Hackathon has always been an exciting part of the Web 3 community. Each year, thousands of builders and developers join together to foster new innovations and build new programs,

In today’s blog, we invited our guest speakers who have participated in various hackathon events in the past years to share their experiences and insights about hackathons.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your experiences in hackathon.

Kevin @Moonshot : We have held 7 hackathons in the past and a few hacker houses in Beijing. We usually hold hackathon events in summer and winter. Usually, we have about 200 teams registered, but there will be only 20 teams present their projects on the demo day.

Karthik @College Dao : I'm part of the marketing team at college Dao. We are essentially a one-stop platform for college students to get in on web 3. We're yet to host our own hackathon, but we've attended a few, and a lot of our events have mainly been sort of educational workshops. Last semester, one of the biggest things is that we had was working with Neo blockchain to host these educational workshop shops across different colleges.

EvanOnEarth @Fort1EPodcast: We built NFTs with a company called Ecoverse that provides NFT tools to brands and artists and individuals.

Frozen @Rebase : We are a nonprofit developer community founded by a group of Chinese Web 3 developers. Regarding the experience of hackathons, I just attended a hackathon 2 days ago, and we just finished our 2022 Rebase hackathon a month ago.

Estefania @Blockchain: We're a programming language compiler and deployment tool which makes blockchain development more accessible for anyone who's coming from the web 2 world, as a JavaScript developer. We've been able to hack at various hackathons together, which has been an incredible adventure. Creating MVPs in a weekend, which is more than what most teams do in months. And it's been rather fun.

Matt Hats @Proximity: I currently work with Proximity, which is a team that supports dfi building on near protocol. And I have a lot of hands on experience with hackathons. I've helped out with a number of other virtual hackathons. I'm helping out with the bounties of east Denver this year and I'll be helping sponsors write really good bounties for builders to build stuff.

Aniket Raj @Devfolio: I’m Aniket and I lead the community at Devfolio. And Devfolio is India's largest and fastest growing community of builders. And we've been doing hackathons for the past 7 or 8 years.

Q2. How to host a good hackathon and what defines a good hackathon?

Aniket Raj @Devfolio : There are different metrics which help you decide and for us, I would say that in the whole game quantity versus quality. In terms of quantity, we are looking to capture as much audience as possible. And as far as quality is concerned, these are really smart builders who, in the course of 36 to 48 hours, whatever the hacker duration is, can pick up things, talk to others, network and figure out a really good hack in that much time. And overall, from the builder’s perspective, that's what a great hackathon would look like.

Many Hats @Proximity: I think the key is knowing what you're trying to get out of the hackathon when you're going into it. For example, if you're a L1 and you want a lot of people to launch brand new projects on your L1, that's obviously a really ambitious goal. So you're asking teams to build complete MVPs and launch them on your chain. That can work well for a virtual hackathon that spans about 4 to 6 weeks, but over a weekend in person, it's pretty tough. So I usually offer a feature, a feature hack or a feature bounty, which really is the focus here.

Frozen @Rebase : The most important thing to host a successful hackathon is to make sure all the competitors or the participants in our hackathon have fun. That is a strong indicator that this will be a very successful hackathon. We monitor how many participants attend our hackathon, how many projects will be submitted and we will check if the whole process makes everybody happy.

Q3. How to identify and prevent people from submitting existing/pre-worked projects?

Many Hats @Proximity : I usually look for a solid, meaningful, committed trail. Meaning you should be able to just go click on the history and follow the thought process of how this was built out.

Some people bring existing projects and what they're doing at the hackathon is they're hacking one feature on top of what they've already built. And I think that's perfectly acceptable, provided that they clearly define in their submission where they started from and what was actually worked on during the hackathon. Documentation is the key here.

Joshua @College Dao: Totally agree. I think one big part about what we have observed, at least on college campuses and what people have been speaking to us about, is the intangibles.

For instances. what's diversity in the group, what percentage of them are new ideas? Or how many teams there are women? If it’s a good diverse group of builders, the likelihood of the problems that you're focusing on, the features that you build is going to be a lot more interesting.

