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Announcing the Coinbase BitHack Winners

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, March 28, 2014

, 3 min read time

We’re thrilled to announce the winners of BitHack, our first online hackathon designed to inspire developers globally across platforms to build solutions with bitcoin on Coinbase’s API. Of over a hundred app entries, we selected three winners.

1st Place, $10,000 prize — CoinPlanter

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CoinPlanter is a mobile Bitcoin geotagger that allows you to share, store, or hide bitcoins based on location. Once you’ve hidden a few of your own coins get out there and find someone else’s!

2nd Place, $5,000 prize — Aircoin

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Aircoin is the quickest way to send bitcoin to a nearby person using your mobile device. Owe $7 for half a pizza or want to contribute $5 gas money for a ride? With Aircoin sending money is now quicker than sharing photos, and it’s free!

3rd Place, $3,000 prize — Coinery.io

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Coinery makes it simple to sell your digital products online and accept Bitcoin. There are zero fees and your products are delivered instantly. Simply upload and describe your digital product, and Coinery handles the rest.

Congratulations to the winners and their developers: CoinPlanter (Zach Alam), Aircoin (Didier Hilhorst and Raphael Schaad), and Coinery (Zach Ferland)!

The Runner Up Apps

We were very impressed by the level of innovation we saw in the applications. We’d like to make a special mention for the following apps: Bitfluence, Coinbasis, Coin Grab, and Leaven. In the coming weeks, we’ll be showcasing the best apps in Coinbase Apps, our own app store for apps built using Coinbase platform and APIs.

Judging Process

Winners were selected from 112 entries submitted. It was very important to us to create a fair process for judging the apps. We first did a screen of apps to ensure eligibility according to the BitHack rules, including that the Coinbase API was used and that the app was previously unpublished. We then split all eligible apps into three groups which were each scored by a pair of judges from the Coinbase team (including Charlie Lee, Craig Hammell, and Olaf Carlson-Wee) on our evaluation criteria: creativity, usability, and execution. Each pair of judges submitted the top apps from its group onto the final round of judging, where a team of twelve judges reviewed each app. Each member of the team selected their top three apps anonymously on a voting slip, and the total number of votes determined our winners.

Special thanks to Chris Dixon and Gavin Andresen for their contributions to BitHack’s judging.

BitHack Moving Forward

A huge thank you to all who participated. We enjoyed reviewing your apps and were deeply impressed by the level of technical and design talent in the bitcoin community. If you didn’t win a prize this time around, there will be more chances to win at the next BitHack, where we’ll introduce a crowd-voting element. Stay tuned for more our blog and follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates about our next BitHack!

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