Announcing the Aligned Builders Hackathon: a virtual hackathon with up to $50,000 in prizes

In anticipation of Aligned’s mainnet launch, we are excited to announce the inaugural Aligned Builders Hackathon: an online hackathon series to show the world what kinds of novel and innovative applications can be built using ZK.

We want to give as much time as possible for builders to hack for this event. We will give more details about the jury, prizes and long term plans in the upcoming days.

Up to $50,000 USD (depending on the quality of the projects) in prizes will be awarded in total to apps built in this hackathon that use Aligned and can be ready to go into production alongside Aligned’s mainnet launch. The amount awarded to each application or improvement will be determined by a judging committee that will be disclosed shortly.

The goal is to incentivize the creation of applications that will draw users, and to help refine the developer experience for building on Aligned.  Aligned is seeking  cool new zk Applications or tooling to improve Aligned. Any well-executed project may be eligible and proposals outside of these categories are welcome if they demonstrate what Aligned enables and can bring users.

The Aligned Builders Hackathon is the first stage of Aligned’s upcoming mainnet incentives program which will reward developers, partners, and users with points based on usage.

Project Ideas

We encourage participants to focus on delivering functional, innovative, and user-friendly products across these tracks, with a focus on producing applications that will be ready to be deployed on mainnet once Aligned launches.

These are only some ideas. You can build whatever you want:

1. New Applications

   1. DeFi (P2P Wallet, DEX, orderbooks or other DeFi primitives)

   2. Single Player Games (Tetris, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Pong, Asteroids, Flappy Bird, Snake)

2. Enhance Aligned capabilities (Go/Typescript SDKs, scaffold-ETH integration)

3. Infrastructure (Rollups and Bridges)

How to participate

You can start hacking today (September 29, 2024)! Join our specialized telegram group for the hackathon to find teammates, discuss project ideas, and receive feedback from the Aligned team. We are currently addressing an issue with our Discord server and, once resolved, we will transition the hackathon conversations to Discord. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Hackathon Submission Deadline: Monday October 28th. We will be providing a form and the full hackathon terms of services to submit your project in the upcoming days.

Follow our social media accounts and join our telegram for news and to reach our team with any questions you have:

X: https://x.com/alignedlayer

Aligned Developer Telegram: https://t.me/+fX7wk-luV0E0ZTdh

Aligned documentation: https://docs.alignedlayer.com/

Project Submission Requirements

Submissions of accepted proposals must fulfill the following criteria:

• The project must use Aligned to verify ZK proofs.

• The project must be deployed on the Ethereum Holesky testnet.

• The project must compile and execute. Incomplete submissions will not qualify.

• The project must use a clear Open Source License: MIT, Apache 2 or GNU GPL.

• The project must include appropriate documentation, including:

  • A README.md that describes the project and rationale, provides backgrounds/biographies of team members, and notes on challenges you faced when building the project.

  • Easy to follow deployment and execution instructions.

  • Documentation that allows for others to reproduce your project.

Additional judging criteria include:

• The project should, at least, be an MVP of a project that can deploy to Ethereum mainnet this year.

• Projects with a strong emphasis on user experience and interface design will be highly valued.

• Participants are encouraged to use Lambdaworks or zkRust libraries.

Technical stack