The very first hackathon↗ within the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem is now live and running until August 14th.

Kusama is a wild and fast-moving network, launched in 2019 as an early version of Polkadot, a next-generation sharded blockchain network. Both support interchain communication, collaboration and shared security, with an architecture consisting of a relay chain that interacts with sharded chains running in parallel, known as parachains.

Polkadot and Kusama were built using Substrate↗, a blockchain framework with an inbuilt transition function and customizable modular components for consensus, networking, and configuration.

As a canary network for Polkadot, Kusama is designed for adventure and taking chances, lending itself to a whole host of wild social experiments.

Hackusama

The time has come to Hackusama↗! This is the first of many hackathons within the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem. Get ready to build parachains, tools and let your problem-solving mind get creative. Together we can help contribute to Web 3.0, a fair, secure, and resilient internet that inherently protects the user’s interest.

The Categories

This hackathon↗ is open to both individuals and teams and is divided into two main sections:

• Build a Blockchain: Build a custom blockchain using Substrate that could (in the near future) plug into the Kusama network as a parachain. Parachains on Kusama could be fully fledged businesses, or even a platform hosting a multitude of businesses, such as gaming, messaging, social networking and more.
• Open Hack: Push the limits of what’s possible! Be creative, break things, surprise us. Test suites, visualizations, Wasm interoperability – anything goes.

Each section has a Champion, second and third prize winner.

For the icing on the cake, there’s an additional prize, the Community Choice Winner, selected by the Devpost community and decided by public vote.

Ready to win?

The Hackathon↗ starts today, June 29th, and runs until August 14th. There’s not just a total of $30,000 worth of prizes up for grabs, there are other sweet rewards too: an expedited pitch session for the Substrate Builders Program, a discussion with the team at Web3 Foundation about a grant (worth up to $100k), Ledger Nano devices, direct support from Web3 and Parity developers, a shout-out on Polkadot social media, and Polkadot & Kusama swag. You win the prize, you get to wear the t-shirt!

All the entries will be judged by our panel of judges:

• Dr. Gavin Wood, Founder, Kusama and Polkadot | Co-founder and former CTO, Ethereum
• Adam Dossa, Head of Blockchain at Polymath
• Aidan Hyman, CEO of ChainSafe Systems
• Alexander Ramsey, CEO & Co-founder of FlexDapps, Gantree
• Bedeho Mender, CEO & Founder of Jsgenesis, Joystream
• Cassidy Daly, Token Design & Research at Centrifuge
• Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake
• Dillon Chen, Co-founder of Commonwealth, Edgeware
• Ruitao Su, Co-founder of Laminar & Acala
  

Following their decision, the winners will be announced on August 28th.

Find out more

See the full breakdown and dive into the challenge now at Devpost↗.

Embrace the chaos!

Join the Kusama community

There are plenty of ways to get plugged in to the Kusama community. Join the discussion on Telegram↗ and Riot↗, or subscribe to Kusama's newsletter↗. Learn more about Kusama on our website and in the Kusama Wiki↗. Want to join the core growth team behind Kusama? Join the Ambassador Program.