I’ve refreshed and cleaned up nimiqminiapps.com, and the big update is that the Cycle 2 submissions are now in the catalog! 🎉 In total: - 9 new Cycle 2 apps added - NimHunt updated with its Cycle 2 submission - 11 old/dead listings removed after verifying their websites were no longer reachable - Stakes was already listed as a Cycle 2 app New Cycle 2 apps: Folester https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/folester NimHunt https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/nimhunt TeTe on Nimiq https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/tete-on-nimiq NIM Invoice https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/nim-invoice Pay It Sideways https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/pay-it-sideways AskNim https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/asknim Reef https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/reef BodyDouble https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/bodydouble NIM Tip Jar https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/nim-tip-jar BasePay https://nimiqminiapps.com/apps/basepay All Cycle 2 demo URLs were checked and working before being added. I also removed several older Cycle 1 projects whose domains are now offline, returning 404s, timing out, or no longer resolving. This should make the catalog cleaner and prevent people from ending up on dead projects. 👉 Browse the full catalog at https://nimiqminiapps.com If you built a Nimiq app that should be listed, or notice something missing or outdated, let me know! 💙

GoPool is ready to share! It's an open-source, self-hosted Nimiq staking pool that you can run on your own VPS. Both Nimiq Testnet and Mainnet are supported. 🧪 Live Testnet pool: https://pool-testnet.maestroi.cc ⚙️ What does GoPool do? You run your own Nimiq validator and people delegate their NIM to it. GoPool takes care of the pool infrastructure around it: • Tracks delegators and their stake • Tracks validator rewards • Calculates each delegator's share • Handles payouts • Provides a public pool website • Includes an operator dashboard • Supports configurable pool fees • Works with Testnet and Mainnet You keep control of the validator, wallet and infrastructure. 🚀 Run your own pool You don't need to know Go or manually configure a Nimiq RPC node. You'll need: • Ubuntu/Debian VPS • A domain pointing to the server • Enough NIM to register your validator For your first installation, I'd recommend Testnet. Install: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Beardsoft/GoPool/master/scripts/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- --domain pool.yourname.com --network test-albatross The installer sets everything up and gives you a setup URL where you configure your pool name, fee and validator. Once you're comfortable with the full register → election → rewards → payout flow, you can deploy it on Mainnet as well. 🔐 Important Back up this file somewhere safe and offline: /opt/gopool/.secrets/wallet.json This wallet controls your validator. If you lose both the server and the backup, you lose access to the validator. 💻 Open source + full setup instructions: https://github.com/Beardsoft/GoPool I'd love to see some people spin up their own Testnet pools, run through the full flow and report any issues or ideas. If you've wanted to run your own Nimiq staking pool without having to build all the infrastructure around it yourself, give GoPool a try!

Cycle 1 is officially in the books. 62 Mini Apps submitted, all of them scored by the Nimiq Community Council, and the results are final. 🥁 Drumroll please… 🥇 1st place: Nimiq Space by @Harley NSpace An open multiplayer world where wallet-signed players can see who is online right now, paint a persistent 500x500 collaborative floor, and build rooms that sync live for everyone in them. 🥈 2nd place: NimJump by @Emre Alt An arcade game built around a minimal client-authority architecture, where the server replays every run itself instead of trusting the score the client reports. 🥉 3rd place: NimQuest by @mystiquemide A learn-and-prove Mini App with server-graded quizzes, where a completion only counts once you sign a one-time message in Nimiq Pay. Congratulations to all three. Winners will be contacted directly to arrange payout. To everyone else who submitted, thank you. You shipped something real in four weeks and set the bar high for future cycles. Every app you built is yours under the MIT License, so keep going with it. 🗓️ Cycle 2 opens August 24. Same $17,000 USDT prize pool, four Sip & Ship calls, submissions close September 18 at 23:59 UTC. If your app did not place this time, you can refine it and submit it again. Full breakdown on all three winners: https://www.nimiq.com/blog/mini-apps-competition-cycle-1-winner-announcement

I wanted to give the community a straightforward update: I’ve decided to discontinue NimConnect. I received detailed feedback from the Cycle 1 judges, and there was a lot in it that I agree with. The onboarding needed work, error handling wasn’t good enough, and the app tried to do too many things at once instead of making identity and contacts the clear focus. The biggest point for me, though, was about reach: NimConnect only really creates value for people who already have a Nimiq address. For something built around identity and human-readable handles, that feels like a fundamental limitation. Ideally, it should help bring new people into the ecosystem, rather than only becoming useful once they’re already there. I could narrow NimConnect down to identity + contacts, improve the onboarding and fix the UX issues — and I think that would make it a much better product. But it wouldn't solve that underlying limitation. So rather than continuing to polish it, I’ve decided to stop development and retire NimConnect. I’ve also decided not to participate in the next competition cycle. That decision is separate from the NimConnect feedback. I appreciate the judges taking the time to give detailed feedback, and I’ll take those lessons with me into future projects. My concern is with the transparency of the competition itself. I think things like how projects are evaluated, how scoring works, and how the final results are determined should have been clear and transparent from the start — not something that needed to be addressed afterwards. For me, that wasn't handled the right way in Cycle 1, and because of that I don't feel comfortable participating in the next cycle. Thanks to everyone who tried NimConnect, claimed a handle, gave feedback, or joined the Sip & Ship calls. I learned a lot from building it, even if this is where the project ends.

If you've ever run, judged, or entered a hackathon or competition, you've probably seen the same problems: scoring lives in spreadsheets, judges can influence each other, results get finalized with little context, and participants often get no useful feedback on where they actually stood. I built OpenScore to fix that. OpenScore is a self-hosted platform for running judged competitions end to end: define a detailed rubric, import submissions from GitHub, assign judges, score independently, generate useful feedback, publish leaderboards and result breakdowns, and keep a full audit trail of how the final outcome was reached. What makes it different: - Independent judging — judges don't see each other's scores while evaluating. - Detailed rubric scoring — score individual sub-metrics, not just broad categories. - Useful feedback — comments, quick tags, and optional generated summaries. - Locked means locked — changes after finalization require a reason and are audited. - Configurable transparency — choose exactly what participants and the public can see. - GitHub snapshots — lock judging to the exact commit that was reviewed. - Verifiable results — assessment sets can be Merkle-rooted and committed to Nimiq. - Full audit history — overrides, role changes, snapshot changes, corrections, and publishing actions are traceable. The goal is also to make competitions more useful for builders. If you didn't win, you should still be able to understand where you lost points, what judges valued, and whether improving the same idea for another round actually makes sense. 🔗 Live demo: https://openscore.nimiqminiapps.com/c/miniappscycle1 💻 Source: https://github.com/NimMiniApps/OpenScore Would love feedback from anyone who's run or participated in hackathons, grant rounds, bounty programs, or other judged competitions.