Toothpick Takes Top Prize In ‘Silicon Beach’ Ethereum Hackathon

Amy Castor

A project called Toothpick took top prize at dAppathon.

After 48-hours of brainstorming and coding, the four-person team behind an Ethereum-based project called Toothpick won the top prize of $4,000 in cryptocurrency at a hackathon in Manhattan Beach over the weekend. 

A hackathon is a sprint-like event were teams of developers race to come up with the next killer app.

In this case, these developers were participating in dAppathon, a hackathon sponsored by BCG Digital Ventures, a corporate venture arm of Boston Consulting Group. The event took place over three days in an area of Los Angeles commonly referred to as “Silicon Beach” due to its high concentration of tech companies. 

The Projects

Toothpick, a decentralized app that empowers small businesses to grow and scale via local micro-influencers, was selected by a panel of four judges. (I was one of those judges). Twenty teams were competing for prizes, and each team had only seven minutes to pitch their idea. 

BCG Digital Ventures

Participants at dAppathon get ready to pitch their ideas.

A second prize of $3,000 in cryptocurrencies was split between two teams: Co|Post, a peer-to-peer delivery service for the developing world, and Billchain, a platform that lets customers manage all their subscriptions from one central location. Those projects were selected in a peer vote by the teams they had just been competing against.

A fourth winning team, You’ve Got ETH, selected by the online community, also walked away with $3,000 in cryptocurrency. That project allows users to send ether, the native currency of Ethereum, to any email address.

Kevin Owocki, one of the developers on the project, explained that blockchain projects often want to “evangelize” a token by sending small amounts to people as a way to get them to start using a currency.

“We wanted to remove all the technical barriers to sending out ether,” he told me.

Hackathons, which lure developers with plenty of food, drinks and prize money, are fertile ground for new ideas to take root. Inspiration for those ideas often comes from personal experience.

For instance, Connor Bowlan, a developer, who was part of the team that worked on Co|Post, got the idea for his team’s project after living in Botswana for six months. While there, he saw how difficult it was to get a package from one village to another. Every package had to go through an intermediary point in some far off city first. 

“In our system, a package can just hop a ride,” he said, as he described what sounded like an Uber for package delivery, where someone heading from village A to village B could simply carry a package with them and earn some money in the process.