Why Everyone Should Join a Smart Contract or Blockchain Hackathon
The blockchain ecosystem is ripe for experimentation. Hop in
Yes, you read that right. Everyone should join these hackathons. There are a slew of reasons to participate in a hackathon and those reasons should not be understated. But there is something extra special about blockchain/smart contract hackathons.
You non-techies out there may have already glossed over this, but I hope my emphasis on everyone has kept you here. There’s so much more to a hackathon project than just coding. While a pure software engineer may be a monster at coding, they may not have all the tools needed for a successful project. Idea generation, research, marketing, and industry-specific knowledge are all pieces that can make a project shine or plummet. Not to mention, perhaps you’ve always just been curious to learn more about this wild smart-contract idea.
If you still need to know why smart contracts and blockchain are life-altering technology, check out this video which explains blockchain and smart contracts at a simple level and how it’s becoming stronger and more essential to us today.
1. Learn Bleeding Edge Advances in Smart Contract Technology — Right From the Source
Often, the best way to learn something is to jump in. For most hackathons, the draw is that it’s a dedicated time to set aside from your normal life to jump into an exciting new world. You can have no idea what you’re doing — you may simply be interested in the technology — but after a weekend, a week, a month, or however long the hackathon is, you can come out with some amazing tech skills.
Blockchain especially has tools to get you started. From simple documentation, tutorials, to just asking the source of the technology. How awesome would it be if node.js experts were available at every hackathon? You’d no longer have to spend years searching the web for your npm error, when probably all you needed to run was npm install again or something!
There’s often a Discord with every sponsor or technology ready to answer any questions that you have and help get you set up for success. Remember in college when professors had office hours but you never went because it was across campus? Well, imagine those office hours being right at your fingertips, looking to help solve your project in any way they can.
Plus, if you enter a hackathon with the Chainlink project, you get to talk to me!
Once you learn even a little about smart contracts/blockchain, you instantly join the elite group of engineers who are known as blockchain engineers. In 2018 the number was about 105,000 in the entire planet.
That is about 0.6% of the 18.2 million software engineers on the planet. Essentially, you instantly join a top percentage of software engineers!
You don’t even have to finish a whole project. You can just show up, join the community, learn, build something fun, and leave all the wiser.
2. Projects Go From Fun Idea to Real Companies FAST in the Smart Contract World
In other hackathons, that’s often where the idea dies. The competition is so fierce out there, there’s a good chance your idea has been done. It can be a grind to push forward and years before you have a decent project.
Not with blockchain hackathons.
The support of the community means that if you want to take that entrepreneurship step to build something awesome, the tools are there for you. The world of blockchain is dying for creative ideas to come through the weeds and push the world into the fourth industrial revolution. Here’s a list of 44 project ideas, for anyone to try — these are just scratching the surface.
Due to this demand, it’s often easy for a project to go from idea to reality. Let’s take a look at just a few.
PoolTogether
This team entered the 2019 ETH Denver hackathon, you can see their original submission here. Starting from humble origins as just an idea, they recently received a $1 million dollar investment after locking over $1 million DAI to their project.
In one year they went from zero to a $1 million investment!
Instadapp
Another ETH branded hackathon project, they submitted just two years ago in 2018. Check out their submission here. With humble beginnings, you can now find them among the top 50 DeFi projects on the planet and $6.5 million dollars locked into their project.
xDai
Built in 2018, this is another project that has been around less than two years and sits in the top 50 projects for DeFi.
Do I need to keep going?
3. Connect With Other Brilliant and Ambitious People to Bring Ideas to Life Faster
The blockchain community is one of the most inviting we’ve ever been part of. Everything is new, everyone is curious, and trying to build out awesome projects that make the world better.
When you show up to these hackathons, there’s often a time for people to find teams. It’s often better when you group up with people you may have never met, forcing yourself to get out there and meet new people.
These can turn into life changing experiences, forming lifelong friends and colleagues. As I mentioned, some of these people may not even be technical — just experts in their domain.
Most projects that do well, generally have some people who don’t know anything about blockchain, or very little. Maybe they’re a product manager, front end developer, researcher, domain expert or anything that I’ve said above, there’s always a place for you at a hackathon.
4. Sponsors Are Just Giving Out Money
Blockchain being such a new space, they’re always looking for interesting people to join in and try out new things. Often, sponsors show up and say “I’ll give someone $5,000 if they do something cool with my technology”. These are known as bounties.
Yes, it’s that easy.
Some people even make a living off this — see how this guy made over $100,000 from blockchain hackathons.
Some recent hackathon prizes:
The list goes on and on.
Hackathons you can join RIGHT NOW
I hope you’re now excited now to join hackathons and see why it would be worthwhile to do so. If smart contracts being the spark for the 4th industrial revolution isn’t enough, I hope at least the above is.
So let’s get you into some hackathons. Here’s where you can find some of the best.
There are a few hackathons going on right now that you can join!
Build the next generation of universally connected smart contracts. Right now! This is Chainlink’s biggest hackathon of the year, and with over $40k in bounties, you don’t want to miss it.
This one in particular features some awesome bounties, including Chainlink’s reference contract bounty, and Terra’s wallet bounty. All you have to do is deploy a reference contract for Chainlink, and install Terra’s app to qualify for these entry level prizes.
Using Polkadot, you can build blockchains that are connected to blockchains. Combine this with the power of Chainlink oracles, and you can make some wonderfully powerful applications.
A few other sites that often host amazing hackathons.
They’ve been mentioned before, and have run some amazing hackathons in the past.
Close to the blockchain community, Gitcoin has hosted tons of hackathons, and are looking to host more and more.
Devpost has started getting more and more blockchain projects, and we’re excited to see everyone submit here as well!
Be sure to connect with Chainlink on twitter, so you can stay tuned for Chainlinked hackathons, where you can learn and grow, and maybe win some prizes too!
What are you waiting for?