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IBC Ideathon Space Highlights — IBC for Everyone
IBC Ideathon Space Highlights — IBC for Everyone recaps the live X session hosted by the ICF’s Robb Stack. Meet some of the Ideahacker’s Guide to IBC judges innovating with IBC, find out what they’re building, and the types of ideas they’re looking for from the Ideathon. You have until October 27 to submit your idea and you don’t have to be a developer to take part! Anyone with a background in blockchain and a willingness to learn the basics of IBC has a chance of winning prizes and developing their idea at the IBC Incubator Istanbul in 2025.
Interchain Projects Innovating with IBC
Osmosis Interchain DEX
Osmosis is the interchain DEX enabling people to swap and trade assets across IBC-enabled networks in the interchain and beyond. Aaron Kong is the Growth and Strategy Lead at Osmosis and an Ideathon judge. He says, “Osmosis was the first to put together the need for exchanging assets and baking in IBC with that, so it was the first DEX to bring IBC to market.” When asked what makes the protocol so awesome, he says it’s the people behind it. “We have a GigaChad team on the foundation side and the community ecosystem are huge contributors.”
Osmosis offers one of the best DEX experiences in the industry but Aaron says this hasn’t always been the case. “It has been a long journey, but the product side has pretty much hit its endgame over the last six months.” One of Osmosis’ keys to success is an unwavering commitment to improving the user experience. The team has worked tirelessly to fix bugs and roll out features to ensure the best speed and execution and the least possible friction for users.
Osmosis is also developing the Polaris token portal, focusing on unifying the user experience across chains. Aaron says, “The name of the game for Polaris is the best UX that you don’t even know you need right now because you’re so used to the sh** UX across the entire DeFi industry.” He says the DeFi space is heavily fragmented, creating a lot of friction for users transacting across multiple ecosystems and chains. “Polaris connects all these, removes those barriers, and ensures that these walled gardens of ecosystems can just be abstracted away.”
Aaron’s Tips for Ideathon Submissions
Osmosis recently launched smart accounts, which bring automation, one-click trading, multi-key, and multi-device support. “If you want your account easily accessible from five different devices, it makes it 10 times easier,” he says, “which also makes onboarding easier.” There’s also an account recovery service that users can opt to use or not, improving crypto custody.
With Osmosis focused on chain abstraction and user experience, what ideas would Aaron like to see from Ideathon submissions?
“What do we want? So basically, what if you could do everything with smart accounts, but you can tie that into other ecosystems? I think that would probably be the next big unlock. Make things easier for trading or onboarding, or even potentially baking in actual apps. If you could one-click trade straight into some kind of lending protocol or perps from another chain that would be really cool.”
Akash Super Cloud
Akash Network is a pioneering decentralized cloud computing platform disrupting traditional centralized cloud infrastructure. By leveraging blockchain technology through its decentralized marketplace, Akash connects server owners with users who need computational resources and hosting applications. Ideathon Judge Greg Osuri is the CEO of Overclock Labs and one of the founders of Akash Network. He’s been in the interchain ecosystem for “a very long time” and Akash was one of the first Cosmos SDK chains, pioneering interchain growth with the first IBC transfer between Akash and Cosmos Hub.
Akash developed early using Tendermint (now CometBFT). None of the Cosmos SDK modules existed back then so in tandem with building the decentralized cloud, the team had to build its own module stack. Greg admits that “Akash modules were not as stable as the Cosmos SDK because while we were building modules, we also had to build the cloud.” Eventually, the team decided to delete their modules and “thousands of lines of code” and switch to Cosmos SDK, a clear sign of knowing how (and when) to play to your strengths when developing a product
So what exactly is a supercloud? “Essentially what the name suggests, it is a cloud that sits on other clouds, creating the supercluster. Cloud-capable compute can join this massive supercluster and offer computation resources to tenants that want to consume them. That’s what a supercloud really means,” Greg says. “The biggest benefit of using Akash is that it makes an application unstoppable. It ensures that the user always has the best possible price because it makes providers compete to provide users the best price.”
Greg’s Tips for Ideathon Submissions
Greg tells the story of a closed-source Akash competitor who claimed to have “four times more A100s than Meta,” an outlandish and unverifiable claim. The project received $30 million in funding but none of its claims were verifiable and turned out not to be true. Greg says it’s much easier to make a profit with closed-source code in a centralized environment, but that’s not why we’re building this industry.
“My biggest request to people who are building in this space is be transparent, be open… build open source. Keep it true. Better remember why we are building what we’re doing.”
Greg has been working on Akash for 10 years already and admits he didn’t expect it to take so long. He says:
“The best advice is to set the expectations straight. It is a long journey to get to anywhere. Most people don’t see success in the first or second year so prepare yourself to make the commitment. If not, it’s probably not worth pursuing down the line… Ideas that are moonshots require commitment without which there is no success.”
