Aligned Builders Hackathon: Prizes and Judging Criteria

Carlos Lira

Oct 20, 2024 — 3 min read

The inaugural Aligned Builders Hackathon is in full swing. Over 250 hackers have joined our community to develop innovative projects on Aligned and to show the world what can be built using ZK. With just under two weeks left to build the competition is heating up, and more than two dozen teams are actively building. Today we’re sharing some details on the prizes that will be awarded to the best projects.

This hackathon is the first stage of our mainnet incentives program, designed to reward developers, partners, and users based on their engagement and usage. Our goal is to inspire the creation of apps that will attract users and refine the Aligned developer experience. While we’re specifically looking for ZK applications and tools to enhance Aligned, any well-executed project that showcases Aligned’s capabilities and has user appeal is welcome.

Hackathon Prizes

We’re offering up to $50,000 USD in total prizes. The 1st place winner will receive a prize of $15,000, 2nd place will receive $10,000, and there will be 5 runner-up prizes of $5000 each.

Aligned reserves the right to provide additional financial grants, logistical support, and partnership assistance for viable projects that demonstrate a path towards entering production. We are excited to support successful teams with their mainnet launch and to continue working together with our developer ecosystem.

Aligned Developer Points

In addition to prizes and support, developers in the hackathon may earn Aligned points, recognizing their contributions and status within the Aligned ecosystem. Further details about the points program and our mainnet incentives will be shared at a later date.

Judging Criteria

This is a product-focused hackathon where we are emphasizing the importance of building something that can actually be used. User experience is an important factor, as well as having a roadmap to extend and improve the project from MVP and into production.

Projects must use Aligned to verify ZK proofs on Ethereum (Holesky testnet).

Projects will be judged based on several criteria:

Technical implementation: Does the code work? Is it well-documented?
Innovation and impact: Does the project demonstrate a new or interesting way to use ZK? Is it solving an important problem, or does it have the potential to draw users?
Design and user experience: Is the project usable, accessible, and intuitive?
Readiness: How developed is the project? Is there a clear roadmap for going into production?
Community contributions and long-term collaboration potential: Has the team contributed to technical conversations? Have they helped other teams by sharing code, libraries, advice, etc?

Submissions must also meet some standard criteria to be considered complete:

Execution: The project must compile and execute fully. Incomplete submissions won’t qualify.
Open Source License: The project must use an open-source license (MIT, Apache 2, or GNU GPL).
Documentation: The project must include a README.md with:
- Project description and rationale.
- Backgrounds of team members.
- Challenges faced during development; design considerations.
- Clear deployment and execution instructions.
- Project roadmap.
Additional materials: In addition to a GitHub repository, submissions will require a video demonstration and slideshow presentation.