Polkadot Hackathon: North America Edition
Mon, 30 May 2022 07:00AM UTC+00
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The Polkadot Hackathon Global Series North America edition is the second in a series of hackathons that brings the cutting edge of blockchain to a global community. This event may be focused on North America, but is open to all. Whether you’re an experienced blockchain dev, want to learn more about building on Polkadot, or are new to the ecosystem, a range of activities and a more than US$270,000 prize pool are on offer for you.

Focusing on Substrate, Polkadot, and Kusama, this hackathon is open to both individuals and teams anywhere in the world. As well as blockchain building, participants can take advantage of mentoring hours and networking opportunities that can be invaluable for starting new projects or building teams.

WHAT IS POLKADOT?

Polkadot is a layer-0 protocol and multichain network founded by Dr. Gavin Wood, co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum. Polkadot provides security, scalability, and interoperability to a diverse network of layer-1 blockchains called parachains. Polkadot offers several advancements over legacy blockchain networks, from governance to customization, upgradeability, energy efficiency, and more.

WHAT IS KUSAMA?

Built on nearly the same codebase as Polkadot, Kusama is a layer-0 protocol and multichain network. Kusama provides security, scalability, and interoperability to a diverse network of layer-1 blockchains called parachains, and serves as Polkadot’s ‘canary net’. Designed for radical innovation and experimentation, Kusama is used both as a live, value-bearing proving ground for Polkadot technology and as a deployment environment for early-stage startups and experimental blockchain use cases.

WHAT IS SUBSTRATE?

Substrate is a blockchain development framework for building and customizing parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem, as well as standalone or ‘solo’ chains. It features a completely generic state transition function and modular building blocks for common blockchain components like consensus, networking, and asset creation. By building with Substrate, development teams can significantly speed up production, reduce the cost of building a blockchain, and get much more power and flexibility than building on a smart contract platform.

CATEGORIES

Interfaces & Experiences

This track is dedicated to building your understanding of UI and UX fundamentals, including best practices specifically for blockchain development. Gain experience in building a wide variety of interfaces and user experiences that chains can adopt.

DAO & Governance

Discover the breadth of DAO functionality and governance mechanisms in this track. Get the opportunity to explore ideas, including the creation of new DAOs and the necessary tooling involved in this development process, as well as new governance mechanisms and pallets.

Web3 & Tooling

A diverse track focused on all kinds of tooling and applications that can be used to expand Web3. Those interested in building a better web can explore the use cases for open-source technologies for a society run on peer-to-peer networks.

DeFi

Builders can make use of this track for the multitude of DeFi-related solutions, including DEXs, AMMs, and stablecoins. Learn how to not only develop new financial primitives, but also work towards the integration of existing ones, such as breaking the barriers of assets between blockchains. This all contributes to helping build wider adoption of DeFi.

NFT

This track for developers interested in the use cases for NFTs will explore the scope for their creation across multiple industries, including gaming, art, real estate, logistics, and general collectibles. The scope includes exploring the importance of optimizing for complex NFT use cases, and blockchain-agnostic NFT platforms that enable cross-chain functionality.

PARTICIPANTS' GUIDE

We have compiled a complete guide for you, where you can find a lot of information about our hackathon. Make sure you check out the FAQ and Code of Conduct, go through the list of resources that will get you started, read about how you can get into team formation, who are our awesome mentors to take you through challenging tasks and last, but absolutely not least who will be your fellow judges when the hacking period is ended.

Don't forget to take a look around on Polkadot Pathways as well and climb the leaderboard!

Ecosystem Challenges

Both in our Participants' Guide and in the Resources section of this page we are listing all the information you need to know about the ecosystem teams' challenges, bounties, along with the available documentation. Make sure you take a look!

REQUIREMENTS

SIMPLIFIED SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS FOR TEAMS FOR EACH CATEGORY

A. Project Description x1

This is a detailed description of your team's project which should contain the following:

  • Name and summary of the project
  • Names/pseudonyms of team members and contact information (e.g. GitHub handle, email address, etc)
  • The actual challenge statement you are submitting for and an overview of what problem is being addressed
  • How the project uses Substrate
B. 5 minute Pitch Video x1

This is a recorded pitch of your team introducing your project and solution. The pitch video should cover at least the following:

  • Name of your project
  • Overview of design, novelty/originality, technical complexity, daily/mass usability and impact of project (these are the judging criteria!)
C. GitHub Repo Link x1

Each team to appoint 1 (one) person to create the team's GitHub repo and share the access with the team to collaborate on. During submission, the team needs to submit the link to this GitHub Repo which can be accessible to the judges.

