MetaBUILDing the History of NEAR
Running one of blockchain’s biggest hackathons while fleeing war
MetaBUILD II is one of the biggest hackathons in the blockchain community. With a $1 million in prize money, nearly 4,000 participants and more than 350 submissions from across the world, it has helped ideas from streaming tokens to metaverse worlds become a reality.
Behind the game-changing hackathon, are the judges, organisers, and staff who work to ensure each submission is explored and vetted in an open and transparent way. In any normal year this is a significant challenge. This year however, life for myself, one of the coordinators and judges, was played out amidst a backdrop of Russian rockets attacking my home city, and the threat of being trapped in a war zone.
This is my story.
Chapter 1. Tell the God about your plans
There is no school in the world where they teach you how to run hackathons. Every coordinator, every mentor, and every host is self taught because they were lucky enough to make it to their first hackathon, and they loved it.
For me, this path started around 6 years ago at a NASA Space Apps Challenge in Kyiv, Ukraine. Space Apps is a startup incubation program created by NASA with annual global hackathons hosted in 30+ countries and hundreds of thousands of people competing for the prizes. I’ve been hosting the Space Apps Challenges for 5 years in a row: first as a volunteer, then as a professional with a team of my own. My love for technology and startups led me to an unexpected career path, and by the end of 2021 I got an offer from Near Inc. to manage one of the biggest events in the blockchain community — the second MetaBUILD Hackathon.
MetaBUILD is more than just a hackathon. It’s a platform for collaboration within the ecosystem and beyond — an 8-week long incubation process that turns mere ideas into viable, market-ready products. It’s an opportunity to shape the future, creating decentralized applications to take millions of users on journeys they’ve never been on before. And the hackathon itself is decentralized, too. We invited our partners not only to judge and give out bounties, but to submit their own challenges, educate the participants in their own self-paced workshops, and inspire the building of hundreds of new products alongside NEAR.
The first MetaBUILD featured tracks for “Work” and “Play” applications. This time we decided to broaden the focus by creating two main tracks — Welcome and Natives. The Welcome track was designed as an entry point for developers unfamiliar with blockchain, and even non-developers. In collaboration with the NEAR Education team, we introduced the “Low Code” and “No Code” challenges, allowing non-developers to play with NEAR technology in whatever ways they could. Additionally, our partners submitted over 30 sponsored challenges around which participants could ideate, build, and create.
All in all, we managed to create a very cool and inclusive environment for both experienced developers, and blockchain enthusiasts.
The highlight of this hackathon was our collaboration with ETHDenver. We added another week to the initial submission deadline to include the participants of the largest and longest running ETH event in the world, which has its own buildathon. By doing this, more talented teams could submit their projects and compete for the MetaBUILD 2 bounties. As a result, we moved the submission deadline to February 22nd, which left us with more than a week to judge the projects with help and advice from our partners.
The judging process was supposed to include two stages of pre-review (one by our hosts from Devpost, and another from a member of DevRel team); a week long evaluation from the jury, including the challenge sponsors; another check by our Grants team; and a final check with the shortlisted teams. This seems like a lot of work, but with almost 4,000 participants and hundreds of submissions, we had to make sure to pick the best of the best for our winners.
We were committed to deliver on time and congratulate the winners during the March Townhall meeting. Then the world changed.
Chapter 2. 5AM in Odesa, Ukraine
A few days before the war, a colleague messaged, asking if I’d be able to come to Portugal because Putin was about to start something really bad. I told them that Putin had bitten off more than he could chew, so maybe he’ll get stuck with his army “defending” Donbas. I’m not going to fly across Europe without my dog, and what about my daughter who needs to finish her school year? I then thought to myself, “Putin started doing his thing 8 years ago. There is no reason for him to escalate — not in this time of a post-COVID crisis, when all people need is peace and a promise of prosperity.”
I was never so wrong in my entire life.
On February 24th, I awoke at 5:00AM to an explosion that sounded like the world was going to end. At first I thought I was dreaming. Then another explosion happened, and shortly after that I got a call from my mom. She was calling to tell the news: Russia had invaded Ukraine.
