosystem and respect for treasury spending that fully benefits the community, we have already paid for the costs of hosting these two hackathons ourselves; this was required for them to go ahead as scheduled and to create hype amongst builders in the run-up to Polkadot Decoded.

Now that the community has had time to review and discuss our proposal in our discussion post which we posted up in July here (as well as our original Milestone 3 referendum here) we are now making this treasury proposal to request reimbursement for our costs in holding the two hackathons of $220,000.* As EasyA have already paid for the costs of the hackathons, this is a request for reimbursement, in accordance with the community’s wishes for proposals to achieve their goals first and request reimbursement retrospectively.

*DOT amount calculated via EMA7 on 25 Oct 2023 at GMT+0 1000hrs: 1 DOT ~ USD$4.018. USD$220,000 ~54,753.61 DOT.

As explained above, details for this milestone were discussed in our original discussion post here, with the precise milestone and allocation breakdown here. Our first milestone was approved here and our second milestone was approved here. This third milestone is to cover the costs EasyA incurred in hosting the in-person hackathons at Harvard and in London.

Long-term Sustainability

We are strongly committed to the long-term sustainability of the Polkadot ecosystem, and have the greatest respect for treasury spend. This is a bootstrap, where the treasury is helping to fill the gap while the Polkadot ecosystem is still nascent. Since our first Polkadot hackathon in 2022, we have already made great progress towards this long-term financial sustainability. For example, as part of this milestone, we engaged with the ecosystem projects themselves (Moonbeam, Astar, Gear etc). These ecosystem teams supported both with funding (for prizes) and also in their expertise and human costs, covering the costs of both their staff and also their travel to the hackathons (in the case of our Harvard hackathon, even their flights from San Francisco to Boston). This was a very powerful step which saved the treasury significant costs. As the Polkadot ecosystem grows stronger, we see more ecosystem teams like Moonbeam, Astar and Gear supporting these initiatives. In other words, we will not need to rely on Polkadot treasury funding forever.

If you have any questions at all, please do feel free to comment them here! We were thrilled to host these hackathons for the community, and would love to share more about their success with everyone!

-- Phil, Dom (EasyA Co-Founders) and the EasyA Team!