We have some exciting updates to share with the community! During the last few weeks, we worked on strategizing the hackathon execution and here are the latest developments:
- Online Hackathon dates - Sep 15th - Oct 27th (6 weeks)
- Hosted on https://devpost.com/ (will be listed next week)
- $15,000 in prize pool for three hackathon tracks. W3F is happy to add additional tracks through funding matching, if any ecosystem teams/parachains are interested.
The objective of this hackathon is to educate/bring awareness to Polkadot’s USPs (Unique Selling Points), where developers and tinkerers gather together online or in person (thanks to the proposed collaboration with Polkadot’s roots and meetups initiative).
Hence, throughout the six weeks of this hackathon, numerous talks, workshops, demos, and tutorial sessions will take place at regular intervals to cater to different developer audiences.
There are already teams confirming their engagement: W3F, Parity Technologies, Papermoon, OpenGuild, DevCult, Unique Network, Astar Network, and the list is growing. This is a community-driven event; every ecosystem team is welcome to join the efforts!
Staying true to the Polkadot 2.0 theme, we crafted these three hackathon tracks:
- Parachains
- Polkadot SDK
- Polkadot Tinkerers
Parachains Track ($5K)
Everything and anything related to Parachain SDKs and APIs. Polkadot is the home for custom blockchains, focusing on numerous Web3 use cases across different verticals—DeFi, Identity, Gaming, Social Media, Entertainment, DAOs, etc. Pick a favorite parachain of your choice, use their SDK or API to create compelling Proof of Concepts, and bring light to the hidden gems within the Polkadot ecosystem.
As a part of this track, we invite all the parachain teams within the ecosystem to speak about the following topics in a dedicated recorded online session:
- Their objective and use-case/s they are trying to cater to
- Their SDKs, APIs, Demos, Docs and Tutorials
- What features of Polkadot SDK do they use (and plan to use or never want to use)
- Who they would like to collaborate with in the ecosystem
Polkadot SDK Track ($5K)
This track focuses on the Polkadot Cloud narrative and is designed to attract non-native developers to the Polkadot ecosystem. When a random developer from the likes of Google or Microsoft hears about Blockchains, they think of Smart Contracts. Polkadot offers more than just a smart contract execution environment with gas limits. It provides a framework to create feeless and tokenless chains with prepaid execution (and an upgrade path to continously running Web3 services through JAM). Now is the time to bring awareness as Web3 is garnering attention and developers are thinking beyond the tokens. Hence, the focus will be letting the hackers:
- Try out launching Polkadot rollups through https://www.deploypolkadot.xyz/ or https://onpop.io/ and get a sense of how easy it is to launch customizable blockchains
- Build custom runtimes for use-cases they care about (Extensive tutorials and educational content will be provided)
Talks from experts and core developers of Polkadot SDK from Parity Technologies will inspire the participants about what constitutes the Web3 Cloud powered by Polkadot.
Polkadot Tinkerers Track ($5K)
The field is wide open for this track. Work on unstoppable apps, cross-chain apps, data crunching and visualizations, UX improving solitions, vibe-coded PoCs showcasing Polkadot features etc.
We encourage Polkadot Meetups/Roots participants/tinkerers to submit their work to this track.
Web3 Foundation is considering opening up this hackathon to community teams as well. To encourage engagement, we will do a funding matching up to $2.5K. So if any parachain or ecosystem team wants to host a dedicated track under the Polkadot 2.0 hackathon umbrella and wants to piggyback on the marketing and momentum around this event, now is your chance! We are very excited for this community-driven event!