ZecHub | Build With Us! Join the Hackathon! 🚀
Hello, Zcashers. 🙌
We believe many of you are already aware of the news about our Hackathon and are participating. However, this article is a call for those who want to build on Zcash but are still unfamiliar with the process.
On Wednesday, August 29, we gathered on X to talk about the history of Zcash, tools, and usability. Pacu was our guest and explained how to use these resources effectively, joined by Dismad and Squirrel as host.
If you’re interested in listening back the community call, check out the recording on YouTube. If you prefer short clips, we posted some of them in a thread on X.
That said, let's dive in!
What should I do to participate?
First things first: Visit the Hackathon Website. It shows a countdown to the end of the event as well as presenting all contest rules, guides for eligible submissions and links to documentation.
To begin you’ll need to either run a Zebra node with lightwalletd or get started with Zingo-CLI. Visit our Developers Page & follow our step-by-step guide to launch your own Zebra node.
What’s Zebra? It’s a full node written entirely in Rust by the Zcash Foundation and the future successor to Zcashd, which is written in C++. Click here to check out the Zebra Book.
Next up: you can use RPCs to let apps and wallets interact with the Zcash protocol programmatically, giving you tons of flexibility for what you want to build.
And finally: we have Shade Agents, multichain, AI-powered smart contracts, fully verified on-chain and designed to eliminate single points of failure. They use NEAR’s chain signatures for decentralized key management and “worker agents” running in secure TEEs to access off-chain data and make decisions using state-of-the-art AI models.
Sounds less intimidating now, right? 🙂
Step Two
Now it’s time to build your Zcash app! 🛠️
With Zcash’s available tools, you can unleash your creativity and design something that combines usability, innovation, and privacy.
This could be anything: games, messaging apps, or any idea where privacy can play a key role. 💡
In the 2024 Hackathon, the winner was James Katz with Zebra Racing, a web app where you place shielded ZEC bets on a Zebra race. The runner-up built a messaging app powered by Zcash encrypted memos as a proof of concept (PoC), demonstrating fast payments processing and Zcash integration as an everyday messaging platform.
The goal of this Hackathon is to bring new ideas into the ecosystem no matter the use case.
Prizes
🥇1st: 50 ZEC
🥈2nd: 35 ZEC
🥉3rd: 15 ZEC
Voting
The voting will be public, hosted by the ZecHub DAO through a poll on the Zcash Discord server. Only 16 days left.
TL;DR:
🚀 ZecHub Hackathon is live!
🔧 Step 1: Run a Zcash node, or install Zingo-CLI, explore RPCs & Shade Agents to start building.
🛠️ Step 2: Build anything; games, messaging apps, tools etc. as long as it interacts with Zcash mainnet.
🏆 Prizes: 1st – 50 ZEC | 2nd – 35 ZEC | 3rd – 15 ZEC
🗳 Voting: Public via ZecHub DAO poll on Zcash Discord. 16 days left!
🔗 Access https://hackathon.zechub.wiki/ for more details
