Solana Season hackathon: 39 projects share $1m prize pool

In May, the Solana Foundation ran the Solana Season — one of the largest hackathons in IT history. More than 13,000 developers participated, and the winners received prizes totaling $1 million.

Here are the standout winners of Solana Season.

Organisers and prize fund of Solana Season

The hackathon ran from 15 May to 7 June. Participants built applications, tools and infrastructure components on the Solana blockchain.

The organiser of the event — Solana Foundation. This non-profit organisation develops the Solana ecosystem: it awards grants for product development and educational materials, and organises hackathons and marketing events. In addition to the Solana Foundation, ecosystem projects and local ecosystem communities supported the hackathon.

Participants created 350 projects. The jury evaluated them against the following criteria:

• functionality;
• impact on the ecosystem;
• novelty;
• design and user experience;
• composability.

The total prize pool for Solana Season was around $1 million. The winners were 39 teams. They received prizes from the Solana Foundation, the hackathon sponsors, and regional blockchain companies.

On 5 July, Solana and the hackathon winners held an online conference during which they discussed the Solana Season results and the prospects for the blockchain industry in Eastern Europe.

Grand Prix, DeFi, NFT, Web3 and Community Choice

The grand prize was awarded to Zeta — a DeFi options platform with low collateral. The project uses a hybrid order book and automated market maker. This solution increases liquidity and improves price discovery. The Zeta team received $30 000, plus two tickets to the Solana event in Lisbon and $1,500 for airfare.

Judges named Solend — an algorithmic decentralized lending protocol — the best DeFi project. It supports lending in any asset on the Solana blockchain. The Solend team received $20 000.

The most developed NFT project was Coral Reef — an NFT marketplace with fractionalization. Its developers received $20 000.

In the Web3 category, Solarium won — a Solana-based blockchain messenger. It is fully decentralised, censorship-resistant and uses end-to-end encryption. Registration in Solarium only requires a Solana wallet. The developers’ prize was $20 000.

The Community Choice award went to Boring Protocol — a decentralized VPN service on the Solana blockchain. The solution includes a peer-to-peer bandwidth marketplace and traffic-anonymity apps. The project team received $5,000.

Awards from sponsors

DEX Serum rewarded the developers of Slope — a decentralized exchange that processed orders faster than rivals and charged lower trading fees. The prize was $25 000.

Kin ecosystem highlighted Cyclos — a concentrated-liquidity market maker in Serum’s order books. The Cyclos developers received $12 000.

Our Network representatives liked FM Gallery — a platform that helps disseminate and popularise NFT art on the Solana blockchain. The sponsor awarded the project team $11 000.

The Pyth oracle developers highlighted SolFarm — a yield aggregator for crypto lending. Its users can allocate assets to crypto-lending platforms with better terms and create their own lending markets. The project won $25 000.

The DeFi project Raydium rewarded the Laguna Finance developers — an ecosystem for asset management on the Solana blockchain. The prize was 3,000 RAY ($9,000 at the time of publication).

The decentralized content delivery network Media Network awarded $30 000 to HOAG — a p2p streaming platform with censorship resistance, built-in payments and NFT support.

The automated market maker Orca AMM issued $52 500 to the developers of the arbitrage bot Orca Arb. They estimate the bot can generate 2-8% profit per day.

Prizes for Eastern Europe projects

Regional representatives from Eastern Europe awarded:

• Cross-chain lending protocol Everlend. It offers leveraged lending and liquid staking of assets. Prize — $25 000.
• Instant lending protocol Solaris. Team prize — $15 000.
• NFT collection platform UNQ Club. Users can form clubs and pool funds for collective token purchases. The project received $10 000.

The Serum decentralised exchange noted the cross-chain lending protocol Everlend. Prize — $40 000.

The cross-chain security protocol HAPI awarded the prize to developers Solbridge. They built a bridge for transferring tokens between EVM-compatible networks and Solana. Prize amounted to $25 000.

The decentralized cloud hosting service Akash allocated prizes for three projects:

• Newsystem090 — an application for deploying Akash with a Docker container. Prize — 2500 tokens AKT ($6500 at the time of publication).
• Ovrclk — an application for deploying the Kanboard project management tool on Akash MAINNET 2. Prize — 250 AKT ($650 at the time of publication).
• CoffeeRoaster — a graphical wrapper for the Akash CLI. Prize — 250 AKT ($650 at the time of publication).

The Spacemind development team was awarded prizes of $10 000 each:

• Solarea — blockchain explorer and on-chain package manager;
• Solaris — instant decentralized lending protocol.

In addition, developers of Solarea and the cross-chain bridge Solbridge received $10,000 each from the Velas blockchain ecosystem.

Conclusion

The Solana Season hackathon drew attention from developers and users to the ecosystem. Solana noted that the hackathon helped improve the protocol’s documentation, tools and educational materials.

The prize-winning projects plan to migrate to the Solana mainnet. Seven teams have already released working versions of their apps. The remaining developers published Lite papers and demo versions.

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