Registration for the 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon is Open Now!
In the past year of 2022, many developers, investors and enthusiasts focused on Web3 have been discussing an important topic: the future of Web3. We have witnessed numerous Web3 startups struggling and crypto exchanges facing the brink of collapse. A series of dramatic and tumultuous changes seem to be impacting anyone looking to enter the Web3 industry. However, is Web3 really not worth the deep exploration by developers? The answer is no.
The world-renowned consulting and management firm McKinsey has stated, “While Web3 undoubtedly faces a variety of challenges, it represents the decentralization of business models. Digital assets and blockchain technology still hold potential for transformative applications across various industries. It is through nurturing emerging projects with optimizing technology and enhancing user experiences that we can truly lead the long-term development of Web3 in 2023.”
Polkadot might be a cost-effective choice. From 2022 to 2023, the Polkadot ecosystem has never ceased its progress. With hundreds of projects already launched or under development on Polkadot, the introduction of the next-generation governance system OpenGov, the release of XCM urging the development of the Polkadot multichain ecosystem, and the publication of the “State of Polkadot Q1 2023” report by Massari, there have been significant milestones and breakthrough achievements. Six new projects have obtained parachain slots, enjoying the flexibility of customized blockchain projects. The XCM V3 upgrade has made asset transfers and cross-chain interactions more convenient and efficient. The Polkadot Blockchain Academy is also collaborating with 12 universities to host the second phase of developer courses. These milestone and groundbreaking achievements have attracted more developers to enter the Polkadot ecosystem, allowing them to truly experience the ecosystem’s focus on developers and the resources available for project development.
To attract more vibrant developers to join the Polkadot ecosystem and become the future stars in building Web3, Parity and the OneBlock+ community will be hosting 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon from May 12th to July 15th. We welcome all blockchain enthusiasts to actively sign up and participate. Whether you are an experienced developer with abundant skills or a novice eager to join the Polkadot ecosystem, we will provide comprehensive guidance and mentorship to support you on your journey throughout the competition. If you have the desire to be part of Web3 and yearn for an exhilarating brainstorming session this summer, the 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon is one of your best choices.
1. Schedule
The organizers of the 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon will provide developer teams with ample preparation time and abundant event resources guidance, aiming to enable each participating team to develop excellent entrepreneurial projects from 0 to 1.
Specific schedule for the event is as follows. Please stay tuned for updates:
1.Open Registration: 5/12
2.Coding: 5/15–7/4
3.Online Opening Ceremony: 5/20
4.Online Team-up Event: 6/3
5.4 Online workshops & Office Hours: 6/10, 6/17, 6/24, 7/1
6.Mentors Lead Team Guidance: 6/19–6/21
7.Registration & Code Submission Deadline: 7/4 12:00
8.Preliminary Review: 7/5–7/6
9. Announcement of advancing teams: 7/7
10. Offline Finals: 7/14–7/15
11. DemoDay: 7/15 10:00–17:00
12.Winning Team Announcement: 7/15 18:00
13. Open Party: 7/14 20:00–24:00
14. After party: 7/15 20:00–24:00
15. The Champion Team Participates in Decoded Conference Speech: 7/16
2. Challenge Tracks
This hackathon is open to all individuals and teams who have a passion for blockchain. Participating teams can register for multiple tracks, and the rewards and honors can be accumulated. The competition is divided into four main categories:
Category I: Building Parachains + Independent Chains
In this category, you have the challenge of building a custom blockchain using Substrate. In the near future, your chain will have the ability to connect to Kusama Relay Chain to achieve interoperability and plug-and-play security. The following ideas are meant to inspire you. We encourage you to unleash your creativity and build a custom chain that you believe would be most useful to other builders in the Substrate ecosystem!
- DeFi Chain
- Private Chain
- Decentrialized Storage Chain
- DAO Chain
- Gaming Chain
- Content, Social Network Chain
- DID
- Decentrialized Market Chain
- Others
Category II: Smart Contracts (and related)
- Smart Contract Chain
- Smart Contracts Platform
- ink! Smart Contracts Developer Tools
ink! is the next-generation smart contract development framework developed by Parity. It relies on the pallet-contracts module built into Substrate and uses Rust to write WebAssembly smart contracts. As more and more developers adopt the ink! framework, we need additional auxiliary toolkits to assist developers in writing secure and efficient smart contracts. These toolkits include, but are not limited to:
- Contract Testing Environment for Quick Startup and Deployment
- Smart Contract Audit Standards and Tools
- Enhanced Contract Standards
- Monitoring, Indexing, and Visualizing On-chain Contract Data
Category III: Blockchain Tools
- Test Kits
- Substrate pallets Tools
- Governance Tools
- Others
Category IV: Open Tracks
Explore all possibilities! In this category, we encourage you to push the boundaries and think creatively, aiming to disrupt status.
Enhance the underlying technologies of Web3, such as peer-to-peer communication frameworks like libp2p, new consensus algorithms based on Substrate, node routing and lookup mechanisms like DHT, and other solutions that can facilitate peer-to-peer financial and social activities.
