Solana’s DeFi hackathon winner to receive $200,000 prize
Participants will receive mentorship from Solana CEO Anatoly Takovenko and Bankman-Fried
High-performance blockchain firm Solana announced a DeFi hackathon in partnership with Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX’s Project Serum from 15 February through to 1 March earlier today. The hackathon is set to offer a $200,000 prize pool and $200,000 in seed funding from the Solana Foundation to aspiring developers in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space.
Solana, aimed at supporting builders around the world to create large-scale crypto apps, has also announced that the hackathon participants will receive mentorship from the firm’s CEO Anatoly Takovenko and Bankman-Fried.
Explaining the thought behind organizing the event, Bankman-Fried stated, “A lot of an ecosystem’s success depends on how much the community builds on it. I’ve been really happy with the growth of Solana so far building out the world’s fastest, most scalable on-chain ecosystem; I’m excited to see some projects come to market!”
The hackathon will be judged by notable personalities from the crypto industry including Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, Aave CEO Stani Kulechov, CoinShares CSO Meltem Demirors, and CoinGecko Co-Founder Bobby Ong.
Developers and participants are encouraged to explore Solana’s bi-directional Ethereum bridge “Wormhole” and the new Chainlink oracle integration through the announcement.
Takovenko, in his conversation with CoinTelegraph, stated that he is excited to see the growth of recurring participants and understand how developers who took part in Solana’s Q4 2020 hackathon will use their takeaways in the upcoming event.
He also spoke about the benefits offered by the Solana blockchain through its support for traditional compiler toolchains like Rust, making it “more accessible for folks outside of crypto.” Further, the Solana founder emphasised the need for the DeFi sector to “break out among general consumers”.
“This could be as simple as I get a Wrapped BTC savings account, but in the background, it’s earning a DeFi yield. And the end-user, a general consumer, isn’t really dealing with smart contracts or the complexity of [DeFi], but they actually get access to all of the entire pipeline”, he explained
Takovenko predicted that such a BTC savings account was a near-future possibility, adding that he believes 2021 is a year ripe for that type of development. “The tools are much better, key management is much better, you can ship applications on iOS and Android with secure keys […] I’m excited to see who actually pulls it off and scales [DeFi] to one million or ten million users”, he added.
