Backed By A $100,000 Prize Pool: Polygon Launches Hackathon To Inspire Developers to Build Dapps

Polygon, an ethereum-based full-stack scaling solution bringing mass adoption to the ethereum platform, has launched Round 1 of its Polygon-Grants Hackathon on HackerLink, DoraHacks’ open source developer incentive platform.Developers are encouraged to come up with ideas for decentralized apps (Dapps) and bring them to life on Polygon, with a prize pool of $100,000, unlimited community funding, and coverage across Polygon’s marketing channels up for grabs. The prize pool will be allocated based on votes from the Polygon community executed via on-chain quadratic voting as well as those from assigned judges.

Polygon has a reputation for being one of the most developer-friendly ecosystems outside of the Ethereum mainchain, offering the best tools for building applications on Ethereum, including Hardhat, Truffle, Metamask, and Etherscan. The Polygon ecosystem has been designed especially to make it easy for developers to get started on Polygon, build Web 3.0 apps, access a 1 million-strong user base and gain funding from VCs. DeFi bluechip Dapps including Sushiswap, Curve, Aave, Balancer, Kyber use Polygon.

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, said: “We’re incredibly excited about the ideas that will emerge from the Polygon-Grants Hackathon. We already have the biggest brains in blockchain building innovative apps on Polygon, this hackathon will help us to further unlock the potential of developers around the world to help shape the next phase of Web 3.0.”

A range of these innovative Polygon-integrated projects that have gone on to achieve incredible success include QuickSwap, a permissionless decentralized exchange (DEX) based on Ethereum, and powered by Polygon Network's scalability infrastructure; SushiSwap, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange that lets you trade a wide range of tokens; and AaveGotchi, DeFi-powered NFTs staked with interest-generating tokens.

Polygon has also presented a long list of ideas to inspire hackathon participants, including non-fungible token (NFT) bridges to other blockchains to enable NFT minting, a lending protocol that immediately provides liquidity for assets transferred cross-chain, a decentralized version of Patreon to support creators and influencers, and a protocol to decentralize insurance risk without needing a third-party.

Polygon currently houses six times more gaming and NFT Dapps than other chains – currently over 500 Dapps. Since April this year, Polygon’s Total Value Locked (TVL) – a metric that denotes market share and growth – rose from $1 billion to nearly $9 billion. Polygon’s rapidly growing market share suggests there’s a strong demand for Dapps on faster and cheaper blockchain solutions.