In mid-September, the Filecoin, IPFS, and Protocol Labs communities came together to bring down the curtain on the Browsers 3000 Hackathon (opens new window) at the official closing ceremony. Browsers 3000 was a six-week hackathon that lasted from July to August. Over 30 projects building on Filecoin and IPFS joined the hackathon to iterate, test, and pitch their solutions to modernize “the browser” for the decentralized web3 world that is coming soon.
At the culmination of the event, three startups were recipients of a total of $18,000 in prizes. You can watch the full closing ceremony (opens new window), including presentations of the winners and many other amazing projects that participated in the hackathon.
Without further delay, here are the winners of the 2021 Browsers 3000 Hackathon!
# First Place: NetSepio
The recipient of the $10,000 first place prize was NetSepio (opens new window), a browser extension that helps detect security threats like malware, spyware, spam, and more.
NetSepio provides a safe and secure internet browsing experience through data decentralization that empowers individuals and companies to use this data in their decision making. The NetSepio browser extension allows users to register votes for websites or domains that they are visiting, and label them with certain categories.
Website users can see reports of malware, adware, phishing, and so on — and can report the website for having unsafe content as well. NetSepio uses smart contracts to store the voted ratings and labels for websites and leverages the IPFS Ceramic network for storing metadata.
Learn more about NetSepio: Devpost (opens new window) | Documentation (opens new window) | Github (opens new window)
# Second Place: Blockforge
The recipient of the $5,000 second place prize was Blockforge (opens new window), a web3 site builder with a graphic user interface, which will also host your website on IPFS and Filecoin with cryptographic proofs — free for 365 days!
Blockforge aims to increase web3 adoption by launching a well-designed, user-friendly drag-and-drop website builder for the blockchain ecosystem. Websites created with Blockforge are uploaded to Estuary (opens new window) (and thus IPFS and Filecoin) and signed by the user.
Blockforge verifies signed messages and content is converted into a SHA256 hash so that users of the website can personally verify the authenticity of the website moving forward.
Learn more about Blockforge: Devpost (opens new window) | Test the App (opens new window)
# Third Place: IPFS WebGL Gaming
The recipient of the $3,000 third place prize was IPFS WebGL Gaming (opens new window), an IPFS-based, open-source solution to WebGL, which currently powers more than half of the top 100 websites.
Traditionally, a WebGL program will download the WebGL page and the WebGL data (similar to gaming metadata) from a remote server. With IPFS WebGL, the program redirects the WebGL data to IPFS, and IPFS serves it directly to the browser.
This redirect ensures that the metadata remains available through IPFS, and removes the retrieval of data being limited by bandwidth. What’s up next for IPFS WebGL Gaming? THey plan to develop the IPFS redirection as a Chrome plug-in, to make it available on any WebGL pages.
Learn more about IPFS WebGL Gaming: Devpost (opens new window) | Test it Out (opens new window)
Browsers 3000 saw many other innovative and ambitious submissions of applications, websites, browser extensions, libraries, and other projects, all based on IPFS and Filecoin concepts. The future looks bright for web3 and it's an exciting time to be involved in these communities. Stay tuned to the IPFS Blog (opens new window), Filecoin Blog (opens new window), and Twitter (opens new window) for announcements about more hackathons and events happening soon!