Codugh’s TAAL deal is a BSV Hackathon success story

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As the Bitcoin Association’s third BSV Hackathon gets underway, it’s time to take a look at its past success stories. One of them is Codugh, which auto pays developers in real-time micropayments whenever an app calls a piece of code they authored.

Codugh recently signed a definitive share purchase and equity financing agreement with TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc. that saw TAAL take a 20% stake in the company.

Codugh’s progress should encourage other budding blockchain developers to start turning their ideas into working concepts. The Bitcoin SV (BSV) industry, which restored the original Bitcoin protocol in early 2020, is ripe for new use cases to flourish.

Codugh came first in the second Bitcoin Association BSV Virtual Hackathon in October 2019, when finalists pitched their proof-of-concepts at the CoinGeek conference in Seoul. Since then, co-founders Shashank Singhal and Andrew Snow from Australia have been busy building their product based on feedback they’ve received. Codugh is currently in alpha testing phase and plans to announce a new beta release date sometime in the coming month.

Singhal and Snow won US$20,000 in Bitcoin for their pitch, with runners-up receiving $10,000 and $5,000. This third time around, the total prize pool has increased to $100,000. The Bitcoin Association has partnered with nChain and CoinGeek to organize the competition, which opened for entries on May 26, starts officially on June 23 and ends August 18.

Due to the current restrictions on international travel and large gatherings, the third hackathon will happen in “virtual” space over a longer period. Previous competitions happened over a single weekend.

Codugh’s progress since October 2019

According to an official announcement this week, Codugh will now assist TAAL in developing its Miner API (MAPI) services layer.

Speaking to CoinGeek, CEO and co-founder Shashank Singhal described Codugh thus:

Codugh is a versatile tool that can be used as a revenue stream by developers, businesses, and enterprises to find and claim value in an area where this has traditionally been difficult. This requires little upfront effort.

The company addresses what has often been a fatal problem for small-time or independent developers. Their “true” work often isn’t lucrative enough to support them, meaning they have to work other jobs and code freelance in their spare time. This also puts limitations on what they can build, and once built they usually have little choice but to give it away for free.

Codugh creates an “API marketplace” where developers can sell smaller pieces of code and get paid in real time every time an external application calls one of their APIs. Even with micropayments of a cent or less per call, it could be enough to allow coders to devote more time to their work.

Better opportunities on BSV

Such a system is only possible on Bitcoin BSV. Other pay-per-use marketplaces for code do exist, but are unable to pay in real time, meaning developers can wait long periods before seeing the money. For independents, and developers living in lower-paid countries, that could mean better meals while they’re working.

Singhal also offered some encouragement to the talent behind some of the ideas he’s seen.

It’s heartening to see the teamwork and vision that exists in the BSV development ecosystem. However, I don’t believe we have even scratched the surface on what can be built and achieved on BSV. I’m excited to see new innovation in the coming months as new businesses are built on BSV.

Bitcoin BSV’s high-volume, low-fee approach and focus on a micropayment economy opens up a whole new world of ideas. There are also opportunities for enterprise-grade data processing concepts to emerge, many of which have never been tried (or been able to be tried) before this year.

Whether an entry makes the finals or not, the Bitcoin Association BSV Hackathon provides those ideas with a chance to air in public—valuable publicity which could easily gain extra momentum from interested parties. Codugh has gone from concept to TAAL taking a 20% stake in just eight months, and several other participants from the first and second hackathons are still going strong.