We here at Maker were thrilled to see such high quality projects come out of the hack at ETHDenver! In the end, we selected two great project from two great teams for our first place MKR award.

Congratulations and thank you to the ETHLeveragers and the Shorties for their outstanding work on the Maker platform. Both teams will be awarded 2.5 MKR.

ETH Leveragers: Hack and Team

The ETH leveragers created a hack that delivered on the following:

1) Help users calculate the leverage of a nested stack of CDPs given a price floor (e.g. 2.41x leverage given a price floor of $933).

2) Launch a recursive sequence of CDP opens/draws and then sells on OasisDex.

3) Reverse the process to liquidate the CDPs.

Check it out here:

KentonPrescott/eth-leverager Contribute to eth-leverager development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com

Thanks Alex (@antsankov), Kenton (@kentonprescott), Hernando (@hcastano) and Josh (@JParkLevine) of Ethleveragers

Shorties: Hack and Team

Shorties built a decentralized short selling platform that lets you profit by betting against ERC20 tokens, using loan contracts with DAI as collateral.

How the Shorties’ hack Works:

Let’s say we think Augur’s REP is overvalued. We can enter into a short position that will let us profit if REP’s price drops.

1. Enter into a loan agreement by locking up DAI as collateral into a Dharma Protocol smart contract and receiving REP from Shorties or another lender.
2. Sell the REP for another asset.
3. If the price of REP drops, now purchase REP at the lower price in the market, repay the REP loan, and keep the profit and your DAI collateral.
4. If the price of REP increases, either satisfy the loan at a loss or abandon the position and let the lender collect the DAI collateral.

This mechanism allows traders to bet on price movements in an ERC20 token without using a centralized exchange. DAI is an ideal token for lending and collateral so that profits and losses can be measured in USD (or a very close proxy).

They plan to build a 0x-style relayer that allows traders to “make” short positions without requiring an on-chain transaction. There will be a transaction to “take” the short and another one to settle the trade (or to collect the collateral in case the position was abandoned).

They also plan to generalize the platform to allow for different types of derivatives (puts, calls, etc.) as well.

All in all, ETHDenver humbled us by showing us just how many talented devs there are that are interested in hacking on the Maker platform! Congrats to all participants and huge thanks to organizers of ETHDenver.