We've read your feedback about the scores not being made public, and we hear you! We completely understand why having clearer guidance on where to improve matters, especially if you're planning to submit again in Cycle 2. We've spoken with the Community Council about this and found a compromise. If you submitted in Cycle 1 and would like feedback on your Mini App, you can ask any of the 5 Council members for it. They'll give it to you privately, so you have a better understanding of what worked, what could be improved, and what to focus on for your next submission. Telegram is the easiest way to reach them and these are their handles: @mindbyte_de @paulghz @plsenteryournamehere @faberto @Azencot We're also actively reviewing the scoring guide and the overall judging process to make things clearer and more useful for builders going into the next cycles. Cycle 1 was our first round, so please bear with us as we improve the process. We're reading your feedback, discussing it internally, and taking it seriously as we make adjustments for Cycle 2 starting next week. We really appreciate everyone helping us make the competition better 💪

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.

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

Everyone did a great job building for about a month, and I genuinely appreciate the effort that went into the projects. But I think one important question was missing: Are we building something that will actually be beneficial to NiMiQ? Some of these projects might be great products for another chain or as standalone mini apps, but I’m not sure they necessarily solve a problem for NiMiQ or bring value to the ecosystem. I believe this is one of the reasons the games stood out and ultimately won. Even if another product had been selected, I believe we would still be having this conversation. You can build the perfect product, but you have to ask yourself: - Will it bring users to NiMiQ? - How often will people actually use it? - Will users be willing to pay for it? - How does it create value for NiMiQ beyond the initial launch? - How will we market it outside the existing NiMiQ community? For the games that were selected, I also think there are areas that need more thought, particularly unit economics. How exactly will these games make money for NiMiQ? Beyond the existing community, how will they attract new users to the mini-apps? And, more importantly, how can these products help attract more builders to build on NiMiQ? I think the bigger goal shouldn’t just be building something good. It should be building something that people will actually use, pay for, and that ultimately strengthens the NiMiQ ecosystem. That’s the kind of thinking I believe we need to take into the next round.

Hi Nimiq Team, I wanted to share something a couple of users have reported. When the game is opened inside the Nimiq Pay WebView, the bottom system navigation bar on the phone seems to stay on top of the game content, covering it. For comparison, this doesn't happen in other WebView environments that were tested, like Telegram's in-app browser — the nav bar behaves normally there. So it's suspected that this might be something specific to how the WebView is set up on the Nimiq Pay side, though it's not certain. On our end, some JS and CSS fixes were tried (safe-area padding, viewport adjustments, etc.) and they helped to some extent, but the exact position/height of the navigation bar could never be reliably detected from the web side — that information just doesn't seem to be consistently available from within the WebView. It was also noticed that some other apps within the Nimiq ecosystem, like nimiq.space, have dealt with this by adding a permanent bottom padding/spacing to work around it. This approach was tried as well, but it made the app look pretty off/odd visually, so it wasn't used as a final fix. Screenshots are attached showing how it looked, in case it's a useful reference for how others have handled it and why it wasn't used on NimJump. Not sure what's causing it exactly, but wanted to flag it in case it helps. Happy to share more details if needed. Thanks in advance for looking into this, looking forward to hearing back!