Chainlink Announces Winners of $550K Hackathon Prize Pool

Chainlink, the industry-leading oracle network in the blockchain industry, today announced the winners of its Fall 2021 Hackathon. The event awarded $550,000 in prizes, received nearly 290 project submissions, and recorded 7,800+ signups—double that of Chainlink’s Spring hackathon. Participants from around the world came together to showcase their passion and talent for building the next generation of hybrid smart contracts.

Chainlink and the other hackathon sponsors awarded prizes to the teams that showed exceptional creativity in both their ideas and implementation, creating new use cases across verticals such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and social impact, as well as developer tooling to help engineers easily leverage Chainlink oracles in their applications. According to a survey of participants, more than 40% of hackathon attendees had little to no experience in smart contract development before entering the hackathon, and an additional 40% had little to no programming experience at all.

"It's been a wild ride watching so many developers use smart contracts and oracles to build such incredibly creative and powerful applications,"

said Patrick Collins, lead developer advocate at Chainlink Labs.

"As one of the largest hackathons in the blockchain space, this is the stomping ground of innovation. It's at these events where the future of technology and Web3 is built."

The Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon awarded prizes across a wide array of categories, ranging from the $30,000 grand prize to topic-specific prizes in critical blockchain verticals. Of the nearly 290 project submissions received, 90 used Chainlink’s Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF), 64 projects used Chainlink Data Feeds, 46 used Chainlink Keepers, and 92 used Chainlink’s any API functionality. Since Chainlink is natively integrated with more than 10 blockchains, this event allowed participants to work on whichever blockchain best suited the needs of their project.

Here is the list of top prize winners for the Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon:

• Grand Prize: NUSIC: An NFT bond project that empowers musicians to better monetize their work and earn long-term revenue from their copyrighted material.
• Chainlink Services Prize: Kotal, a platform that streamlines node launches.
• DeFi Prize: Krypton, a decentralized exchange that is resistant against front-running, adverse selection, and miner-extractable value (MEV).
• DeFi Prize: Tradeboard, an auto-balancing DeFi index fund platform where any trader can build their own crypto index that any other user can then join in on.
• DAO Prize: Governor C, a Sybil-resistant quadratic voting system that solves the problem of Sybil attacks on DAO voting systems.
• NFT Prize: SpaceTombo, a gamified lucky draw game in which tickets are exchanged for dynamic NFTs to fund charitable organizations.
• Social Impact Prize: Soleil, a token-based project that incentivizes the expansion of solar power generators by adding additional income through stablecoins.
• Off-Chain Compute Prize: Meltdown, an NFT auction platform that utilizes Chainlink VRF and Chainlink Keepers to create a randomly finalized auction period.
• Women-Led Project Prize: Figura, a gaming marketplace for blockchain-based gaming projects.
• Women-Led Project Prize: CricNFT, a curated NFT platform that allows sports teams to easily launch NFTs for their fan bases.

More information on Chainlink Fall Hackathon Winners is available here.

In January, top prize winners will have the opportunity to present their projects to leading venture capital firms such as DeFi Alliance, Ethereal Ventures, Lightspeed, Tribe, Polychain, and DCG. This will help these projects get feedback on their product and go-to-market plans. Select pitches will be available later on Chainlink’s YouTube channel.

Sponsors for Chainlink’s Fall Hackathon included Moralis, Filecoin, SNZ Holding, UFO Gaming, Polygon, Avalanche, Alchemy, Harmony, Aurora, Google Cloud, Ernst & Young, and UNICEF. A full list of hackathon sponsors can be found here.

Developers actively looking to connect blockchain applications to Chainlink Data Feeds, Chainlink VRF, Chainlink Keepers, or access any API, can explore the Chainlink developer documentation page and connect with the technical community in the Chainlink Discord. Chainlink’s next hackathon will take place this coming Spring.