This past week the DeSo Foundation made the last minute decision to be a sponsor for Miami Hack Week, a week-long hackathon event taking place in what has been one of the most crypto-forward cities in the world.

The Miami Hack Week event itself has grown to be one of the larger Web3-focused hackathons, with many crypto companies like: Solana, Polygon, etc. having a presence at the event alongside other upcoming fintech companies like Ramp.

To help ensure the event was a success, Alex Valaitis was on the ground in Miami giving talks to developers, reviewing hackathon submissions, and spreading the word on DeSo.

Overall the event was extremely successful for DeSo, and we wanted to have Alex highlight some of the key takeaways from his time there.

We need to continue spreading awareness on DeSo

One thing that was quite clear from my time in Miami, was that the vast majority of people still haven’t heard about DeSo yet.

Despite there being a strong Web3 presence at the event, when I gave the talk to a few hundred developers at the opening ceremony very few of them had ever even heard about DeSo before.

On the one hand, this is actually very promising because it means that there are many green pastures for us to still enter. On the flip side, it shows how far we have to go on our GTM approach.

The good news is that Miami Hack Week gave us a platform to talk to thousands of developers throughout the week, and also a clear blueprint for how we can continue to spread the word on DeSo in the future.

DeSo sells itself

Building on this last point, another very promising trend was how quickly developers (and people in general) became interested in DeSo once they did hear about us.

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After the opening ceremony I had a line of people that I stayed to talk with for hours at the event. The excitement that these individuals had once they realized the potential that DeSo provides for building social experiences on-chain was palpable.

This excitement was also evident from the large group of attendees at the 4 hour DeSo workshop the day after the opening ceremony. For this many developers to go from zero awareness to wanting to spend half their working day learning about DeSo is a great sign.

I even had a chance to talk to Anthony Pompliano (aka “Pomp”) in front of a group of developers, and even he admitted that the future would be multi-chain & that putting social on a blockchain is compelling. Hearing this from someone widely considered a “Bitcoin maxi” was extremely promising for DeSo.

The power of the DeSo community

Another takeaway that I wanted to highlight is how strong our DeSo community remains. Without any proactive outreach, Jason Devlin (founder of Cloutcast), Yazin (founder of ChimeIn), and Michael Marra (founder of Entre) all were in attendance at Miami Hack Week and helped pitch the DeSo ecosystem to people throughout the week.

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Jason & Yazin helped answer questions from developers during the workshop, and Michael joined me at the Polygon house to show people the power of DeSo apps firsthand.

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Even Will Laurent (Editor in Chief at Blockster) reached out and set up an interview with me to learn more about DeSo for an upcoming feature he is doing.

I believe the support of these founders was a big reason for why DeSo ended up drawing more attention at the event than other much larger crypto companies in attendance.

Our smart services bet is paying off, especially with Web2 developers

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the week was that our bet on the smart services model seems to be paying off in spades already. Since developers don’t need to learn how to program Solidity or Rust, this made DeSo an attractive blockchain for them to build on.

For this reason, we saw more DeSo-based app entries at the hackathon than Solana, Polygon or Ethereum. 

The quality of Web2 talent building on DeSo was also impressive. Among the winning teams were employees from Google, Microsoft, HackerOne as well as students from MIT.

We believe that bringing in top talent from top tech companies and straight from college campuses will continue to be a winning strategy for DeSo (and one that is largely ignored by other blockchains).

The winning projects

Last but not least, we wanted to highlight the winning teams from the DeSo X Miami Hack Week challenge.

In total we allocated $15,000 in prizes, with $10,000 going to the winning team and an additional $1,000 going to each runner-up.

Winner: DeSo Wrapped

Similar to how Spotify does your music year in review, this app analyzes all of your social content from DeSo apps for the year, then creates a fun video recap that you can then share with your network.

In just a few days, this team implemented DeSo identity + a bunch of endpoints, while also dealing with complex issues like content aggregation and rich media 👏

Runner-up: Nich3.io

The Nich3 app connects to a user's DeSo identity & then leverages end-to-end machine learning to extract traits from user profiles and find unique shared interests between them.

This app truly demonstrates the power of storing social content on-chain.

Runner-up: Passport‍

Passport is a social, gamified city experience powered by DeSo.

It shows city experiences on a map & allows users to 1) like places & see what their friends like & 2) earn points to redeem an exclusive NFT for each place.

Runner-up: Thread Hive

Thread Hive is the starter pack for DeSo creators enabling users to write rich content threads, edit them, schedule posts and draft unfinished posts!

Runner-up: Frills

Frills works with brands who reward their customers post-purchase with NFTs & Diamonds in exchange for engaging and social content.

They plan to use DeSo as the go-to Blockchain network for the brands.

Runner-up: DeSoChats

Built without code by leveraging the @DeSoNoCode institute.

This is awesome new chat application that leverages the power of the DeSo blockchain. It facilitates both private and group chats.

Runner-up: Superwallet

Superwallet solves the problem of mass coin transfers on the DeSo blockchain & makes it a much more seamless experience!

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A huge shout out to everyone who participated in Miami Hack Week both in person and remote.

Whether you won a prize or not, there are always opportunities to keep building and receive $ through development grants and the Octane Fund.

This is just the beginning of our efforts to continue expanding the DeSo ecosystem.