Announcing the VeChain Developer Bounties and Application Development Challenge
As VeChain’s mission for 2019 is creating valuable transactions, enabling and building the developer community is one of the critical tasks to achieve it. The VeChainThor public blockchain is designed with mass adoption in mind, which means it is designed for the developer and their users. On top of keeping the Ethereum Virtual Machine to lower the barrier for smart contract development, VeChainThor blockchain is packed with unique features such as
- Proof of Authority (“PoA”) Consensus for scaling and increased security
- Dual-token economic model for projectable expenses
- Multi-party payment protocol (“MPP”) so anyone can get the full value of the technology without the need of a cryptocurrency
- Multi-task transactions (“MTT”) to reduce cost and increase contract flexibility
- Transaction dependency to sync a series of transactions that occur if conditions are met on chain
- On-chain governance for verifiable votes and code is law action plans
All these features aim to ameliorate the blockchain industry and increase adoption by developers and their users. (For more details about VeChainThor blockchain features, please see the GitHub Wiki)
Now users can choose to access VeChain applications (either Connex or web3.js) via the New Sync, an integrated VeChain application browser built by the official team or the Chrome extension — Comet built by Totient Labs, and more to be expected to come from community teams. With the release of Connex v1.0, the native standard interface connecting applications with the VeChainThor blockchain and users, we have already seen some good developments of VeChain applications.
In order to boost the application development and make people aware of VeChainThor blockchain’s features, we are excited to announce three ongoing developer bounties and the Application Development Challenge. This challenge, entitled VeChain Application Development Challenge leading up to the VeChain developer conference — VeChain Summit 2019 scheduled on April 18 at Fort Mason, San Francisco, will have a total reward pool of 40M VETs. Teams will also be showcased by the Foundation and ecosystem builders to various enterprises and funds that are looking to bolster their influence within this space.
1. Application Idea Hunt — let us know your application development idea and plan and be rewarded with 100K — 1M VTHO for an easier start for the development
2. VeChainThor Supercharger — plug in your MPP-enabled application to the VeChainThor Supercharger, a program that sponsors the user transaction fee of your developed application for one month
3. Developer Academy Bounty — share your experiences with application development on VeChainThor blockchain in documentation/scripts/tools that make life easier for the developers that follow
4. Application Development Challenge — 5 favorite applications voted by the community by April 12th and 3 Connex compatible applications selected by the Foundation will be announced in the 1st VeChain developer conference and share a total reward pool of 40M VETs
Join our developer Gitter and Discord and start building now!
DETAILS AND RULES
Developer Bounties
To help developers who want to participate in the VeChain Application Development Challenge, we would like to introduce three developer bounties as follows. They will be available as ongoing bounties, even past the duration of the competition. We are currently working to add more bounties in the future.
1. Application Idea Hunt
Ready to make your creative ideas into applications running on the VeChainThor blockchain? Let us know your idea and plan, and get some VTHO for a boosted start. You could be granted between 100K and 1M VTHO upon on the Foundation Assessment Team’s judgment from the following perspectives.
- The originality of the idea
- Nativeness on VeChainThor blockchain
- Development experience of the team
- Value to the ecosystem
- Plan for product development, user acquisition and expansion
The VTHO granted in this bounty is intended to help with the development and attract initial users. Applications that have completed the development should apply for other bounties and the Application Development Challenge. A submission may not be accepted if it is determined by the Foundation Assessment Team to not contribute to any of the above criteria or is deemed as duplicated, abuse or fake information. The Foundation Assessment Team consists of VeChain’s key technical team and operation team.
Submit your idea and apply for the bounty HERE. If accepted, you will receive an email and the granted VTHO on your submitted address within 5 business days.
2. VeChainThor Supercharger
When you design your application, don’t forget to integrate VeChainThor blockchain features to help you create smoother user experience. Among those features, Multi-party Payment is the most talked about one, as it allows application operator smart contracts or delegated 3rd party addresses to pay for transactions fees on behalf of their users. It significantly helps onboarding users to the application without friction. Exchange sign ups and transaction fees can deter those who have not yet fully engaged with the application or the blockchain protocol.
MPP enables fee delegation at the meta-transaction level, making it secure and convenient for users, application operators, and 3rd party service providers to collaborate. Therefore, to set the example, VeChain Foundation will sponsor the transaction fee of MPP-enabled applications for one month (with the max cap of 3M VTHO per application) starting from a preferred date of the application developer. By this way, an application can cover and delegate its user’s transaction fee to the VeChainThor Supercharger (i.e. sponsor address).
Submit the information about your MPP-enabled application and apply for the bounty HERE. Please note a version of your application with MPP function enabled should be live on the VeChainThor mainnet before you apply for the bounty. The Foundation Assessment Team will verify whether the application has properly integrated MPP before getting in touch with your team.
