Developers who are still curious about Babbage’s upcoming BSV Hackathon but still wonder how to approach it should check out Ty Everett’s latest livestream. In the stream, Everett walks through the list of resources available and what they do. Babbage has updated its entire BSV tech stack, especially for the Hackathon, which runs for two days starting April 5, 2025, in Austin, Texas.
A prize pool of over US$50,000 is available, with most of the prize money coming from Babbage’s account.
You can jump straight to the (two-hour) video or read on for a brief preview. A full written list of all the developer resources available (with GitHub links and descriptions) is available on the BSV Hackathon website.
“I think there’s been a lot of potential that has existed for some time in BSV, but we’re finally in a place where we’re making that into a reality,” Everett says. As for entering the Hackathon, maybe you’re new and curious about entering the blockchain world; maybe you’d like to show off your skills; or maybe you’re just looking to win some of the prize money.
There are a few rules to know before competing in the BSV Hackathon, and one of those is that you must use one or more (and ideally a combination) of Babbage’s developer tools. That’s not just for promotion—every item in the stack is a critical component for making a solid and secure blockchain app.
“You can come into the event with a bit of knowledge about the things we’re able to use,” Everett says. “We want to make sure everyone’s in a position where they can contribute, where they can build things, and do so in a way that’s going to have an impact.”
First up is Babbage’s Metanet Desktop repo, a wallet that’s essentially “where you’d get started working on BSV,” he says. It can interact with other apps, handle permissions, and manage trust and identity functions. Everett live-shares his terminal screen to show how to clone/pull the repo and explore the code.
As we mentioned last week, one of the stack’s highlights is the “Meter App,” which he says is one of the most useful since it “has a lot of the different components working together in a way that hopefully makes some good sense.” His demo shows how to look at both the front- and back-end aspects of an app, interacting with sCrypt smart contracts and data on the blockchain and presenting it to the end user.
There’s a demo in the form of a to-do list app, and Everett shows how it interacts with a user’s wallet along with the items in it (including the user’s to-do tokens, all encrypted for privacy, of course).
The section on “monetizing Mars weather with micropayments” is also useful. Not because this particular example is a fantastic money-making opportunity, but because it demonstrates how to integrate different aspects like identity certificates and authentication, regularly occurring micropayments through wallet transactions, attributes of different people, routines on the server side, and more.
Everett’s stream goes into much more detail about other components in the stack and gives some suggestions on how they might be used. For those less familiar with the BSV network and its structure, it’ll also help you pick up some of the essential jargon.
“You can build an overlay that incorporates an sCrypt smart contract and have that as part of your application. The ability to have an overlay network that tracks smart contracts, and the ability to let other people plug into that, and interact with the same contract you’re interacting with, in real-time or with a lookup service—that’s really powerful.”
If all that’s still not enough to get you signing up, Everett was also a guest on last week’s CoinGeek Weekly Livestream with Kurt Wuckert, Jr.—where he also goes a little further into the reasons for organizing the Hackathon and what Babbage would like to see from the BSV ecosystem.
Watch Texas BSV Hackathon: Ty Everett on Building an Open-Source Ecosystem
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