Polygon-Grants Hackathon Round-1 kicks off: Register Now for a $100,000 prize pool, VC funding and online workshops!

7 min readAug 31, 2021

Starting August 30, 2021, Polygon-Grants Hackathon is officially launched at Hackerlink.io, DoraHacks’ open source developer incentive platform.

The Hackathon is sponsored by Polygon with a $100,000 prize pool to encourage developers to contribute early-stage projects and ideas to the Polygon ecosystem. The whole prize pool will be allocated based on the results of the community voting as well as judges’ voting results. Developers from around the world are welcome to submit blockchain projects of ALL sorts based on Polygon!

In addition to the generous prizes, the Polygon technical team has designed a series of workshops to explain how to get started building on Polygon, and the Polygon eco-leaders will explain what benefits are available to everyone who joins the Polygon ecosystem.

Let’s BUILD on Polygon — Ethereum’s Internet of Blockchains!

Why Join us？

Generous prizes: a $100K prize pool + unlimited community funding!
Judging panel: judges will observe the whole process, discover potential projects, and vote to allocate the $50K judging bonus pool.
Polygon Team Support: Interesting projects will have the opportunities to talk directly with the Polygon team and receive full assistance from them.
Technical Workshops: Technical mentors from the Polygon ecosystem will explain how to get started with Polygon through a series of workshops.
Team/project publicity: Each applicant will have the opportunity to participate in project demo live sessions to showcase their projects and gain a lot of exposure!
Potential investment opportunities: Venture partners and other investors will keep an eye on your projects!

Schedule

Project Submission: August 30 — October 22 13:00 UTC+0

Voting: October 1 — October 29 13:00 UTC+0

Live project demos: (TBD) (live sessions will be arrange daily or bi-daily regarding the number of applications)

The final round of focused quick demos: October 22

End of event: October 29

Who can apply?

There are a few ideas for your reference, but this hackathon is accepting cool ideas and projects of ALL sorts built on Polygon!

Yield farm analytics dashboard — A web dashboard that shows for each yield farm, Tvl/staked token or lp in each farm. Emissions of reward token per day/week.(no of the token as well as real-time price) APR per day, week, year. Token/lp amount staked by the user(real-time price as well) Estimated reward token earnings per Day, Week, Year. LP tokens composition.
Polygon ↔ Flow Bridge — A bridge to transfer funds from Flow Blockchain to Polygon and vice versa.
Gnosis Safe Integration — Develop multisig apps integrations for gnosissafe on polygon.
Degenscore on Polygon — A dapp to measure how many rugpulls, hacks and aping a wallet endured.
NFT Bridges — NFT Bridges / Minters to other blockchains to mint & move NFT’s cross-chain.
Adding functionalities on Polygon NFT Minter — Adding functionality on top of Polygon NFT minter(https://mintnft.today) which allows any artist or creator to include royalties on secondary sales.
Game Development Tools/ Engine Plugins — Tools/ Gaming Engine Plugins to ease gaming integration with Polygon.
Connext analytics dashboard — Per day influx of various tokens from different chain pairs. Per day withdrawal of various tokens from different chain pairs Per day difference(influx/withdrawal) in volume of tokens for different chain pairs.
Tokenized Debt Agreements — Build a dapp to bring existing rights and assets on the Polygon blockchain.
Rebasing/synthetics based on UMA — Build a Dapp using UMA’s KPI Options and Optimistic Oracle on Polygon.
Meta Transactions — Implement Meta Transaction on your dapp using Biconomy on the Polygon Network.
Dune Analytics — Build useful DeFi dashboards using Dune Analytics showcasing interesting figures and comparisons.
Cross-chain lending Protocol — A lending protocol that immediately provides liquidity for assets transferred cross-chain from Polygon and vice versa.
Educational Dapps — A dapp which rewards users for completing beginner tutorials on DeFi,NFT and other applications deployed on Polygon.
Quadratic Funding — A quadratic funding dapp which decentralizes the grants program of Polygon using Smart-contracts.
Decentralized Insurance — Build a decentralized insurance protocol to decentralize the insurance risk together without needing a third party company.
Prediction Market — A prediction market to trade the outcome of a real-world event on Polygon.
DeFi Asset Manager — A one-stop platform to diversify and invest funds across all the aggregators and pools cross-chain.
Decentralized Creator Support Platform — A decentralized version of Patreon to support your favourite creators and influencers on Polygon.

How to apply?