Frozen @Rebase : In our previous hackathon held about 2 weeks ago, there were lots of projects that were pre-made projects and they were very mature in terms of completion. So the way we tried to differentiate these projects was to interview all the teams and to asked about their ideas and how much of preparation they have done so far. And we will give them about 4 weeks to finish the project. This will avoid the problem of the existing projects in Hackathon.

Q4. How to design the process to make the hackers feel more engaged and supported?

Estefania @Blockchain: From my experience, I feel like it's really important as well to consider all the non developers as well. That are just as important for a team. And the reason is we see so many MVPs be created that are very tech heavy. And the tech is great and it's incredible, but oftentimes they don't go beyond the hackathon.

So having other individuals who might think a little bit more creatively, or in terms of design, could actually make something that's wonderfully created technically go to market much sooner.

Secondly, if you're coming in fresh without a team in mind, some of the first steps that I think are also crucial are ice breakers. Having icebreakers to encourage team building and having people come together so that you can discuss the different types of skill sets that one might have to create a diverse team.

Karthik @College Dao: I think a big part of it, having a very structured approach for the teams to come together. Teams need people for different skillsets: marketing, design skills, operation, etc. Another thing is having a clear expectation of what's required.

Kevin @Moonshot : Absolutely. I think it's really important to invite the best people from the industry to share their insights with the hackers.

For example, in our hacks, we have different tracks like defy, dapp, and different tracks for hackers. And we invite them to host workshops for our hackers. I think their insights really help the founders to build valuable projects.

Q5. What's the process of designing a bounty?

Many Hats @Proximity : We actually made a really intentional bounty guideline with 5 different categories, and they’re roughly a feature bounty, like a defi protocol or a NFT platform. Essentially, we put up a small bounty such as a bug or an issue bounty, and we will just point to that issue and you say that's what we would like to put a bounty on. And we like to see teams try to try to solve this issue for us. And for bigger projects we have different bounties designed for different audiences.

For one, we have the MVP experimental project start to finish bounty. This is intended for layer ones that want to see projects launching on their chain. We have one that's a little bit more serious. And this is for either layer one foundations or sort of funding DADs that they want to stake projects or invest in projects. It's basically for investment. It's called early stage. So this is for teams that are super serious, they're looking for funding, they're looking for ways to kind of get their name out there. And then the final category we have is called a meaningful open source contribution.

This is typically for projects that don't really have anything in particular that they would like to bounty, but they think that there should be some contributions made to crypto space in general.

Q6. How to make your Hackathon stand out?

EvanOnEarth @Fort1EPodcast: I do think one thing that can be good for any hackathon is providing more information for layman's. Having a good infrastructure and breaking down their goals and making it more digestible is the best way to get more people interested in participating in hackathons.

Kevin @Moonshot : I think a successful hackthon needs to attract as many audience as possible. So it can really help those projects to get more exposure. I think that's really crucial for all the projects, especially for their first launch.

Joshua @College Dao: For us, the most important thing is to make the hackathon as accessible as possible.

Karthik @College Dao: Absolutely. Since we mostly help students in India and many of them are very talented and tech-savy, what they need is to connect with different communities to share resources and to really help them to build their projects. And that is certainly one of our main focuses this year.

Aniket Raj @Devfolio: Yes, I think the major purpose of hosting a hackathon is to help talented builders to look for sponsor counties and check out all the prices that are up for grabs, take the maximum benefits from the mentors, and eventually go out and build something which is really benefiting the ecosystem.

Q7. For builders, what is the most crucial thing they want to get out of a hackathon?

Frozen @Rebase: We had participated in 2 types of hackthons in the past. The first one we had was the that participants were having fun, and they just enjoyed the whole experience of building something new in a short amount of time. They didn't care much about the awards or the money.

However, the results were actually great. The second one we had was a little different since some of the projects were pre-worked projects and what they really tried to get out of the hackathon was to gain some exposure to their projects. So, it really depends on what stage of your project is, so you will tailor your focus differently.

Estefania @Reach: I think the reason you should go to a hackthon is because you can meet many builders and developers in person so that you can build an inpactful bond with them during the hackathon. Also, it's a great way to just learn the different types of protocols that are coming together for you.