livestakes

We found a way to make hackathon winners make more money. Leveraging betting markets, we enabled speculators and hackathon fans to bet on hackers they believe will win specific tracks (Infrastructure, DeFi, Gaming, Social, AI). This model creates a parallel betting pool to the original hackathon prize pool. Each team records a pitch video showcasing their project and strategy. These videos help bettors make informed decisions, displayed alongside real-time odds and hacker profiles showing past performance. Users can hover over team names to see win rates, specialties, and track records. When prize winners get announced, 80% of the parallel pool gets distributed to bettors who won and the other 20% gets distributed to the winner hackers. That way hackers make more, and bettors can speculate on their favourite hackers. This model not only drives extra capital to talent, but also creates attention for hackathon organizers. Aspiring judges and angel investors can test their judgment - if they bet correctly, it builds their track record of spotting talent early. This proven track record becomes valuable for joining startup schools and supporting founders early in their journey.

How it's Made

• Our flow collects team data and video submissions from hackers who visit our booth. Each team records a 30-60 second pitch video explaining their project and chosen track.

• Backend assigns unique IDs to each team and submits all team IDs in arrays organized by track to our smart contracts deployed on Flow. Videos are uploaded to IPFS with hashes stored in the contract.

• Backend initiates the betting period by calling startBetting() on the contract. Users can now visit livestakes.fun, browse teams, watch pitch videos, and place bets by clicking the "Place Bet" button.

• To place a bet, users connect their wallet and sign a transaction containing their bet amount in FLOW and selected team ID. The transaction is submitted directly to the contract which updates odds based on total betting volume.

• Our smart contract automatically calculates and displays real-time odds for each team based on the ratio of bets. The getPools() function returns current pool sizes and getOdds() returns odds for each team.

• When judging ends, the backend calls closeBetting() to prevent new bets. After winners are announced, our admin wallet calls setWinners() with verified team IDs. This creates an on-chain record of results.

• The admin then triggers distribute() which sends 20% of each track's pool to winning teams and 80% to successful bettors. This manual verification step ensures accuracy during our beta phase. (Note: We chose manual distribution for the hackathon to focus on the core innovation - creating parallel prize pools. Automation is a solved problem we'll implement post-hackathon).

• The getLeaderboard() function returns betting performance for all users, showing ROI and successful picks. This data is displayed on our site, helping bettors and aspiring judges & angels build their track record. Consistent winners can showcase their talent-spotting ability to startup schools and accelerators.

We plan to take this to all hackathons and startup schools globally.