CoinDesk’s Web3athon, an annual hackathon event hosted in partnership with Alchemy University and HackerEarth, has announced its latest cohort of winners. Six teams building in five blockchain ecosystems will receive over $200,000 in grants to help fund further protocol development.
The industry needs more developers learning and building in Web3, said Garrett Skrovina, audience partnerships senior manager for CoinDesk’s Consensus event. Each protocol approaches ecosystem development differently, so Web3athon provided a platform to showcase the various developer relations initiatives of our partner protocols and foundations.
The six-week virtual event, which ran from April to June this year, saw over 6,400 participants submit over 160 final projects. The winning projects addressed a wide range of needs around protocol infrastructure and applications, including network privacy, zero-code development and e-commerce. Nearly half of applicants were building on Solana and XDC, with the next most popular networks being Polkadot and the Ethereum and Cosmos-compatible OKT Chain (OKTC).
Mike Hale, who was building the first version of Vanward – a tool that helps manage and verify professional certifications – on Solana, plans to continue the work through the ongoing Encode x Solana Summer hackathon. I didn’t go into Web3athon expecting to win a prize. Instead, I used it as a deadline and motivation to get the first version developed, Hale said.
The six winning projects included Obsidian, a protocol that enables stealth payments on Ethereum; Risc-Roll, a project that brings zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs onto Polkadot; Synap, a blockchain-based data economy; FuelStack, a crypto-based e-commerce platform built on the XinFin protocol; Blocklog, a data intelligence developer tool for tracking and analyzing blockchains, smart contracts and decentralized apps; and Birdhouse, a setup tool to help businesses integrate with Coreum and create Coreum-based infrastructure and projects.