This past weekend, the University of Waterloo Blockchain Club held its inaugural hackathon, Olympihacks. With 205 hackers participating IRL, 38 projects submitted in total, and seven projects sponsoring, Axelar was thrilled to support the first ever Olympihacks!

The hackathon was a success. Sergey Gorbunov, Axelar co-founder, delivered a technical keynote and participated in a roundtable discussion during the opening ceremony, and Axelar's head of developer relations, Stephen Fluin, hosted an interactive interchain workshop. With that, a total of eight teams got started building to claim the Axelar hackathon bounties.

Axelar’s track challenged hackers to use General Message Passing (GMP) to build an interchain-native application that would interact with contracts across multiple chains using Axelar GMP. The Axelar prize bounties totaled 4,000 USDC to the top three teams. The winning submissions ranged from an estate-planning service to an application that combined AI and Axlear to send interchain messages and tokens, and mint NFTs across 13 chains!

Check out the Olympihacks Axelar bounty winners:

Grand Prize: InterPal

The Grand Prize winning team on the main Olympihacks track was built using Axelar!

InterPal is a chatbot platform that offers interchain token functionality as well as the ability to mint and manage NFTs (non-fungible tokens) through chat. Users can interact with the chatbot to send messages and complete token transactions across EVM and Cosmos chains (enabled by Axelar), as well as generate depositAddresses using the AxelarSDK. Additionally, they can create, store and manage their NFTs with a seamless and user-friendly experience. InterPal enables decentralized file storage using IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), Jackal Protocol and Hedera. Users can securely store their files on the decentralized network, ensuring data integrity and reducing reliance on centralized platforms. This decentralized approach empowers users to have greater control over their files, promoting data privacy and autonomy. InterPal's integration of interchain general messaging and depositing, NFT management and decentralized file storage provides a comprehensive solution for users seeking all functionalities in a single platform.

Try it out and see just how easy InterPal makes interchain.

First Place: Glue

Glue introduces abstraction contracts on target chains. Inheriting from AxelarGateway, these contracts allow developers to extend the reach of their own contracts across multiple blockchains. End users, who own assets on their preferred chains, can call these Glue abstractions directly, only needing to pass the dApp name and the desired function. Glue capitalizes on Axelar's General Message Passing (GMP) to route the user's payload back to the proxy contract on the primary chain. This proxy contract acts like a master controller, deciphering each user call from the abstraction and directing it to the respective main contracts of the dApp.

Check out the full submission and dive into the code.

Second Place: Intergalactic PioNEARing with Axelar

This cutting-edge technology is enabled by the release of Aurora Engine 2.9.0 on April 21st 2023, which allows Near XCC cross-contract calls from within Aurora EVM. We combine this capability with the power of Axelar GMP to allow users in any EVM or Cosmos chain to make a cross-chain call to NEAR smart contracts. To showcase this technique, we developed an intergalactic themed passport dApp which allows users to gain a stamp in their passport for each chain they use along the way. Once the space traveler makes it all the way to NEAR, a celebratory social media post is created on Near Social, a smart contract on the NEAR blockchain. Overall, a smart contract on Avalanche (or any other Axelar-supported chain) makes a successful Interchain Message and Cross-Chain Call to a smart contract in the NEAR blockchain.

See the flow for yourself and how they built it here.

Third Place: BeSafe

BeSafe is a secure and trustless cross-chain estate-planning service for any EVM-compatible chain on the Axelar network. It allows individuals to seamlessly make estate plans for assets across multiple blockchains, ensuring their loved ones are taken care of in the future. When the time comes to transfer assets, the individual's chosen beneficiaries will be able to withdraw assets using predefined rules after a certain period of time, without needing to come to agreement with other beneficiaries or third parties. In this way, BeSafe fosters trust and confidence in the inheritance process.

Learn more about the project here.