Polygon, an Ethereum-based full-stack scaling solution bringing mass adoption to the Ethereum platform, has launched the first round of its Polygon-Grants Hackathon on HackerLink, DoraHacks’ open-source developer incentive platform.
Developers are encouraged to come up with ideas for 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 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 one-million-strong user base and gain funding from VCs. DeFi bluechip dApps including Sushiswap, Curve, Aave, Balancer, Kyber use Polygon.
“We’re incredibly excited about the ideas that will emerge from the Polygon-Grants Hackathon,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said. “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 based on Ethereum, and powered by Polygon Network’s scalability infrastructure; SushiSwap, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange and AaveGotchi, DeFi-powered NFTs staked with interest-generating tokens.
Polygon has also presented a long list of ideas to inspire hackathon participants, including 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 more than 500 dApps. Since April Polygon’s total value locked rose from $1 billion to nearly $9 billion. The Polygon-Grants Hackathon Round 1 will run to Oct. 22 and winners will be announced Nov. 3.