D. List of Tech Stack Used x1

This is a list of tech stack used by the team to build your project

E. Project Demo Link

This is the URL to the live working environment of the solution you have developed

IMPORTANT! GENERAL SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS & RULES

If you are submitting a Substrate chain, the submission must be one of the following formats:

  • a live running site or running chain and provide an endpoint, if you are running a substrate chain (highly recommended)
  • a Docker image (highly recommended)
  • a Linux executable (discouraged)
  • code with detailed build instructions (strongly discouraged)

If you are using Substrate, use the latest version.

If you are submitting for an ecosystem team (hackathon sponsor) challenge, clearly state which challenge you are building for.

Include in your submission’s readme file:

  • Project title
  • Project description (minimum 150 words)

Provide a way to access the project for judging and testing by including a link to a repo hosting the application’s code and any other deployment files and testing instructions.

Must have an open source licence (GPL, MIT, Apache, and Unlicense are accepted, others may be considered on a case by case basis).

Must use or be made for the Polkadot/Kusama/Substrate ecosystem.

Ecosystem challenge requirements

Everything described above, further detailed sponsor prize requirements are the following:

Acala:

  • Must be deployed on Acala's Mandala testnet or your own testnet

Crust Network:

  • At least using Crust cross-chain storage or crust blockchain storage
  • Open sourced

Interlay Bounties: 

  • Name of bounty

PRIZES

$336,000 in prizes

- Grand Prize - $30,000
- Interfaces & Experiences - 1st place - $20,000
- Interfaces & Experiences - 2nd place - $15,000
- Interfaces & Experiences - 3rd place - $10,000
- Web3 & Tooling - 1st place - $20,000
- Web3 & Tooling - 2nd place - $15,000
- Web3 & Tooling - 3rd place - $10,000
- DAO & Governance - 1st place - $20,000
- DAO & Governance - 2nd place - $15,000
- DAO & Governance - 3rd
- DeFi - 1st place - $20,000
- DeFi - 2nd place - $15,000
- DeFi - 3rd place - $10,000
- NFT - 1st place - $20,000
- NFT - 2nd place - $15,000
- NFT - 3rd place - $10,000
- Community Choice - Top three projects - $5,000 each (3)
- Acala Bounties - $30,000
  • EVM+ DApp for aUSD yield
  • EVM+ Substrate Pre-compiles
  • Cross-parachain DApp
  • Front-end, tools, or utility service

- Best use of Crust - $6,000

  • Leverage on Crust Network’s web3 storage for the metaverse! Think of something involving IPFS Scan, Crust Wallet, or built with NFT storage, dApp hosting, SocialFi data storage, general file storage, and more!
- Interlay Bounties - $30,000
  • Dashboard and System Information (based on squid!)
  • Trading/Arbitrage Bots
  • Vault Interface

JUDGES

JUDGING CRITERIA

Ecosystem Impact and Usefulness

How impactful and useful is the submission in the Polkadot/Kusama/Substrate ecosystem?

Web3 Contribution and Advancement

How does the submission contribute to and advance Web 3.0 as a whole?

Originality, Creativity and Innovation

How new and novel the submission is versus existing technologies?

Technical Difficulty

What is the level of skill or knowledge required to build the submission?

Mass Usability

How feasible is the idea? How adaptable is it across other integrations? How sound is the business model?

Acala Bounties

Contribution to the Acala and aUSD Ecosystem (25%), Originality, Creativity, and DeFi Innovation (25%), Technical Difficulty (25%), User Experience (25%)

Best Use of Crust

Is it involved with IPFS? Is it involving Crust cross-chain storage on Polkadot or directly with Crust blockchain? Is it integrated with Crust Wallet and/or IPFS Scan?

Challenge criteria - Interlay

Contribution to the Interlay/Kintsugi (iBTC/kBTC) Ecosystem (25%), Originality, Creativity, and Innovation (25%), Technical Difficulty (25%), User Experience (25%)

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