A few minutes later, I started getting messages from my friends — they were panicking, asking whether they should leave the city, and where they should go. I was completely lost and devastated, anxiously waiting for another explosion to happen. And happen it did. And another one. Soon I started recognising the sound of the ground defense system: this was still an explosion, but a safe one, because it meant that a Russian rocket was intercepted.
That day we were supposed to wrap up the first stage of MetaBUILD 2 pre-review and start evaluating the projects. With my hands shaking and tears in my eyes I joined our everyday meeting to see my team just as scared. I’m the only Ukrainian on the DevReal team but NEAR was co-founded by a Ukrainian, and a lot of people throughout the company live in Ukraine. For us, the war was not some media sensation — it was happening right at our door. As a team, we are used to unexpected circumstances but this situation was a full blown force majeure, and we weren’t trained in how to approach it.
Just like hackathons, war is something you learn as you go. Unlike hackathons, you don’t choose to be a victim of a war, nor can you quit when you’re done.
I never felt so sad and angry at the same time. I needed to keep working at all costs because modern wars are won not only by soldiers and bombs but by successful economies and public opinion. So, in order to win as a nation, every individual has to do what they can do best. For me, that meant continuing to work and fairly judging the thousands of people who chose to join MetaBUILD 2 to share their ideas and vision with the world.
Back then I thought I was able to do this with rockets exploding above my house. But after a few days, my mom developed some really bad anxiety symptoms, while the city of Mykolaiv, just 300 km to the north, was not only bombed — it was attacked with tanks and soldiers. It was time to make one of the hardest decisions of my life. A decision to leave.
At 7:00AM on March 2nd, I loaded three small bags, my dog, my daughter, and my mom into my Fiat 500 and drove westbound. I had 4,000 km (2,485 miles) and two major borders ahead of me. The first border was Moldova, which took me 24 hours to cross, and the second was Hungarian, which took 7 hours. The rest was just driving 10–14 hours a day across Transylvania, the Apennines, and the Pyrenees to reach Lisbon, Portugal, and the rest of the Ukrainians who decided to seek temporary protection there.
Chapter 3. Come rain or shine
I spent 6 days driving. Some evenings I had Wi-Fi to connect with my team and the judges, and sometimes I was too tired or didn’t make it on time to join the calls. Nevertheless, the first thing I did in Lisbon was not eating a pasteis de nata or doing another round of doom scrolling on my phone. Instead, I had to tame the chaos and understand how to deliver the MetaBUILD results.
The war impacted everything in the world, including the MetaBUILD 2 hackathon. Sanctions imposed against Russia made a lot of projects with Russian team members ineligible, but my amazing teammates made it work. Some of the jury members were unavailable because they or their families were affected by war, but we redoubled our efforts and replaced them with equally qualified judges.
I saw a thread on Twitter saying that we, the NEAR team, didn’t seem to pay enough attention to the judging process. I had to make sure this person knew that every team member was completely focused on delivering the best judging possible despite the circumstances.
I have two very good reasons why this is true. Firstly, I really do love my job. I love observing how mere ideas and vague concepts turn into real products, and how groups of strangers turn into teams. A hackathon coordinator’s job is similar to that of a gardener’s: if you are really patient and persistent, you get to see the fruits of your labor. Seeing hundreds of projects ready for a very bright future is the best reward for me.
Secondly, I really love my country. Technology is neutral, but we don’t have to be, so I’ll be doing my part in this horrible game, come rain or shine, or rocks from the sky. Every Ukrainian I know is doing their best to keep their head above water despite anxiety, rage, and sadness. It’s not just because they are trying to stay afloat but that we need to keep the industry going, creating new amazing projects, and benefiting their founders in Ukraine and all across the globe.
Despite the circumstances, MetaBUILD 2 delivered some great projects, and I know for a fact that all of those projects were judged fairly by some of the best people in the blockchain community. Russian aggression shapes Ukrainians as a nation, and as a team with Ukrainian roots, we get to build our history by staying resilient and doing our best in these uncertain times.
I wrote this post to put the MetaBUILD hackathon in historic context because I know from my personal experience that projects carry the spirit of the people who are building them. And MetaBUILD as a program has some really great people to shape its spirit going forward.
See you at the next NEAR hackathon!