We reserve the rights not to accept an MPP application or terminate the sponsorship before the bounty ends, if, determined by the Foundation Assessment Team that the submission violates the rules or is deemed as duplicated, abuse or fake information.
3. Developer Academy Bounty
Now that you have the experience with application development on the VeChainThor blockchain, we would like to sincerely invite community developers to help us create and optimize the developer documents, tool sets, and scripts related to your applications and the VeChainThor public blockchain. We see your collaboration as a way to share resources and ideas, and to achieve the developer-friendly ecosystem necessary for a widely used public blockchain.
If you have something, including but not limited to: technical tutorials, technical description documents, self-developed tool/scripts and others, created during the development of application, that you think would be helpful to other community developers please submit HERE.
Based on the quality of the submission, the Foundation Assessment Team will determine acceptance and grant at least 25,000 VET per successful submission. For similar submissions, we will reward those based on their added effort as deemed by the Foundation Assessment Team. Additive improvement submissions to content publicly visible as a result of the Developer Academy Bounty submission can also be submitted to receive a reward as deemed fit by the Foundation Assessment team, such as grammar fixes and general updates. Successful submissions may be incorporated into the upcoming developer portal.
VeChain Application Development Challenge
We hope that the above developer bounties provide the needed support that motivated and opportunistic developers are seeking. Our goal is to provide a boosted start to qualified application development and start using our resources to help you attract users and get exposure to investors and developers to further expand a potential application and business.
We tailor fit our initial bounty programs with a development challenge in mind. As you plan, design, and document your applications, we want to support you along the way. When your application is live on the VeChainThor mainnet, we encourage you to submit it HERE. By doing so you join the Application Development Challenge and will further let more of our community members experience and contribute to your project on top of potentially winning some VET.
In the VeChain Application Development Challenge, both the community and the Foundation Assessment Team will select their favorite applications which will share a total reward pool of 40M VET!
On April 1, a list of submitted applications will be published for community voting. You can still submit the application after April 1, and it will be will added to the list within 24 hours if it does not violate the rules. The community voting will be concluded based on the result at 11:59pm UTC+8, April 12th. Applications submitted after this time will not be eligible for this challenge.
Once the community voting is concluded, the Foundation Assessment Team will evaluate all eligible applications and select the top 3 applications to win the Foundation Awards. The focuses of the evaluation include value to the ecosystem, user experience, originality, nativeness on VeChainThor blockchain and the plan for further development. In addition, only Connex compatible applications are eligible for the Foundation Award and the winners are not eligible for Community Awards.
- 1st prize: 12M VET
- 2nd prize: 8M VET
- 3rd prize: 5M VET
Apart from the Foundation Award winners, the top 5 favorite applications based on the community voting result will win the Community Awards.
- 1st prize: 5M VET
- 2nd prize: 4M VET
- 3rd prize: 3M VET
- 4th prize: 2M VET
- 5th prize: 1M VET
Note: Because the Foundation Award winners are not eligible for the Community Awards, if one of the applications in the top 5 community voting is picked by the Foundation Assessment Team, the next application on the list will be entitled for the Community Award.
All the prizes will be announced during the VeChain Summit 2019 on April 18.
Submitted applications will be added to the VeChain application store that will be launched soon.
Once the Challenge is finalized, be sure to continue taking advantage of our bounty programs as you scale your applications.
