Building for Chaos and Creativity: My Hackathon Projects at Royal Hackaway

Hackathons are where creativity thrives under pressure, and over the past two years, I've been lucky to build some wild and technically challenging projects with talented teammates. Here's a recap of two of my favorite builds.

🎮 2025 – Royal Hackaway vX: PVP Trader

With three colleagues (LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn), we built a “degenerate” PVP trading simulator—designed for chaos and bragging rights.

We’ve all dabbled in real trading, but we wanted to know:

Who’s actually the best when it comes to high-pressure decision making in volatile markets?

The Concept:

• Players wager real crypto (e.g. $10) to join a lobby.
• Each gets $20,000 in virtual funds and 60 seconds to trade using up to 1000x leverage.
• Whoever ends with the highest balance wins the pot.
• Or gets instantly liquidated in the first 5 seconds. 😅

Yes, it’s ridiculous. That’s the point.

Key Features:

• 💰 Crypto deposit & withdrawal system
• ⚔️ Multi-lobby PVP support
• 📈 Real-time price feeds from Binance API
• ⚙️ Built with Flask (backend) and React (frontend)

This was more than just a silly game. It was a crash course in live data streams, websocket architecture, and integrating secure crypto payment flows—all under a tight hackathon deadline.

🎶 2024 – Royal Hackaway vX: Solana-Powered DJ Payment System

Teamed up with a coursemate (LinkedIn) to bring Web3 into the nightlife scene.

The idea?

Let club-goers pay crypto to queue a song—and give the DJ direct control of the playlist economy.

How It Worked:

• A QR code was displayed at the booth
• Users scanned, connected wallet, and paid a small sum in Solana
• The song of their choice was added to the DJ’s live queue

Stack:

• 🔗 Solana Wallet Integration
• 🧾 Smart contract-style logic (without deploying one)
• 🧠 Flask-powered backend with QR and audio management

This was a fun experiment in creating microtransaction-based music influence and opened our eyes to lightweight crypto UX at events.

💡 Takeaways

• Hackathons let me prototype fast, fail fast, and build wild ideas I wouldn't try elsewhere.
• Both projects leaned into real-time data, crypto integrations, and user-first interaction—three areas I'm super passionate about.
• I'm proud of how far we pushed the tech in such short timeframes.

🛠️ Tools Used

• Flask – Backend for both projects
• React – Frontend for PVP Trader
• Binance API – Real-time crypto price feed
• Solana wallet integration – DJ app
• Websockets – For lobby & trading updates
• QR Code generation – DJ app UI