Explore the Biggest Blockchain Hackathon Events & Crypto Hackathons

A crypto hackathon is a competition where participants have to develop a solution (prototype of a crypto product, dApps, concepts) in a short time to solve a specific problem faced by a business. Teams usually contain 3-5+ people: developers, designers, analysts, marketers, and other specialists. Crypto hackathons usually last from several hours to a week and can include workshops, pep talks and other discussions.

Essentially, cryptocurrency hackathons push the boundaries of understanding blockchain technology, incentivize generating innovations,  and strengthen the blockchain community. Besides that, crypto hackathon has a multitude of other objectives:

• Learning & teaching new skills;
• Networking with talented, creative professionals;
• Solving a specific business problem;
• Developing a new application or service;
• Raising funding for a projects;

A few popular and well established crypto hackathons that are confirmed to occur in 2023 are:

1. ETHGlobal: ETHGlobal is a series of hackathons focused on Ethereum and decentralized applications (dApps) built on the Ethereum blockchain.
2. MEGA-ACE Hackathon: This event is aimed at uniting developers, engineers, and entrepreneurs from all around the world to demonstrate their expertise and explore the boundless potential of the Algorand blockchain.
3. PENN Blockchain Hackathon 2023: The theme of the Hackathon is “Real World Utility – what does this mean?”. The participants will have to create applications with value generation that isn't inherent in cryptocurrency.

Participation in hackathons helps developers get acquainted with the representatives of sponsoring companies (usually L1 and L2 blockchains), pitch their projects, upgrade a skill set and make new meaningful connections. Apart from that, hackathon participants have a chance to compete for a share of prize fund and eventually launch a pilot project with a company that offered a case problem for the event.

The organizers and sponsors of crypto and blockchain hackathons host such events to attract talented developers, marketers and other enthusiasts that can potentially contribute to their project or business overall. Despite promoting innovation in the industry, they also meet and interact with people and companies to form connections and partnerships in pursuit of meaningful collaboration and business opportunities. 

The hosts of hackathon events have an opportunity to find individuals and teams that can address their business problems and solve them more efficiently and faster and cheaper compared to internal resources. There are cases when products created at hackathons succeeded, attracted large investments and were bought by corporations.