Building a blockchain project? Win co-investment from 20+ VCs in this US$5mil prize pool.

[This is a sponsored article with Avalanche Asia.]

After the crypto craze years ago first popularising the use of blockchain, it’s now NFTs that are bringing attention to the technology.

Following this, smart contracts platform Avalanche and global hackathon organiser DoraHacks have joined forces and resources to launch an ambitious blockchain hackathon.

Called Avalanche Asia Hackathon, its aim is twofold: to help global projects (BUIDLs) scale into Asia, and for Asian projects to scale globally. Thus, the hackathon has no regional limits. 

More specifically, it’s looking to bring blockchain projects to the next level by providing funding opportunities from an investment prize pool of over US$5 million.

So, if you’ve got an early-stage project that’s ready for the limelight, here’s what you need to know about the hackathon.

Projects that the hackathon is looking for

Hosted on HackerLink.io, DoraHacks’ open source developer platform and open source curation market, the Avalanche Asia Hackathon wants to see projects in the following sectors: 

• DeFi (decentralised finance), 
• Metaverse,
• NFT, 
• GameFi (gaming finance), 
• Infrastructure and tooling, and 
• Web3.

They can be projects native to the Avalanche platform, or even if they’re built on another chain, they can be easily ported over to Avalanche since it’s EVM-compatible.

EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a software platform that developers can use to create decentralised apps (dApps) on Ethereum. 

The advantages to this include the fact that developers don’t have to learn a whole new set of tools when using Avalanche. Plus, gas fees could be significantly lower compared to those on the other networks.

Do note though that for your project to be eligible for the investment prize, you will have to give a certain amount of tokens in return. 

In the registration form for the hackathon, teams will state how much they are looking to raise and at what valuation, and the allocation they set aside will match that.

How the huge prize pool will be distributed

The US$5 million prize pool is no small amount, and Avalanche takes pride in its ability to offer these investments to deserving projects.

To add, these funds have been gathered from over 20 big-name investors in the industry such as AVATAR, Blizzard, NGC, LongHash, Huobi, and more. 

This means that winning projects will be getting a joint investment from the above investors as well as additional funding opportunities and growth support. 

To add, winners can get potential listing and incubation opportunities from exchange sponsors like Huobi, and the Avalanche team is prepared to help winners further network for project collaborations.

90% of the prize pool is reserved for the top 10 winning projects. Winners will be awarded based on the judging panel consisting of one representative from each investor as well as the Avalanche team themselves.

The remaining 10% (US$500K or more) will be then given to projects through a quadratic funding platform by DoraHacks. Quadratic funding is a more democratic and scalable form of matching funding for public goods, so community votes will determine who gets funded.

Funding aside, participants can also benefit from a series of workshops held during the hackathon in order to better understand Avalanche’s consensus and dApp building.

For the winning projects, follow-up incubation may be given after investment.

Timelines to take note of

Multiple rounds of project demos will start in the last week of February to increase project exposure, attract more votes for the quadratic funding platform, and for further investment opportunities.

Here’s the big picture

Leroy Mah, Head of Business Development, Asia at Avalanche shared with us that this hackathon is only the first step towards strengthening their ecosystem in Asia.

In their bid to increase their presence here, they’re looking for partners and projects to grow with them.

One of the platform’s larger goals is actually to break misconceptions that blockchains are slow and not scalable. Avalanche prides itself on its novel consensus model which enables it to be “blazingly fast, low cost, highly scalable, EVM-compatible, and eco-friendly”, as the team puts it.

Able to achieve instant finality, it can support over 4.5K transactions/second (TPS), making it one of the fastest smart contracts platforms in terms of time-to-finality (TTF), which is the time taken from transaction submission to confirmation.

In terms of scalability, Avalanche is hoping to break out of the mould with the launch of its subnets.

Developers can now build their own independent blockchains on top of Avalanche’s while still being connected to the broader ecosystem of chains on the platform.

Essentially, all these mean that projects can be developed faster, cheaper, and easier on Avalanche.

​To date, Avalanche has seen over 400 projects built and grown on its platform in the past 15 months alone, and there’s more to come.

“We are expecting even more explosive growth in 2022 especially with the launch of our subnets,” Wilson Wu, Head of Asia for Avalanche and founder of AVATAR (Avalanche Asia Star Fund.

The team and AVATAR are now on standby to invest in and scale innovative solutions deploying on Avalanche, and this hackathon is an opportunity not to be missed by developers with noteworthy BUIDLs.

• Think you have a BUIDL that deserves recognition? Sign up for Avalanche Asia Hackathon here.

Featured Image Credit: Avalanche Asia Hackathon