Detailed Application Guide: https://hidorahacks.medium.com/polygon-grants-hackathon-application-guide-1d5c07817d9d

Log in to hackerlink.io and click on Grant — Polygon Grant to apply (new users please register first). Please make sure you have at least 0.01 MATIC as gas fee. For gas fee support, please find hackerlink (Telegram: @hackerlinkofficial).
Join the Polygon Grant telegram group chat to get the latest information about the event. Developers without projects can also team up in the group and turn ideas into projects together! Link: https://t.me/polygonhackathon
In order to prevent fake projects from participating in the prize pool, please contact hackerlink (Telegram: @hackerlinkofficial) to verify your project.
During the Hackathon, we will conduct multiple rounds of project demos, so the earlier the project is submitted, the more attention it will receive. This will surely increase exposure and attract more votes and funding opportunities.
At the end of the Grant Round, before announcing the results, a 72-hour Grace Period will be held to prevent a Sybil-attack. During the Grace Period, each project will be required to contact HackerLink to confirm the authenticity of the project, and after the Grace Period, the project will be able to take out the community donations and the prize pool to match the prize.

What is Quadratic Funding? How does it work?

Quadratic Voting is a voting scheme introduced and often discussed in the Radical Markets community. It is often considered an innovative improvement of the traditional 1-person-1-vote or 1-dollar-1-vote voting schemes. The simplified formula on how quadratic voting functions is

cost to the voter = (number of votes)².

Individual community contributors can vote for their preferred projects to push them ahead in the funding round. The votes cost MATICs, which are directly donated to the respective projects after the round.

With a quadratic funding algorithm, the cost of each vote to a single project from a single contributor will increase, this encourages community contributors to donate to more projects.

Quadratic Funding was later introduced to the blockchain community by the Gitcoin team by Gitcoin quadratic funding grants. Community members can donate cryptos to new projects to appreciate their effort in building public goods for a specific community. In previous Gitcoin Grants, community members donate ETH to the Ethereum ecosystem projects as community Grants to help them continuously get funded.

To know more about quadratic voting, you can check the Quadratic Funding algorithm by Vitalik Buterin.

The prize pool and allocation

Each vote of the voter directly affects the prize distribution.

The Grant prize pool consists of two parts:

A. Community Contribution

Sky’s the limit. Community members will choose Hacker projects they are interested in to vote, and the MATIC spent on this part of the vote will be directly allocated to the voted project team after the hackathon.

B. $50K Quadratic Voting Matching Prize Pool

The initial prize pool will be allocated to each project according to its popularity.

C. $50K Judges’ Pick Prize Pool

In other words, the final prizes received by the project = community contribution + a share of the quadratic voting matching prize pool + Judges’ Pick Prize

About Polygon

Polygon is the first well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its core component is Polygon SDK, a modular, flexible framework that supports building and connecting Secured Chains like Optimistic Rollups, zkRollups, Validium, etc, and Standalone Chains like Polygon POS, designed for flexibility and independence. Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with 500+ Dapps, ~567M+ txns, and ~6M+ daily txns.

If you’re an Ethereum Developer, you’re already a Polygon developer! Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for your Dapp, get started here.

Developer Resources:

Matic Faucet: https://faucet.matic.network

Polygon PoS Chain Explorer: https://polygonscan.com

Matic Documentation: https://docs.matic.network/docs/develop/getting-started

Network Details & RPC endpoints: https://docs.matic.network/docs/develop/network-details/network

Polygon Gas Station:

https://docs.matic.network/docs/develop/tools/matic-gas-station/#usage

https://www.polygongasstation.com

Matic.js SDK:

Easy interface to deposit, transfer and withdraw your funds to and from the main chain. https://github.com/maticnetwork/matic.js

About DoraHacks

DoraHacks is a global hackathon organizer and one of the world’s most active developer communities. HackerLink (https://hackerlink.io/en) is DoraHacks’ open source developer platform and open source curation market. HackerLink provides unique on-chain tools to incentivize open source developments around the world. The platform is offering features including hacker profile, BUIDL, quadratic funding grants, bonding curve, bounties, hackathons to more than 100,000 users around the world.

Risk Notifications

Please note that the smart contracts generated from the Website will arrange and transfer the donated fund, to conduct quadratic funding algorithm, and distribute contribution funds to the projects of which the voting results in favor. Please understand that the website cannot guarantee the authenticity, legality and validity of the project information, though admins will contact the projects to verify the validity with their best effort. Please be aware of the risks of donation and voting and make rational decisions. Polygon, HackerLink, or DoraHacks aren’t held responsible for any adverse consequences if any.

For more Information

Please visit our Website| Telegram｜Twitter｜Youtube