On Monday, the experimental currency Ore was awarded $50,000 in a hackathon supported by the Solana Foundation. The hackathon aimed to identify high-impact projects for Solana’s future. The win comes despite the project majorly disrupting the blockchain in April.
The May 6 “Solana Renaissance Hackathon” was centered around discovering Solana’s upcoming projects with significant impact. It seems that “high-impact” is related to the project’s ability to significantly improve Solana’s adoption rates.
Ore wins Solana hackathon – All the details
Midway through April, the mining operation was terminated due to the overwhelming network load caused by the currency’s mining, which hindered Solana users’ ability to have their transactions included in blocks.
The recent memecoin craze and the abrupt increase in Ore mining transactions were two of the primary causes of Solana’s transaction failure issue in mid-April, which resulted in the initial rejection of over 70% of non-vote transaction requests.
Recent network congestion issues, according to the Solana Foundation, were caused by the high demand for Solana block space and a delay in implementing upgrades associated with its networking stack.
On April 15, Solana developers planned to implement an update that would solve the congestion issue. Despite this, the failure rate of non-vote transactions remains at approximately 62%, per a Dune Analytics dashboard authored by scarn_eth.
Additionally, the team ceased its own mining operations temporarily thirteen days after the system’s April 16 launch in order to optimize a second version. Mining activities have seemingly resumed, as per the information provided on Ore’s website.
Hardhat Chad, the pseudonymous creator of the project, expressed his excitement at receiving the honor but acknowledged that “there’s still a long way to go” before he and the Ore team can offer Solana users a “fast, cheap, private, inflation-proof digital currency everyone can mine.”
The Ore project
Ore is an innovative exploration of implementing the proof-of-work security mechanism on the Solana blockchain. Proof-of-work systems reward miners with native currency for their computational power, which helps secure blockchains against potential attacks. Bitcoin is secured differently from Solana, which uses a combination of proof-of-history and proof-of-stake, the consensus mechanism chosen by Ethereum.
In a demo video, Hardhat Chad, the pseudonymous creator of the project, explained how they rewrote a more egalitarian version of the Bitcoin protocol as a Solana smart contract. Unlike Bitcoin, the project operates on a different system where multiple miners have the opportunity to receive a portion of the network’s block rewards.
This allows for a more inclusive and distributed approach to mining. A new ORE is generated every minute and distributed among miners who have successfully completed their tasks.
Many participants in Solana’s enthusiastic ecosystem couldn’t resist the allure of “Bitcoin on Solana,” leading to a surge in Ore mining transactions that overwhelmed the network. A miner shared a post about sending a large number of transactions without any specific target, hoping that a few would be successful.
The project vanished from sight prior to emerging victorious in the “Solana Renaissance” hackathon, where esteemed individuals in Solana’s ecosystem, such as the chain’s co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, served as judges. Colosseum, an experienced web developer, organizes Solana hackathons, including this one, and also invests in some of the winners.
According to Colosseum, the contest received an impressive number of over 1,000 entries. The Solana Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports Solana’s ecosystem, has become a limited partner in Colosseum’s venture fund.
People who acquired the project’s token that was extracted prior to the cessation are experiencing an increase in their wealth during this period. The price of the token experienced a significant surge of over 90% on Monday following the announcement, as reported by CoinGecko. At the time of writing, it was being traded at approximately $240.
