Winning The Stellar Dev Challenge Award
#We Tried to Win Best dApp, But Won Vivid Video Award Instead! 🎉
#Our Journey from Lunchtime Idea to dApp (and a Surprise Video Win)
I’m really happy to share the ups, downs, and surprises of our run at the Stellar Smart Contract Dev Challenge. My friend Cyril Kurmann and I went all in trying to win the Best dApp award with our project VoteVault. We didn’t take that title home, but we walked away with something we never saw coming: the Vivid Video Award and $6000. 💰
#What’s VoteVault? 🤔
VoteVault is our secure, transparent, open-source voting platform built on the Stellar blockchain. The goal was simple. Make voting easy, clear, and even a little bit fun. We wanted to do something different from the usual crypto projects, so we built a platform anyone could use to create, join, and verify votes. No flashy animations, just reliable blockchain tech doing its job.
#How We Ended Up Winning the Vivid Video Award 📹
This is where things got interesting. After finishing VoteVault, and quietly hoping we had a shot at Best dApp, we still had a bit of time before the deadline. Rather than sit around, we decided to make a short video tutorial on Stellar smart contracts.
We took inspiration from Fireship’s “100 Seconds” series and wanted something short and packed with info. Cyril handled the scripting and narration while I edited the video. The result was a concise, hopefully helpful tutorial for anyone getting into Stellar smart contracts. To our surprise, that little side project is what won us the Vivid Video Award. 🚀
#Wrapping It All Up 🎬
What started as a lunchtime idea turned into a wild few weeks of coding from far-flung places (Sri Lanka for Cyril, Italy for me), late-night Discord calls, and an award we never expected. We didn’t get the Best dApp title we were after, but the Vivid Video Award feels like a pretty good way to lose.
Feel free to check out VoteVault, watch the video, and let us know what you think. We’re proud of what we built and curious to see where it goes next.
Cheers, Daniel