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With the raging hash-wars delivering one devastating blow after another to the entire world of crypto, Byteball now introduces its very own war! Unlike the hash-wars, Byteball’s war is one of productivity, innovation, adoption and creativity!

We invite developers to create Chat Bots for the Byteball platform in a contest to build the most awesome, useful, innovative and creative chat bot. The best ideas will be rewarded generously.

Contest format

Over a 4 week period, developers battle in the fine art of coding chat bots. There will be weekly reviews of each contestant’s progress (if the contestant share it) and a weekly award will be granted to the bot creator that provided the best, funniest or most engaging article, blog-post or video.

Prizes

1st prize: USD $1000 worth of Bytes 2nd prize: USD $500 worth of Bytes 3rd prize: USD $250 worth of Bytes

To make the contest interesting and fun for people to follow, we also introduce a weekly award for the best progress report!

Each Sunday, the jury will pick the best, most interesting, most informative, funniest or most engaging article, blog post or YouTube video showing the past week’s progress. The best will be awarded 2 Gbytes. Developers must provide a link to a publicly visible blog, article or other medium by Friday 20.00 UTC. Participants and links to progress reports will be kept updated on this Byteball Wiki page.

Referral rewards

Know an awesome developer that would surely win this contest? Then ask him to join and be rewarded a reward of 10% of the developer’s prize! Just make sure the developer adds your wallet address on the entry form. So $1000 prize has $100 referral reward, etc. It is OK to invite/refer oneself if there has been no genuine referral (we understand this will occur anyway).

Schedule

- Wednesday December 12: Announcement of contest and official start - Friday December 21, 20.00 UTC: Deadline Week 1 progress reports - Sunday December 23: Announcement of weekly winner of 2 GB award - Friday December 28, 20.00 UTC: Deadline Week 2 progress reports - Sunday December 30: Announcement of weekly winner of 2 GB award - Friday January 4, 20.00 UTC: Deadline Week 3 progress reports - Sunday January 6: Announcement of weekly winner of 2 GB award - Friday January 11, 23:59:59 UTC: Deadline for all contest entries

Rules and requirements

1 - Each contestant must fill out this form to enter the contest. 2 - All code must be published under MIT license on GitHub. 3 - The bot must apply at least one DAG feature (e.g. payments, storage, attestation etc.) 4 - The bot must be functional and fulfill the purpose in at least a MVP

Weekly progress reports must be submitted to the jury by Friday to be eligible to win the weekly progress award announced on Sunday. Progress reports can be articles, blog posts, videos or similar and must be publicly accessible. Submit a link to your report using this form.

All chat bots are welcome in the competition. Whether it’s a revenue-generating use case, an interface to an external resource or whatever you can think of - it’s fair game! Developers can enter with more than 1 bot each, but all entries must be functioning.

Evaluation and jury

The jury will consist of Byteball User Acquisition Manager Casper Niebe (Punqtured), Byteball Core Developer Evgenii Stulnikov (xjenek) and Byteball Veteran Slackjore. The mix of core staff, developers and users helps us evaluate each entry from different perspectives. This means that a brilliant technically-excellent bot with flawless code but no actual real-world use, would not necessarily have an advantage against a clumsily-coded, semi-buggy bot that aims to solve an actual problem or make something easier for Byteball users. Bots should always aim to:

- Solve a real world problem (games and entertainment solves the problem of boredom) - Reduce friction in a process - Have a clear and easily understood purpose - Add something new and interesting to the Byteball ecosystem - Be able to run sustainably without huge costs for the operator

Useful help and resources

Byteball is easy to develop for. The main scripting language is Node.js, which can be run on both backend and frontend. Any other language works as well by connecting through the easy RPC API.
Don’t have any experience with the Byteball platform or developing Chat Bots for it? Don’t panic - there’s plenty of help and inspiration to get! An excellent place to get started is our new developer website.
Some sections you may find useful are Writing chatbots, Issuing assets and Smart contract definitions.
The developer site documents multiple APIs that you may want to explore, has guides and tutorials showcasing Byteball’s most interesting features. Our GitHub has loads of source code of existing bots working in production that you may also want to use in your apps.
If you have coding skills but lack ideas, drop by the Byteball Telegram, Slack or Subreddit to see if other users have an interesting idea. You might also be able to find inspiration from one of the previous Use-a-Thons that Byteball hosted. The most recent was for the Steem community.

Join the community

On Telegram, there is the official Byteball group and we have a dedicated developer’s group as well. You are also encouraged to join the Byteball Slack to exchange experience with other developers and meet the core team. Please state in your request, that you’re a participant in the contest. Finally, the Byteball Subreddit is also an excellent place for inspiration, pitching ideas, getting feedback or simply sharing your thoughts.

Get your bot listed in the Byteball Bot Store

Byteball has a fully featured official wallet which contains a Bot Store where you can list your apps. The Bot Store is a prominent part of the wallet, meaning users can easily find your app.
With e.g. Ethereum, marketing your app is difficult and expensive. If users don’t find your app, its chance of success is remote. One reason Android and Apple apps have become so popular is because the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store connect users to developers’ apps. This is the way Byteball has chosen, too.