We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for the Spring 2021 Chainlink Virtual Hackathon! To help accelerate the continued wave of innovation in the smart contract ecosystem, our spring hackathon will give developers across the globe an opportunity to collaborate with other community members, learn from top projects and engineers in the space, and build next-generation dApps with Chainlink’s industry-leading oracle network, with a chance to win from a $80k+ prize pool.

The Spring 2021 Hackathon is geared toward smart contract developers with all levels of experience who are ready to jump-start new projects and use Chainlink’s widely adopted oracle solution to connect their contracts to real-world data and systems. You’ll get hands-on experience building smart contract applications, as well as easy onboarding to Chainlink’s wide range of oracle functions, with support from engineers and industry leaders across the DeFi, NFT, and blockchain gaming ecosystem.

The worldwide virtual event will run from March 15 to April 11, 2021 and is free to attend. Register now to secure your spot and read on below to find out more details about prize bounties, sponsors, and other hackathon resources to help you hit the ground running next month.

$80k+ in Hackathon Prize Bounties

Hackathon participants will have the chance to compete for bounties from a prize pool of over $80k, with prize categories ranging from DeFi to gaming. Projects will be judged by leading figures across the space, including Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov, Avalanche Founder Emin Gün Sirer, Aave Co-founder Stani Kulechov, and many more.

We’re always looking for unique Chainlink integrations that help showcase and broaden the applicability of smart contracts and blockchain oracles. Past hackathon participants have used Chainlink for a wide array of applications, from connecting a Tesla vehicle API to a smart contract to a marine shipping insurance smart contract to an RFID hardware integration. Many previous Chainlink hackathon winners have gone on to join top projects in the space and even launch their own.

Prize Categories

• $8,000 Grand Prize. The overall best project that makes use of Chainlink in a unique and compelling way.
• $3,000 DeFi Prize. The top prize for a project that uses Chainlink oracles for a decentralized financial application.
• $3,000 Gaming Prize. The top prize for a smart contract gaming project that leverages Chainlink.
• $3,000 Open Prize. A judges’ choice award for a top project using Chainlink solutions.
• Plus 14 $500 Runner Up Prizes

If you’re new to smart contract development, you can enter your project to win a free course from Dapp University. Additionally, each developer with a valid project submission will receive a 1 LINK bounty.

Sponsor Prize Bounties

Projects built using Chainlink oracles and hackathon sponsor tech are also eligible for $45k+ in sponsor prizes, so be sure to take advantage of Chainlink’s flexibility across different platforms and environments. This is a great opportunity to win bounties and get your work in front of the most notable projects in the blockchain space. Judges from hackathon sponsor projects will review your work. Sponsor prize bounties include:

• Solana – $10,000
• Aave – $5,000
• Polygon – $5,000
• Synthetix – $5,000
• The Graph – $5,000
• Avalanche – $5,000
• Moonbeam – $5,000
• ENS – $1,000
• Arbitrum – $1,000
• Plasm – $1,000
• Plus more to be announced!

Building With Chainlink

Now securing over $10B in value across the DeFi space, the Chainlink Network is providing smart contract developers with a wide range of critical oracle functions for securely connecting their decentralized applications to external data and APIs.

One of Chainlink’s most widely used solutions is the growing collection of Price Feed oracles for feeding tamperproof market data into smart contracts. These secure data feeds now encompass top crypto pairs, commodities, foreign exchange rates, and numerous other datasets. Learn how to use Chainlink Price Feeds in our developer tutorial, Fetch the Current Price of Cryptocurrencies in Solidity.

If you want to call a specialized API from your smart contract, you can use or build a Chainlink External Adapter. Creating a new External Adapter is a fantastic hackathon project for developers who are new to Chainlink and a popular approach among previous hackathon winners.

A widely adopted solution for blockchain-based gaming, ticketing, NFTs, and other use cases that require secure on-chain RNG is Chainlink VRF, which provides oracle functionality for generating provably fair random numbers. A large number of top ecosystem projects are leveraging Chainlink VRF for a tamper-proof source of on-chain randomness, including PoolTogether, Axie Infinity, and AnRKey X.

Your imagination is your only limiting factor in planning and building a hackathon project that makes use of the Chainlink Network’s wide range of oracle solutions. Explore the Chainlink docs for a deeper dive into each of Chainlink’s functionalities and to get yourself set up ahead of the hackathon.

Dedicated Expert Support

Hackathon participants will also have direct access to top engineers through Discord groups, workshops, and tutorials. The Chainlink Discord is the main location to network and find teammates (1-5 people per team) to build your project or join someone else’s team.

To help you maximize the success of your projects, Chainlink will provide participants with help finding team members, support from experienced mentors, educational materials for learning about Chainlink oracles and universally connected smart contracts, live technical workshops walking you through how to use Chainlink, and much more. Join our hackathon Discord to meet other hackathon participants and start planning your build today.

Register Today

Register now for our Spring 2021 Virtual Hackathon to secure your spot. No problem if you don’t have a team yet. You can still sign up, then join our Discord to connect with other participants and form a team.

Be sure to check out our hackathon web page to see a full list of prizes, judges, and sponsors, as well as a calendar of events. We also encourage you to explore our Chainlink Hackathon Resources for examples of winning projects, boilerplate code, tutorials, and some inspiration. As always, we can’t wait to see what you build!