Scrypto DeFi Challenge

The Scrypto DeFi Challenge was a five-week remote hackathon organised by RDX Works and hosted on Devpost, running from 20 February to 24 March 2023. It challenged developers to build decentralized finance applications in Scrypto, Radix’s asset-oriented smart-contract language. The event drew 434 registered participants and closed with 17 submissions competing for a $50,000 XRD prize pool.

Format and prizes

Entries had to be written in Scrypto v0.8 or later and submitted as a pull request to the scrypto-challenges GitHub repository, with a frontend built using the Radix dApp Toolkit and the then-current Radix Wallet developer preview. Judges scored submissions on the quality and “asset-oriented-ness” of the code, breadth of functionality, creativity of the concept, documentation, and frontend integration.

The $50,000 pool was split across overall placings and two category awards: $11,500 for first, $9,500 for second, $7,500 for third, $5,500 each for the best perpetuals and best lending dApps, and $3,500 for each of three honorable mentions.

Winners

The results were announced in April 2023:

• 1st – FlashyFi by backyard-coder ($11,500), a flash-loan protocol.
• 2nd – Stoichiometric by avincigu, Théodore and Guillaume ($9,500), a stablecoin and concentrated-liquidity DEX.
• 3rd – ScrillaLending by aus87 and errollgnargnar ($7,500), a Liquity-style lending and stablecoin platform.
• Best Perpetuals – Cup Perps by zygomeb ($5,500).
• Best Lending – KL Protocol by Atoumbré ($5,500).
• Honorable mentions ($3,500 each): MojitoSwap, Kaupa and DefiFunds.

The full field

All 17 submissions remain public in the 7-defi-devpost directory of the radixdlt/scrypto-challenges repository, one folder per entry, and they are the closest thing to a census of what developers reached for first when handed an asset-oriented language. Lending dominates: alongside the placing ScrillaLending and KL Protocol sit Optlend, Scrypto Lend Marketplace (built against Betanet V2 with the Radix dApp Toolkit and the developer-preview Android wallet), a real-world-asset lending entry, and fleet-vehicle-lending, which applies the same machinery to financing commercial vehicles.

The rest of the field went wider than DeFi primitives. RadInsurance is a decentralized insurance protocol in which insurers stake into a policy and are paid out in proportion to their contribution. AlkyneFi pairs investors into a joint contract under an "equally collateralised trade", Tokenvest is an investment platform where products themselves are on-ledger and funded by other users, investor_companion is a portfolio-side tool, and coupon is the outlier — a proof of concept issuing e-commerce coupons through the wallet SDK rather than a financial protocol at all.

The submissions are prototypes rather than products, and the repository preserves them as filed: Optlend opens with its author explaining that they realised the design was wrong two days before the deadline, rewrote it in the time left, and shipped without withdrawal for lending or borrowing positions. That is the texture of a hackathon at the edge of a new language, and it is why the code was judged on "asset-oriented-ness" as much as on completeness. None of the 17 went on to become a production dApp under its challenge name; the ecosystem that followed Babylon was built by later teams.

Significance

The challenge was one of several Scrypto hackathons RDX Works ran to build a developer base ahead of the Babylon mainnet launch, which brought Scrypto to production in September 2023. The submissions were experimental prototypes published to the scrypto-challenges repository – early explorations of lending, perpetuals, stablecoins and DEX designs in an asset-oriented model – rather than production dApps. It followed the network’s earlier in-person developer outreach such as the Scrypto Developer Event in Lisbon.

External links

• Scrypto DeFi Challenge – Devpost
• Scrypto Devpost DeFi Challenge Results – Radix Blog
• radixdlt/scrypto-challenges – GitHub