Overarching Rules for the Developer Bounty and Application Development Challenge
- A qualified VeChainThor application could be an application, usually web-based or mobile app, that can be accessed by users to interact with the VeChainThor blockchain, e.g. dApps powered by smart contracts, tools or infrastructure useful to the developers, applications integrating VET / VIP180 token payment or VIP181 NFT transfer
- There is no limitation or preference on the category of the applications for the Developer Bounty or Application Development Challenge, the application categories may include but not limited to Business, Finance, Social Networking, Entertainment, Developer tool, Infrastructure Service
- Applications developed before this announcement are eligible, while applications that have previously raised funds through token issuance are not eligible
- Developers own the applications developed and are solely responsible for the legality of the applications in relevant jurisdictions at every stage of the challenge and its completion
- The Awards do not construct any endorsement from VeChain Foundation or the VeChain company to the developed application, its development team, or the security related to the use of the submitted application
- The rewards will be paid in VET or VTHO only, and the participants should check the regulations surrounding the legality of ownership or compensation of digital tokens/ cryptocurrencies in your respective countries of residence
- The Developer Bounties and Application Development Challenge considers a number of variables in determining rewards. Determinations of eligibility, score, rewards and all terms related to an award are at sole and final discretion of the VeChain Foundation Assessment Team assigned by Steering Committee, featuring Sunny Lu (VeChain CEO), Bin Qian (VeChain Lead Blockchain Developer), Jiangliang Gu (VeChain CTO), Peter Zhou (VeChain Chief Scientist), and Kevin Feng (VeChain COO)
- VeChain reserves all rights to amend the conditions without any prior notice in writing and the VeChain’s decisions will be deemed final
- While we do not limit the type of applications submitted, applications fitting the following attributes could be favored by the Foundation Assessment Team in the Developer Bounties and Application Development Challenge due to its value to the ecosystem and alignment with VeChain’s focus and strategy
i) utilizing VeChainThor’s features such as multi-party payment, multi-task transaction, transaction dependency
ii) integrated with Economic (X) Node smart contracts and benefiting X node holders e.g. Node status token management platform, market, or applications leveraging the node status
iii) compatible with Connex
iv) providing infrastructure services which enable other developers or applications
v) integrated with the applications or tokens of VeFam projects
FURTHER READING — VECHAIN DEVELOPER INFORMATION SUMMARY
Overall
Developer Communication Channel
Official Developer Discord
https://discordapp.com/invite/HHvXvUX — for discussion about the dApp development on the VeChainThor blockchain
Official VeChain Gitter
https://gitter.im/vechain/thor — for questions / discussion related to projects in the VeChain official Github that you would like to address to the VeChain core dev team
VeChainThor Blockchain Core
- VeChainThor blockchain source code and deployment guide — download and deploy a VeChainThor full node
- VeChainThor built-in smart contracts and documentation — introduction on the 6 built-in smart contracts in VeChainThor and how to use them
- VeChainThor transaction model — documentation on VeChainThor’s unique transaction structure, fields and features
- VeChainThor block structure — documentation on how VeChainThor defines a block in Golang
- VET/VTHO dual token design — introduction on the VET/VTHO dual token design
- Multi-party Payment (MPP) — introduction on the functions of the MPP which is an unique feature of VeChainThor (Because the transactions on VeChainThor only consume VTHO, when there is no VTHO in the user’s deposit address exchange could set the exchange system address as the payer for the transaction fee to move funds by leveraging the MPP function in VeChainThor)
- VeChainThor RESTful API in various presentation — swagger UI, Thorest, thor.yaml
- Public VeChainThor Node — to facilitate developers to play around and test the VeChainThor
Developer Tools
- Connex — the newly defined standard interface to connect dApps with the VeChainThor blockchain and users, comparable to web3.js. Connex provides a set of well-designed APIs for developers, and with injected Connex Object in web applications they can easily build dApps. Comparing with web3.js, Connex provides streamlined and lightweight methods for dApps. Connex API reference
- Tool instruction — instruction on how to use Java Client SDK or Sync for private key management, building and signing transaction, sending transaction, using MPP function, querying blockchain info and confirming transaction
- Thorify repo and API reference documentation — a Web3 adaptor for VeChainThor RESTful API, Thorify is an extended web3 that sends the request directly to VeChainThor’s RESTful API. So if you are writing applications or scripts executing in Node.js or Browser environment, you should use Thorify
- Web3 gear — a tool to proxy VeChainThor’s RESTful API to ETH JSON-RPC, so if you are writing smart contracts using Remix, Truffle or other tools that use original web3, you should use Web3 Gear
- Java Client SDK — a collection of Java codes to interact with VeChainThor and access console
- Thor-devkit — typescript library to aid dApp development on VeChainThor
- VeChainThor Development Environment Setup — This guide will cover the process of setting up your local environment for developing on the VeChainThor blockchain using the standard web3 stack
- The New Sync — an integrated VeChainThor dApp browser on desktop, compatible with Connex, a newly defined standard interface connecting dApps with the VeChainThor blockchain and users. the New Sync User Guide
- VeForge Explore — explorer for VeChainThor mainnet and testnet
- Comet Compatibility Guide — Comet is the Chrome plug-in that can be used by VeChain dApps. While Comet exposes the both standard (thorified) web3 and Connex API, there are few things to keep in mind. This guide includes requirements for Comet support as well as some best practices
- Morpheus Lab BPaaS — Morpheus Lab provides an integrated development environment compatible with the VeChainThor blockchain
VIP180 token contract address
- VTHO: 0x0000000000000000000000000000456E65726779
- OCE: 0x0ce6661b4ba86a0ea7ca2bd86a0de87b0b860f14
- PLA: 0x89827f7bb951fd8a56f8ef13c5bfee38522f2e1f
- SHA: 0x5db3C8A942333f6468176a870dB36eEf120a34DC
- DBET:0x1b8EC6C2A45ccA481Da6F243Df0d7A5744aFc1f8
- TIC:0xa94a33f776073423e163088a5078feac31373990
VIP 181 token contract address
- VeChainThor Node token: https://github.com/vechain/ThorNode-contracts
