The List of Web3 Hackathon Events & Crypto Hackathons

A crypto hackathon is a time-boxed competition where developers, designers, and analysts team up to build a working prototype on a specific blockchain or for a specific problem set by a sponsor. Teams typically run 2–5 people, and events last anywhere from a single 36-hour sprint to a multi-week virtual marathon. The deliverable is usually a deployed smart contract, dApp, autonomous agent, or piece of infrastructure judged by ecosystem leads, investors, and sponsor engineers. Modern programs typically run on platforms like Devfolio, DoraHacks, TAIKAI, and Akindo.

A crypto hackathon serves several connected goals. For sponsoring chains and protocols, it's the most efficient way to discover new builders and seed a fresh wave of projects. For participants, it's a structured environment to:

• Learn a new stack quickly with workshops and mentor office hours;
• Network with talented professionals and meet potential co-founders;
• Solve a specific business problem set by a sponsor;
• Ship a new application, agent, or service in days rather than months;
• Raise early funding — many top hackathon projects roll directly into grants, accelerators, or seed rounds.

The most anticipated hackathon crypto events for 2026:

1. ETHGlobal 2026 — Cannes (April 3–5), New York (June 12–14), Lisbon (July 24–26), Tokyo (Sep 25–27), Mumbai (Q4). The flagship Ethereum hackathon series.
2. Solana AI Agent Hackathon by Colosseum — Feb 2–12, $100K USDC, the first major hackathon where AI agents register and compete alongside human teams.
3. Sui Overflow 2026 — global virtual, $500K+ prize pool across AI-agent, payments, infrastructure, Walrus, and DeepBook tracks.
4. MIT Bitcoin Hackathon 2026 — April 10–12, 36-hour in-person event focused on Lightning, Bitcoin protocol, and freedom-tech applications.
5. HYPE Singapore — Hyperliquid's flagship hackathon during TOKEN2049 week in October.

Note how this differs from the crypto hackathon 2022 and web3 hackathon 2023 eras: prize pools have grown 5–10×, every flagship is now multi-track, and most events now include AI-agent categories.

The benefits of hosting blockchain hackathon projects work in both directions. For sponsors and L1/L2 ecosystems, hackathons are the cheapest, fastest way to find talented teams that can build on their stack — products born at hackathons have gone on to raise major rounds and be acquired by larger protocols. For participants, hackathons compress months of networking into a weekend, give direct access to core engineers and investors, and put visible ship-able work on a public leaderboard. The combination of prize money, follow-on funding, and partnerships often outweighs salary-equivalent value for early-stage builders. Compared to the remote blockchain hackathons of the blockchain hackathons 2022 wave, today's events also attach formal grant and accelerator tracks to the headline prize pool.

Web3 hackathon prizes range from a few thousand dollars to multi-million-dollar funding tracks. A regional or college-edition hackathon typically distributes $25K–$50K total — the Time2Build program with Breez, Lightspark, and Tether and the Sei All-Star Hackathon are good benchmarks. Flagship ecosystem hackathons — Solana AI Agent ($100K), Base Onchain Summer Buildathon (250 ETH), Sui Overflow ($500K+) — clear six figures and increasingly include follow-on grants or accelerator slots. The Sei AI/accelathon advertises up to $1M tied to a live VC pitch. Prizes typically split between cash and stablecoin, with in-kind awards (tokens, mentorship, demo-day spots) often worth as much as the headline cash.

The Solana AI Hackathon — run by Colosseum in February 2026 — is the first major web3 event where AI agents themselves are the participants. Autonomous agents register with their own X accounts, form teams with other agents, propose and develop projects across the competition window (Feb 2–12, 2026), and the human community votes on submissions. The headline prize pool is $100,000 USDC: $50K for first, $30K for second, $15K for third. The event is built specifically around Solana's high-throughput, low-fee profile, which makes per-action agent economics viable, and it sets the template for the agent-led hackathons appearing across other chains in 2026.

Sui Overflow is Sui's annual global hackathon, run virtually so anyone anywhere can compete. Overflow 2026 carries a $500K+ prize pool across core tracks (autonomous AI agents that act and transact; financial primitives and payment rails; builder tooling, SDKs, and indexers) and specialised tracks built around Walrus (off-chain and verifiable data) and DeepBook (on-chain orderbook trading). There are no experience requirements. Joining is straightforward: pre-register at overflow.sui.io, join the Sui Discord for team formation and office hours, and ship your project on Sui before the submission deadline. The 2025 edition (the sui overflow 2025 hackathon, also known as sui hackathon 2025) shipped multiple projects into the Sui Foundation grants program.

The Aptos hackathon ecosystem in 2025–2026 includes the Code Collision Hackathon, Aptos Ctrl+MOVE on DoraHacks, the RaNd0M Hack on TAIKAI, and the Aptos × GCP “AI Agent Takeover” online program. Aptos pairs developer programs with regional events — the aptos hackathon amsterdam track tied to local builder gatherings is one example, alongside stops linked to the Digital Asset Summit NYC. Most aptos hackathon 2025 and 2026 editions emphasise the Move language, AI-agent primitives, and consumer-facing dApps that benefit from sub-second finality.

The Ethereum hackathon scene is the largest and most established in web3, and ETHGlobal remains the gravitational centre. The 2026 in-person calendar — ETHGlobal Cannes (April 3–5), New York (June 12–14), Lisbon (July 24–26), Tokyo (Sep 25–27), Mumbai (Q4) — covers five continents and surfaces hundreds of new dApps each year. Beyond ETHGlobal, the ethereum hackathons calendar includes ETHTokyo, regional ETH community events, base hackathon stops tied to Onchain Summer, and dozens of online programs hosted on Devfolio, Akindo, and Encode Club. The eth hackathon scene has matured considerably since the web3 hackathon 2023 wave.

The fastest way to get hackathon-ready is to lock the basics two weeks out: pick a chain, complete its official starter tutorial, deploy something tiny to testnet, and join the sponsor Discord so you don't lose hours to setup questions on day one. Pre-form a 2–4 person team with complementary skills, agree on a problem area, and pre-pick your stack including the best virtual hackathon tools for web3 demos 2025-era teams rely on: a hosted RPC, a wallet SDK, a no-code dashboard for the demo, and a screen-recording tool for the submission video. For online events, the web3 developer hackathon online communities on Discord and Telegram are where most teams form. Ship a working demo before you polish.