The Blockchain Writing Contest 2022: Round 5 Results Announced!

18 Aug 2022

Welcome to the Round 5 results announcement of the Blockchain Writing Contest brought to you by HackerNoon and Tatum! Let’s see who won.

The Blockchain Writing Contest July 2022 Nominations & Winners

As usual, we picked all the stories with the #blockchain tag on HackerNoon, published in July 2022. Then we chose the top stories using 60:30:10 weightage respectively to:

Number of hours read
The number of people reached
The freshness of the content

Here are the top 10 nominations:

The editors’ favorite this month is A CIA Agent's Guide to Steganography, Fooling the KGB, and Protecting Your Crypto by @officercia

Unlike cryptography which hides the contents of a secret message, steganography hides the very fact of its existence. Steganography was first introduced in 1499, but the method itself has existed for a very long time. Legends have brought us a method that was used in the Roman Empire: a slave whose head was shaved was chosen to deliver a message, and then text was applied with a tattoo. After the hair grew back, the slave was sent on the road. The recipient of the message would cut off the slave's hair and read the message.

Congratulations @officercia, on winning the first position. Well deserved! You’ve won 500 USDT!

The second place goes to From Trending to Falling Apart: A Reminder of the Importance of Blockchain Regulation by @growthpunk

While we await the international community to lay down a harmonized regulatory package on all aspects of blockchain-based business models, let us attempt to protect ourselves by choosing to align with projects that think ahead of the regulation curve. Projects that prioritise user protection and safety, and projects that want to comply with existing and coming laws and regulations.

Well done, @growthpunk! You’ve won 300 USDT!

Laplace’s Demon Speaks: Is Something 'Alive' in Blockchain? by @officercia has won the third position.

By establishing a core set of rules (enforced through smart contracts, for example), software can take the form of organisms in this new world and effectively compete for the scarce resources available on the blockchain.

Each instance of software can be, like any living thing, self-serving and seeking to survive and reproduce. And as each genealogy of software develops, it improves not just in isolation but in its desperate attempt to out-compete all of the other software in the environment.

Congratulations@officercia! You’ve bagged another 100 USDT in the same round!

The title of the most-read story goes to What Happened to Terra Luna? by @juxtathinka

The Terra Luna crash was a defining moment in the world of cryptocurrency: it drove home the point that cryptocurrency in any form would always be volatile. Investors who believed in the ability of $UST to remain pegged to the US dollar lost faith in $UST and became more wary of Tether $USDT. The suspicion that not all stablecoins are actually backed by reserves resulted in less trust for cryptocurrency stablecoins and tokens in general. Cryptocurrency critics had a field day describing cryptocurrency as a Ponzi scheme in which investors had been played, not once but twice with Terra Luna. The cryptocurrency industry as a whole suffered, losing investors and over $400 billion in value in terms of crypto market capitalization.

Yay, @juxtathinka! You have won 100 USDT!

On that note, let’s wrap up the announcement! We will contact the winners shortly. Keep an eye on contests.hackernoon.com to see the current and upcoming writing contests!

See you all next month.

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