CoinDesk and CRADL announce the winners of the Web3athon: Hyperlocal, People-First Crypto Hackathon. The Web3athon is a multi-blockchain, 2-stage, virtual hackathon powered by HackerEarth that brought creatives and developers together to address some of the most pressing hyperlocal problems facing communities. The driving goal of Web3athon: build better, scalable products that use Web3 that provide tangible solutions for everyday utility. Launched on June 9, 2022 at CoinDesks’s flagship conference, Consensus, Web3athon concluded after 14 weeks of building with 32 winners and 15 standouts announced at CoinDesk’s I.D.E.A.S Conference on October 19, 2022. The winners split over $800,000 in prizes.
Web3athon took a radical departure from typical hackathons. Instead of submitting a technical problem for a single-chain, participants kicked off stage 1 by focusing on one of the five hyperlocal hackathon challenges areas: Generational Wealth Building, Financial Health, Sustainable Communities and Culture, Disaster Relief and Response, and Environmental Well-Being. Sponsors approved of 163 projects for Stage 2 building an MVP on-chain.
The event recruited Web3 developers and people new to Web3 such as Web2 coders, designers, community organizers, policymakers, economists, urban planners and artists. The multi-chain effort led to 17 protocols joining as sponsors to create a prize pool of $800,000: Filecoin, Stellar, Celo, Circle, Avalanche, Polkadot, Prasaga, Polygon, Ripple, Accumulate, Aleo, Qtum, Provenance, Acala, Hedera, Boba Network, Blockdaemon (API). Featured judges included; Erikan Obotetukudo; Founder & CEO of Audacity, Akin Sawyerr; MD, Feleman Ventures, Akihisa Shiozaki; Member of the House of Representatives, Japanese Government, Sheila Warren; CEO of Crypto Council for Innovation, Michael Casey; Chief Content Officer, CoinDesk, Daniel Culotta; Chief Innovation Officer, City of Austin, Texas.
Tricia Wang, Director and Co-founder of CRADL said, “Web3athon sets a precedent by proving that we can create a Web3 that has real-world utility by focusing on 3 things: prioritizing solving human problems over technical problems, hosting multi-chain not single-chain hackathons, and aggressively welcoming domain experts as builders. By creating an environment where non-technical experts feel comfortable contributing, the Web3athon winners and standouts are proof that we can create a high quality funnel of teams ready for pre-seed investment.“
About Web3athon: Top Line Statistics
| ● 14 weeks of designing and building ● $800,000 in prizes ● 17 sponsors ● Over 6,000 registrants ● 378 Ideas Submitted in Stage 1 ● 163 Projects Submitted in Stage 2 | ● 32 Winners, 15 Standouts ● 50 Judges ● 10 partner organizations such as Africa Blockchain Institute, Black Bitcoin Billionaires, H.E.R. DAO, Crypto Council for Innovation, Jumpscale, and Impaqto |
Web3athon Winners: Out of the 32 winning teams and 15 standouts, here are three winners that exemplify the best of Web3athon, including the chain and prize level the project team placed, along with a project description. These projects also won the title of Web3athon Standout.
- EVOLVE, 1st place Polygon, is a Learn-To-Earn & community pooling platform to strengthen financial literacy and mental health; supporting women of color globally to build generational wealth. Users will learn and invest $EVOLVE tokens in a community pool for staking and building interest for their contributions to tackle a perennial financial inequity issue: the median net worth of Black and Latina women is $1k compared to $80k for White women.
- Peace DeFi Wealth Protocol, 3rd place on Polkadot, is a protocol that combines DeFi with a non-custodial solution for the new generations, to manage and grow their on-chain assets, while also keeping them safe in case of emergency, error, or death. Based out of Mexico, the Peace DeFi Wealth team, co-founded by Juan Espejel, was inpired to create a solution for generational wealth when they discovered that $4 billion in crypto assets have been lost due to death or loss of access.
- Black History DAO, 1st place on Polkadot, is an NFT-based cultural museum and anthropology organization on-chain. The team and community, led by Theresa Kennedy, are dedicated to the preservation of Black history using blockchain technology and decentralized systems like IPFS and Substrate.
- realCashFlow, 1st place on Circle, is a Web3 native payroll product offering a solution to inflation’s harmful effects on workers by paying them daily in inflation-adjusted dollars. The co-founders, Kunal Kewalramani and Michael Jones, are a student and professor team at University of Cincinnati’s Kautz-Uible Cryptoeconomics Lab.
Michael Casey, Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk, said, “The world is on the precipice of a humanitarian catastrophe. As Web3 technologies barrel forward, it is imperative that we figure out how to use them in ways that advance the human experience. The crypto community has an opportunity to change the world. Hackathons are a vital building block for that effort, a means of collectively creating world-changing tools. But they need to be humanity-centered if they are to shift crypto culture and work practices in a lasting, meaningful way. And that’s precisely what we got with hundreds of tremendous submissions to this hackathon, now whittled down to 32 highly worthy winners. They are all very different but each, in their own special way, captures the ethos of Web3athon’s human-centric, hyperlocal approach. Congratulations to all who participated.”
For more information, the Web3athon Messaging Kit contains the list of winners and standouts, additional stats, and testimonials from attendees, organizers, and judges.
CoinDesk and Consensus: CoinDesk is the most influential, trusted information platform for a global community engaged in the transformation of the financial system and the emerging crypto economy. CoinDesk’s annual festival, Consensus, is the most influential crypto and blockchain experience of the year since 2015. coindesk.com | @coindesk
CRADL: The Crypto Research and Design Lab (CRADL)’s vision is to put people at the center of Web3. Its mission is to use evidence-based thought leadership to accelerate the crypto industry toward its goal of creating a more equitable, inclusive society. Their research on hackathons led to the partnership with CoinDesk to design Web3athon.
HackerEarth: HackerEarth is the global leader in Hackathons. They have hosted over ten thousand Hackathons around the world and coordinate with developer relations managers globally and are the turnkey partner to execute Web3athon. Hackerearth.com | @hackerearth
