How I Made $100,000 from Blockchain Hackathons in a Year
Making six figures from hackathons has been an incredible milestone for someone who has never joined, let alone win a coding competition.
The learning experience I have gained from these competitions had been insightful, and I want to share them here — especially on what I thought contributed to successfully winning four blockchain related hackathons throughout last year. Hopefully this simple guide can motivate you to compete in similar events.
On Blockchain Hackathons
2018 was known as the crypto winter — prices across all major cryptocurrencies crashed significantly in a yearlong bear market. Yet despite the slow market there were constant activity in blockchain development. Many startups were busy at work building blockchain protocols and decentralized systems. This provided huge opportunities to blockchain engineers as companies sponsored coding events to increase their platform’s adoption and to solve tech problems.
The competitions I enrolled in were online creative challenges, and is not the usual one to two days coding hackathon. In these challenges, you are given a longer term of around one to three months to complete a working prototype of an application and to submit it online so you don’t really have to show up in person. Some competitions lay out the business requirements you, where others are open and the ideas are totally up to you.
The ones that I participated in were:
Microsoft China NEO dApp Competition: This was actually two competitions held at around the same time. The challenge was to build a decentralized app on the NEO blockchain network. The app itself can be anything up to you as long as it has a real use case.
Binance Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Competition: This was a tough one but had the largest prize pool for winners. The requirements were laid out clearly so you didn’t have to think up an idea for a product, but the implementation methods were entirely up to you. The requirement was to build a decentralized exchange platform that is fast, secured, and can support any number of tokens on the market. Achieving this goal was no simple task, hence we were given ample time.
Blockchain Writing Competition: This one has a different concept from the rest and isn’t actually a coding contest. The goal was to write a tutorial to help people get started on dApp development – and has been the catalyst that sparked my writing journey today.
How to Improve Your Chance
- First and foremost, dip your toes in the blockchain scene. It’s not hard finding hackathon events from time to time by following blockchain related news. Join the discord channels for several blockchain startups and get involved in the community.
- Like any other project, the hardest part is just to get started. Don’t spend too much time thinking about what to do or how you’re going to do it. When I first joined the Binance DEX challenge, I had little experience and only some knowledge on blockchain platforms. I went on spending the first few weeks learning as much as I could and was able to produce a decent product by the end of the competition.
- Understand the requirements clearly. Some hackathons give you hint of how the contest is graded (aka the judging criteria), use that to your advantage. If a certain category bag more points than others, you know for sure that is what the judges or sponsors are looking for and that should be your focus.
- Don’t be intimidated by the number of contestants in a competition, most don’t reach the finish line. Seeing the number of competitors can be demotivating because it indicates a lesser chance of winning – don’t let this keep you from competing. The thing is many people don’t stay committed to completing their projects, let alone deliver a solid one.
- Treat your project like a real product. That means having a proper name, good documentation and a landing page with a tag line. If people don’t know what your project is about or how to even use it, then it is as good as nothing.
- As always, give it your best shot. Online creative challenges are world stage competitions that attract the best talents internationally. Even if you don’t win, you are sure to walk away learning something new and be better equipped for your next adventure.
Conclusion
Participating in an online creative hackathon is a good way to sharpen your skill sets and gain new knowledge. Always have an entrepreneurial spirit when competing in these contests and treat every project like a business product. Completeness is key, so get a proper name and if there’s a UI involved, make it decent looking. A free stock theme will go miles compared to an interface from a hello world tutorial. And most importantly don’t skim on documentation. You don’t want people confused over how to use your product.
Participating in an online creative hackathon is a good way to sharpen your skill sets and gain new knowledge.
Good luck!