3. Prize
All prize for the 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon will be sponsored by Polkadot, with a total value of $300,000 in equivalent DOT. Unlike previous editions, this hackathon will feature category-based awards, and a project can participate in multiple award categories. If no eligible projects are submitted in a specific category, the corresponding award will not be granted. There are a total of 4 categories and 16 awards. Each category will have the top three winners, making up 12 awards, while the remaining 4 awards are: Judges’ Favorite Award, Developers’ Favorite Award, Best Innovation Award and Travel Grant Prize Pool.
The track is divided into award groups including (with first, second and third prizes and corresponding bonuses):
- Track 1: Building Parachains + Independent Chains
1st Prize: 571.4 DOT
2nd Prize: 285.7 DOT
3rd Prize: 142.8 DOT
- Track 2: Smart Contracts (and related)
1st Prize: 571.4 DOT
2nd Prize: 285.7 DOT
3rd Prize: 142.8 DOT
- Track 3: Blockchain Products and Tools
1st Prize: 571.4 DOT
2nd Prize: 285.7 DOT
3rd Prize: 142.8 DOT
- Track 4: Open Tracks
1st Prize: 571.4 DOT
2nd Prize: 285.7 DOT
3rd Prize: 142.8 DOT
- Other awards include:
Audience’s Favorite Award: 714 DOT * 1
Developer’s Favorite Award: 714 DOT * 1
Best Innovation Award: 714 DOT * 1
Travel Grant Prize Pool: Shared 714 DOT (distributed among teams attending each event and the final competition)
4. Judging Rules
All submissions will be evaluated based on the following six dimensions:
Preliminary Evaluation (50%):
- Technical Difficulty (20%): The project addresses a problem with a certain level of technical challenge and demonstrates technical breakthroughs.
- Project Completeness (20%): The project is fully implemented, going beyond the conceptual stage, with a complete demo or proof of concept (POC) presentation.
- Compliance (10%): The project is submitted within the specified time and meets the required standards.
Final Evaluation (50%):
- Business Value (20%): The project offers a solution that can be applied in real-world industry scenarios and solves practical problems.
- Innovation (20%): The project exhibits novel ideas, breaking through conventional thinking and approaches.
- User Experience (10%): This includes the intuitiveness and comprehensibility of the solution for potential users.
Note: The preliminary review focuses on code submissions, added features, testing, integration, deployment, and other development work during the hackathon. Projects with clear submission history have an advantage as they provide a better understanding of the actual development process. The participation in the demo will be determined by the technical scores from the preliminary evaluation, which can be adjusted based on the demo and the actual functionalities developed.
5. Registration Process
Step1：Fill out the Google form
Participants can submit their registration and complete the required information through the following link. Whether you are participating as a team or an individual, each team member must fill out this form.
🚩Google Form: https://forms.gle/bfQCm1JUKDwBqXSW9
Step2：Fill out the registration form
Participants can register for the hackathon by filling in their information through the registration link and submitting their email address. By clicking the “Register Now” button on the Dorahacks website, they can apply for a free Dorahacks account to participate in the hackathon. At least one team member should register and provide the required information, and they can choose to provide only the necessary information for registration. By participating in this hackathon, it indicates agreement to the sponsors collecting and storing participants’ personal information for the operation and promotion of the hackathon.
🚩Registration Link: https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/polkadot-hackathon-2023-summer/detail
Step3：Join our Discord
Please join the discord group and select “2023 Polkadot Summer Hackathon Hacker” as your role. Please modify your username to “Name-TeamName” or “Name-Individual” (if you haven’t formed a team yet).
🚩Discord Group Link: https://discord.com/invite/KsCEKvqU4p
Step4：Build your project in the GitHub repository
- Once registration is complete, you can immediately start creating your project by forking this code repository into your team members’ repositories.
https://github.com/parity-asia/hackathon-2023-summer
2. Generate a directory in the “teams” section, naming it after your team. Start by adding an empty file or a simple README introducing your team. Submit a pull request (PR) to create the directory. This is done to reserve a space for your team. Please pull it down.
3. Afterwards, all the code related to your project should be stored within the directory named after your team. You can organize it in this way.
4. Submit a pull request (PR) to this repository before 11:59 PM on July 4, 2023. Teams are only allowed to modify the files within their respective directories.
Step5：Preliminary Submission Content
5. The team’s code must be submitted on the Parity GitHub. During the first week of registration, teams should fork this code repository and create a team directory. In the README file, outline the planned code functionalities to be completed during the hackathon (within 1000 words) and submit a pull request (PR) to the Parity GitHub.
6. Each team must submit at least one entry for the competition, and all submissions must be in English.
7. The submission should include, but is not limited to, the following information:
- Basic information: project name, project initiation date
- Project overview: project background, origin, problem statement, project description, project demo, technical architecture, project logo, initial version of the project for preliminary review, team information, track category
- Planned code projects during the hackathon: blockchain backend, web frontend, user registration page, etc.