Noble — Digital Asset Issuance
Another project showcasing the power of IBC, Noble was built to bring native assets to the interchain and help solve liquidity fragmentation across the broader ecosystem, beginning with Circle’s popular stablecoin USDC. Focusing on security and ease of access, Noble facilitates ecosystem entry for asset issuers by abstracting the complexities away. “We have one very, very specific use case and that is stablecoin issuance within the broader IBC ecosystem,” explains Ideathon judge Jelena Djutic, CEO and co-founder of Noble.
She says the main reason for Noble’s success is because “Noble is very IBC aligned… We look at IBC as one interoperability primitive among several and make sure that users can move USDC in a very one-click way. We built USDC on Noble in a way that makes it really straightforward to send your USDC from Noble to Osmosis, to Akash, to dYdX, always preserving the fungibility of the asset.” This involved a lot of work under the hood integrating Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol on Noble, the first non-EVM implementation of CCTP.
Beyond USDC, Noble is in what Jelena calls “the second phase of its lifecycle,” now working with Monerium to bring EURe, the first authorized stablecoin in Europe and most used on-chain Euro-backed stablecoin by transaction volume, to Cosmos, advancing the adoption of the interchain and solving real-world problems.
Jelena’s Tips for Ideathon Submissions
“UX is still a big problem,” Jelena says, pointing to the heavy fragmentation between appchains, L1s, L2s, and L3s across the industry. Jelena doubles down on the fact that better UX is needed to onboard more people and address the pain points in their everyday lives:
“We’re very interested in real-world use cases… I would really just encourage the hackers to think about the end user and the pain points that exist for real people.”
She gives the example of payments, which she says are still “really hard to do on-chain” and points participants to an app called Payy on Polygon — a mobile-first stablecoin payments application — for inspiration.
“So things like mobile-first payments. I would encourage people to take a look at if you can build something that uses IBC under the hood, such that I can easily swap my OSMO for USDC on some sort of mobile-first payments application, so I can pay for my coffee in a few seconds at the coffee shop. I think that would be really cool.”
She also points to ideas that enable taking a holistic view of users’ holdings across various chains and using some sort of front-end application to manage those assets. “I think this is always something that’s needed. I think wallet UX can always be improved and user-facing applications.”
The Solana Foundation
The Solana ecosystem is renowned for its superior user experiences, a wide range of DeFi apps, speed, throughput, community, and scalable infrastructure. Solana was recently connected to the interchain via the Picasso Network, unlocking myriad opportunities for collaboration between the two ecosystems. The Solana Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Zug, Switzerland, dedicated to the decentralization, adoption, and security of the Solana ecosystem. It regularly conducts and commissions research on the network, its impact, and its usage.
Brianna Migliaccio joins Ideathon judges for the Solana track, working in Developer Relations. She previously worked in the interchain ecosystem as a Rust smart contract engineer and brings deep experience on both sides to the Ideathon event. She says, “Solana is a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable and user-friendly apps for the world. The infrastructure is fundamentally to change the digital world and the Solana Foundation’s mission is to help facilitate this.”
Brianna’s Tips for Ideathon Submissions
Brianna raises a ton of helpful suggestions for bringing Solana closer to the interchain. She says:
“Think about the main goal of interoperability and web3. In my opinion, it’s creating a really good UX to enable more apps to be built for users… Look at the current user experience there and see how that interaction really is between Cosmos appchains and Solana and see what’s missing from a user perspective.”
She gives some concrete examples of use cases including smart contracts on Solana that can decode and execute transactions based on the IBC data that comes in.
“Another example would be cross-chain oracles and cross-chain KYC that would enable specific real-world assets to exist in cross-chain DeFi platforms… Really take a step back and think, how can we optimize this for the user and make the UX the best way possible?”
Brianna says Ideathon contestants might consider using the Picasso Network, deBridge, AllBridge, or Wormhole. “We have a lot of different apps for the interoperability landscape, but there’s still a lot to be explored… Picasso is an IBC-enabled generalized restaking hub for Solana, and you have Wormhole, which essentially enables cross-chain smart contract CPIs to call functions from other on-chain contracts. Then just to get some ideas on how to build on top of Wormhole, you can look into Wormhole’s xApp frameworks, that’s a really helpful framework if you’re looking into some ideas to have on-chain actions between Solana and Cosmos appchains.”
Join the Ideathon
If you want to participate in the Ideathon, you can find plenty more resources on the Ideahacker’s Guide to IBC website, or ibcprotocol.dev. You’ll find useful information and resources about the ideathon, prizes, judges, and tracks, and how to ideate your idea with the Idea Builder and create your DoraHacks BUIDL submission.
You don’t have to be technical, submit a pull request, or write any lines of code. Simply follow the guidelines to be eligible for prizes and spark the next wave of cross-chain innovation! As Robb pointed out, “An idea doesn’t mean you have to know right now that it’s possible. You just need to bring your idea and make sure you really believe in it. That’s the beautiful part.”
Follow IBCProtocol on X for updates about the Ideathon and useful tips and tricks, workshops, and presentations to help your idea take flight.
IBC Ideathon Space Highlights — IBC for Everyone was originally published in Interchain Ecosystem Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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