Password Hashing Competition
The open 2013–2015 contest meant to give the world a better password hash than bcrypt and PBKDF2 — and which gave it Argon2.
It was started by Jean-Philippe Aumasson with a panel of cryptographers and no government body behind it, modelled on NIST's AES and SHA-3 competitions. The starting point: PBKDF2 parallelised trivially on GPUs, bcrypt couldn't be made memory-hungry, and scrypt's parameters were awkward to reason about.
Twenty-four submissions came in. In July 2015 Argon2 was named the winner, with special recognition for Catena, Lyra2, Makwa and yescrypt. Argon2 was later standardised as RFC 9106 and is recommended by OWASP; that a contest with no official standing could set a de facto standard says something about how bad things were before.