- Completed project for the hackathon (to be submitted before 11:59 AM on July 4, 2023)
8. Do not upload demo videos or large PPT files directly to GitHub. Instead, provide links to the demo video and upload the PPT to Google Drive. Only submit the YouTube and Google Drive links on GitHub.
9. List the functionalities that were completed by the hackathon deadline of 11:59 AM on July 4, 2023. Place the related code in the “src” directory and outline the completed development work/features in this section. We will pay close attention to these directories/files and conduct a technical evaluation based on them.
10. If you need to refer to any resources, you can click the following link for reference: 🚩https://github.com/parity-asia/hackathon-2023-summer/tree/main/teams/00-team-template
11. Submissions for the competition must be made within the specified time (before 12:00 PM on July 4th). Late submissions will not be considered valid.
12. On the evening of July 7th, this repository will provide a preliminary list and select participating teams to enter DemoDay.
6. The Guidance of Mentor Team
During the competition, the organizers will organize online discussion meetings for each participating team. After the meetings, Parity engineers and investment firm researchers will act as mentors and join the team groups to provide guidance. Participating teams can raise any development challenges and requirements they encounter based on their project progress and technical architecture. The mentors will offer substantial advice to help the teams successfully incubate their competition entries!
7. Instructions for Participation
- Participating projects should be built within the Polkadot ecosystem and fall into one of the following tracks:
- Building parallel chains + independent chains
- Smart contracts (and related)
- Blockchain products and tools
- Open proposition
- New projects can be developed directly from the Hackathon’s GitHub repository. Experienced teams should clearly define the new features they plan to add during the Hackathon and create a new branch one week later, such as “hackathon-2023-summer,” and submit their code. Please indicate the names of each branch to help the judges understand your work.
- Please note that this Hackathon is conducted both online and offline. The registration deadline is 12:00 PM on July 4th (Beijing time). The list of teams entering the finals will be announced on July 7th. The final DemoDay will be held in Shanghai from July 14th to 15th. Each team entering the finals must send at least one member to participate in person. If unable to attend in person, remote participation is also allowed. The list of winners of the Hackathon will be announced at the DemoDay event on July 15th.
- Participants commit to submitting works that do not violate any relevant laws and regulations, or infringe upon any third-party intellectual property rights or other rights. Otherwise, their eligibility may be revoked.
- We recommend teams to regularly update and submit their code. Projects with clear submission histories are more favorable for judges to understand the actual development progress of the project
- If any cases of plagiarism are found in the submitted works, the organizing committee reserves the right to disqualify the entries.
- The final interpretation rights of this event belong to OneBlock & Parity.
8. The Opening Ceremony of the 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon
The opening ceremony of the 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon will hold on May 20th at 8:00 PM on Twitter Space. During the opening ceremony, Jun Zhou, an engineer from Parity, will share the latest in Polkadot updates for the first half of 2023. Substrate core contributor Jimmy will give a detailed explanation of the competition rules of this Polkadot Hackathon. Don’t miss this exciting moment if you’re interested in participating in the hackathon! There will also be a Q&A session where participants can directly communicate and interact with experts, fostering a warm-up discussion and exchange of ideas before the competition.
The following are the specific arrangements for the opening ceremony:
Time:
Saturday, May 20, 2023 20:00 UTC+8
Topic:
The Opening Ceremony of the Summer 2023 Polkadot Hackathon
Schedule:
- 20:00–20:30 2023 The Latest Progress of Polkadot in 2023 — Jun Zhou, Parity Engineer
- 20:30–21:15 2023 Summer Polkadot Hackathon Competition Rules Detail Explanation — Jimmy, Substrate contributor
- 21:15–21:30 Q&A
How to join:
- Follow OneBlock on Twitter：@OneBlock_
- Twitter Space: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1zqKVPaELeLJB
Since 2021, OneBlock+ and Parity have successfully organized six editions of the Polkadot Hackathon, attracting over 200 teams and nearly 1000 developers who have showcased their impressive skills and achievements through the competition. Many standout projects from these hackathons are still active in the Web3 industry and have become benchmarks for incubating the next generation of outstanding projects. This year, we are excited to welcome all developers to join the Polkadot Hackathon. Through teamwork, mentorship, and the support of event prizes, we aim to help participants truly grow as trailblazers in the Web3 era. If you want to enjoy the technical feast and compete with developers worldwide. Don’t hesitate to sign up! Let’s hack it this summer!
About OneBlock+
OneBlock+ is the first and the largest blockchain developer community in China. At OneBlock+, we provide full support for developers with their substrate studies and further set off their career paths. We host Polkadot Hackathons every season to attract top-notch developers to build and innovate for the prosperity of the ecosystem. As a greater China technology resource integrator, OneBlock+ also partners with developers, communities, business elites, and key media who have business insights and experiences in the blockchain industry to provide educational events, such as technical courses, webinars, AMAs, and offline events for the industry. Want to shape the crypto world together? Come and join us today!
