We have been long-time users of blockchains at ETHGlobal. Our hackathons are free to attend, but we require hackers to put up a small, refundable stake to confirm their participation.

These stakes are on-chain transactions which means, every ETHGlobal hacker is an onchain user, and for thousands of people every year, staking to join an ETHGlobal event is their first ever onchain transaction. Over the last 18 months, over $800,000 in ETH has entered and exited through our onchain staking mechanism.

Introducing: Community Packs

The world is becoming default onchain and we want to accelerate this even more.

Packs are our first onchain product — our goal is to give more value to everyone in our ecosystem helping push this space forward.

In March, we launched the Hacker Pack, offering a bundle of onchain and offchain Perks with gated access via an ERC-721 token to existing hackers in our community.

Today, we are excited to extend Packs to all members of our community.

The 6 Community Packs

1. Hacker Pack — Perks for all first-time hackathon participants

2. Builder Pack — Perks for seasoned hackathon participants

3. Pioneer Pack —Perks for the most accomplished hackers

4. Partner Pack — Perks for all sponsors and partners

5. Supporter Pack — Perks for all volunteers and mentors

6. OG Pack — Perks for all speakers and judges

All of these offerings are already live, and represent four months of building, execution, and iterations on how we best feel we can support our community.

These Packs combined, help us dive deeper into being onchain by:

1. Making it easier to Grow onchain

2. Making it easier to Stay onchain

3. Making it easier to Build onchain

1. Making it easier to Grow onchain

Since March, over 2,300 verified builders have minted their Hacker Pack. When these builders participate in our events, they tend to grow, both as individuals and in experience. We want to continue supporting their growth journey, and Community Packs are the next step in that mission.

Through the new Community Packs, holders automatically receive relevant perks as they continue hacking with us.

These perks are targeted towards their growth with onchain and offchain perks focused on:

• Access to our products: Higher faucet limits, auto acceptance, discounts on swag, staking, city packs, faster prize payouts, and more.

• Access to builder infrastructure: AWS, Dynamic, Goldrush, Lighthouse, Loop, Pinata, Privy, Quicknode, and more

• Discounts to conferences: Devcon SEA, Dunecon, Smartcon, Pragma, and more.

See what Packs you qualify to mint on our Packs page.

A special thank you to all of our partners for their willingness to support the development of Community Packs. We are thrilled that, together, we can help provide so much value to builders across the ecosystem.

2. Making it easier to Stay onchain

For the newcomer, Ethereum is intimidating. We have our own memes, culture, and nearly infinite different rabbit holes to explore.

ETHGlobal is fortunate to be the welcoming door for thousands of excited builders to the Ethereum community. We see this as a responsibility to ensure that their talents, opinions, and experience stay and continue to support our growing ecosystem.

For many, the first time web3 really “clicks” is when they own their own name.

Through our partnership with ENS DAO, anyone who submits a project at a 2024 hackathon can immediately claim their first ENS name for free.

Even for the experienced web3 user, this experience is magical.

Simply type your desired name into the search box, and receive your domain 90 seconds later. No gas costs, no fees, no ETH, no fuss — all onchain.

Beyond ENS, we wanted to put together a proper “welcome” to the first time builder to fully join the Ethereum community.

Decentralized social protocols like Farcaster and Lens Protocol are increasingly becoming the places where our community gathers. Through our partnerships with them we were also able to ensure that any attendee can join the discussion with free accounts on both platforms.

If you’ve hacked at our events before, grab your name as part of the Hacker pack.

3. Making it easier to Build onchain

We spend a lot of time connecting with builders. Spend any time with a web3 builder and they’ll all point you to the same hurdle: testnet tokens.

Put simply, to test your web3 application you need testnet tokens. While testnet tokens are technically free, access to these tokens isn’t a great experience

Most faucets are often not reliable or generous. They defensively limit the distribution. A tragedy of the commons to the deserving developer.

Chains want testnet tokens in the hands of builders, and ETHGlobal makes this easy. Coupled with their ETHGlobal account, we can attest that a given onchain address belongs to a builder and grant increased access to testnet gas based on experience, skill, and use.

To date 30,000 claims of testnet ETH have been received and fulfilled. That’s over 3,000 testnet ETH distributed directly into the hands of builders with an average fulfillment time of < 5 seconds.

Grab your testnet ETH and deploy with our faucet.

We‘re just getting started 👀

This post marks the beginning, not the end of our onchain future. Keep your eyes peeled to our Lens, Farcaster, and Twitter accounts for more announcements soon about the next evolution of Packs.

— The ETHGlobal Team

PS: Building on top of Community Packs is completely permissionless. If you’d like to offer onchain benefits or perks, you can do so today.

Community Packs are deployed as ERC-721 NFT contracts and you can use them today for gating, access, or allow-listing.

Hacker Pack: op:0x32382a82d9faDc55f971f33DaEeE5841cfbADbE0
Builder Pack: op:0xe600A7AD9B86A2D949069A6092b7b5a1Dae50e20
Pioneer Pack: op:0x69B4e2BD6D5c5eeeB7E152FB9bc9b6c4364fA410
Supporter Pack: op:0x5CF3C75E0036f76bB7BE1815F641DDd57Fd54feb
Partner Pack: op:0x27479dd41a85002F5987B8C7E999ca0e07Dba817
OG Pack: op:0x37C6fe4049c95f80e18C9cDDaA8481742456520B