Every Uniswap Labs onsite has its range of activities, from team bonding to workshops to presentations. But everyone’s favorite part is the hackathon, and this summer was no different.
Fueled by pizza, limited sleep, and furious debugging, sixteen projects emerged from the 24-hour hackathon, ranging from an NFT photo booth to a complex MEV hook on Uniswap v4. Out of all the hackathon projects, only one could win the ⭐🦄Golden Unicorn ⭐🦄.
S.O.N.A.R.
What happens when you put a Uniswap Labs protocol engineer and researcher in the same room? Math blogs. And also a useful tool for calculating liquidity depth in Uniswap v3 and v4 pools. SONAR, an acronym for Serious Onchain No-bullshit Amount Renderer, calculates the market depth for an asset's liquidity within a specific price range. You can ask questions like how much USDC can I buy without moving the price more than 1%? SONAR has use cases for lending protocol risk management, routing heuristics, and onchain market liquidity comparisons.
Unisnap
In a first for a Uniswap hackathon, the Unisnap team brought the hardware. Unisnap is a true-to-life NFT photobooth --- a crazy idea with an equally dramatic story involving a smashed car window, heavy machinery, and a U-Haul.
Unisnap was a two-part project. One team, decked out in safety gear, brought out the chop saw to construct the photobooth's wooden frame. The other team hacked together the software that let anyone scan their Uniswap wallet using UwU Link, snap a pic on an iPad, and mint it as an NFT. Unisnap was definitely a crowd favorite.
Backrunning hooks
With Uniswap v4 fresh in everyone's mind after our recent announcement, our cracked team of interns designed a hook that captures arbitrage after a swap and distributes profits back to the LPs instead of to backrunning MEV arbitrageurs. The project's implementation uses the afterSwap hook to execute a flashswap between three Uniswap pools to profit off the arbitrage, then distributes the profits among LPs or swappers.
TicketBlaster
Finally, we have our ⭐🦄Golden Unicorn ⭐🦄 winners.
Ticketing is ripe for disruption with the string of scams, scandals, and scalpers. Blockchain and NFTs unlock ownership of digital assets and let people exchange them in open and fair markets. The Ticketblaster team built an end-to-end NFT ticketing system that venues can use alongside the Uniswap mobile wallet. Fans can use their Uniswap wallet to display a QR code for their NFT tickets, which they can sign in-app to prove ownership. The venue system can scan the QR code, verify ownership, and mark attendance on the backend.
Other hacks
We've highlighted just a few projects above, but there were many more:
- User-defined privacy controls: Lets users set their privacy stances on ENS and makes it easy for apps to fetch those policies.
- UniATM: Convert physical dollar bills to stablecoins with the Uniswap wallet.
- Hooks Registry: A fork of Token Lists, a community-led initiative to improve discoverability, reputation, and trust in Uniswap v4 hooks.
- Meme in your pocket: A Uniswap wallet feature that displays a glowing green or fiery red unicorn horn, depending on how your portfolio is doing that day.
- TokenAlert: Customizable token price alert push notifications on the Uniswap mobile wallet.
- Uniswap Pink: A premium subscription for the Uniswap wallet to personalize it with custom themes and communities.
- Shadowy Super Team: Reducing production cost, increasing development speed, and having greater backend flexibility by using a backend monorepo with SST.
- Governance Attack: A financial game based on governance voting.
- Puzzle: A puzzle game for onchain rewards and promotion.
- Clippy Corn: A clippy-like chatbot on the Uniswap app. Using the ChatGPT DaVinci model, the chatbot trained on Uniswap help center articles to help users.
- Stedding: Onchain allowlist for safe web domains.
- Curvature: Musings on the curvature of AMMs.