Marlin teams up with Binance to launch the Build for India hackathon cum accelerator program

We’re elated to be partnering with Binance Chain in the launch of the Build for Bharat Accelerator Program, an initiative by Polaris to help further innovation and drive adoption in the Indian blockchain ecosystem. For the non-natives, Bharat, the Hindi word for India, is a legendary king from the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata! 

Home to the second largest blockchain developer base in the world, the program will nurture projects by individuals or teams at different stages of their product lifecycle – proof of concept, minimal viable product (MVP) or innovative use case ideation. We’re joined by infrastructure providers Google Cloud and Ankr with Band as an oracle solution in this effort.

The accelerator, spread over a 3 month course, will award rewards from a pool of over INR 30,00,000 with winning teams getting an opportunity to be incubated by Polaris and receive mentorship from industry experts, founders, Binance and its ecosystem comprising of Binance Chain, Binance Cloud, Binance Launchpad, Binance DEX, and more.

Marlin is happy to support projects that use it for networking and/or build the ecosystem around it. In this endeavour, a sum of USD 20,000 is being offered to teams that use or augment Marlin. Additionally, an opportunity to receive income streams in perpetuity in the form of a dev-share is made available for any feature additions that lead to new cash flows into the Marlin ecosystem. Some ideas/startups we are excited about are listed below:

Decentralized Twitch

Liverpeer strives to make compute-heavy transcoding tasks accessible to small streamers. AWS for compute is expensive for many, but so is its CDN solution CloudFront. Premium CDNs such as Akamai are even costlier and furthermore prone to censorship - YouTube’s midstream abruption of several crypto events being one of many examples. Building a decentralized live streaming platform would thus allow diversity in content while also making it extremely accessible in cost and revenue sharing models. Some additional features that such a platform could include are:

  1. Integrated end-to-end encrypted chat
  2. NFT emotes
  3. Micropayment based subscriptions

Bonus bounty: We’d love to augment OpenWeaver with transcoding solutions at the edge. Thus, integration of LivePeer or a similar custom developed protocol in OpenWeaver would be very desirable. Do get in touch if development of verifiable compute solutions is of interest to you.

Peer-to-Peer multiplayer games

Multiplayer games generally rely on a central server to resolve conflicts amongst state updates of players. However, such centralized games can be operated in a purely decentralized manner by randomly choosing players within the game as a leader and rotating them in intervals. We’d love to see development of such gaming architectures that:

  1. use OpenWeaver for low-latency state updates amongst players spread across the globe as opposed to local/regional gaming congregations
  2. enable spectator mode for a real-time viewer experience
  3. require no central server with conflicts resolved amongst peers in a decentralized way and usage of different NFT game item

Data marketplaces

We still believe in the potential of micropayments and blockchains to enable direct exchange of data in decentralized marketplaces. Some such exchanges are required to happen with extremely low-latency while some others require confidentiality and censorship resistance as well. Thus, we’d be happy to see marketplaces that use Marlin to connect buyers and sellers of streams of data like exchange price updates, sensor data, newswires and social media feeds be built. It would be even more interesting if such exchanges require certain transformations or filtrations with OpenWeaver be used to enable such computations at the edge.

Web 3 infrastructure

We foresee a number of crypto businesses that can directly build on OpenWeaver which include:

  1. Relay networks like FIBRE, FALCON, Bloxroute etc
  2. Centralized, partially decentralized or completely decentralized API services like Infura
  3. DeFi and mempool analytics and low-latency synchronization services

Bonus bounty: In addition, we’ll be happy to sponsor bounties for OpenWeaver integrations with blockchains other than Ethereum

Decentralized zoom or hopin

India’s wechat ban has shown how susceptible platforms are to censorship. Similar to the Twitch idea, it would be interesting to develop a virtual venue for conferences that mirror a variety of real world venues with big auditoriums, rooms and small tables, hackerspaces, private rooms, exhibition areas, etc. A number of such platforms exist in VR with several bitcoin talks, workshops, dinner nights having been hosted in the past. Such a supercharged Airmeet could use OpenWeaver for video and audio conferencing and chats with storage and compute if required happening at the edge. Could such a platform be made completely serverless?

For more details and registration information, check out the detailed article from Binance.

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