The EF is excited to announce the results of the Medalla data challenge, a data hackathon focused on the Medalla testnet ✨

The prompt was open-ended: we asked for data tools, visualizations, and analyses of testnet data; in short, anything that would help the community make sense of all the data.

Over the course of six weeks we received 23 submissions from a wide variety of teams. We were pleased to see high quality submissions for every category.

Prizes are divided into three tiers based on scope, extensibility, and usefulness to the community.

🥇 Gold ($15k prize)

• Jim McDonald -- chaind, a tool for extracting data from a running eth2 client and storing it in a PostgreSQL database. Notably, this tool was used by multiple other teams who submitted to the data challenge.
• Pintail -- a series of blog posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) comparing client performance, studying network behavior, and discussing validator effectiveness.

🥈 Silver ($5k prize)

• Sid Shekhar and Elias Simos -- a wide-ranging study of eth2 data.
• Evgeny Medvedev of Nansen -- an extension of the ethereum-etl tool to eth2, as well as a BigQuery database dump of eth2 data.
• Nate McKervey of Splunk -- a blog post and dashboard studying Ethereum network health.

🥉 Bronze ($1k prize)

• Lawrence Mosley of Omni -- a pair of blog posts studying the network structure of slashings, and a mechanism for segmenting validators by performance.
• Petclippy -- visualizations of validator behavior over the course of Medalla.
• Sen Ni of HashQuark -- an analysis of the various operations carried out by validators.
• Jonny Rhea -- a high-level network analysis of Medalla.
• Daniel Claborne -- an analysis of slashings and attestations with accompanying R code.
• Bitquery - a testnet block explorer and graphql endpoints for eth2 data.
• The BlockBlockData team -- a series of blog posts (1, 2, 3) studying the eth2 beacon block schema and attestation data in Medalla.

Looking forward

The aims of this contest were to welcome new minds into the Ethereum community, encourage them to pore over eth2 data, make it easier to parse and analyse, and provide valuable insights to both developers and the community at large. To that end, the competition has been a great success, and we suspect that many of the tools and analyses produced will be useful as mainnet goes live.

If you're interested in picking up where any of these submissions left off, please consider applying for a staking community grant!