Announcing the Solana Foundation x Serum DeFi Hackathon

Bringing blazing fast speed, low fees, and scalability to Decentralized Finance

Register for the DeFi hackathon today at solana.com/defi for a chance to win up to $200k in prizes and an additional $200k in seed funding!**

We are deeply excited to announce the launch of the Solana Foundation x Serum Global DeFi Hackathon. Registration will be open from February 2nd to February 15th, and the event will take place from February 15th to March 1st. Use this link to signup: https://solana.com/defi

Looking for some ideas on what to build? Check out this list of project ideas https://github.com/solana-labs/defi-hackathon/blob/main/ideas.md

We are proud to announce that anyone with an internet connection can join our hackathon! The only requirement is to integrate Solana or Serum in your project submission.

The importance of decentralization, transparency, and censorship resistance becomes more apparent and compelling each day. At Serum, we believe that public blockchains will be the gateway to a world that embraces these attributes. We are hosting this hackathon to empower developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to build and release new systems that will push decentralization forward.

Many of the leading projects within the crypto industry are supporting our hackathon, including Aave, Sushiswap, Circle, Coingecko, Chainlink, and more. These players have generously contributed to our A-tier lineup of judges and speakers with deep industry knowledge and experience. To see the full event schedule of workshops and live panels, please visit solana.com/defi#events.

About the Hackathon

We look forward to our participants capitalizing on Solana’s blazing speeds and low fees, as well as newly released DeFi building blocks, to build unique DeFi apps and tools that will support a more efficient, powerful, and sustainable ecosystem. We also encourage our builders to try out Wormhole, the bi-directional bridge connecting Ethereum with Solana, and a new Chainlink oracle integration. Check out the official hackathon Github for a list of project ideas and comprehensive developer resources.

There are $400k total in prizes, including a $200k prize pool that will be distributed to the 9 best projects submitted during the hackathon. Those top 9 teams will have the opportunity to continue building their projects to compete for a seed funding round! For more information about our hackathon structure, please refer to the official Github repo here.

To find a teammate, make sure to join our Discord chat and browse the teammate directory here.

Participants and teams may submit a maximum of 1 project by the hackathon deadline. Once all submissions are collected, the Solana Foundation and Serum teams will distribute a filtered list to the judges for evaluation. Teams and individuals are evaluated on the following criteria:

• Functionality
• Potential impact
• Novelty
• Design
• Composability

After judges complete individual evaluations, the hackathon organizers will discuss with the judges to choose the winners based on the project’s weighted scores. Winners of the event will be announced shortly after the end of the hackathon.

Once winners have been selected, the top 9 teams will have the opportunity to compete for an additional $200k in seed funding. This gives serious builders a chance at jumping full-time into the Serum and Solana ecosystem while receiving extensive resources from the Solana Foundation, Project Serum, and leading venture capital firms.

We are excited to see what is built during the hackathon, and we hope to see you at one of the live-streamed events! Head over to solana.com/defi to register for the hackathon and receive helpful resources as the start date approaches. If you have technical questions about Solana or Serum, need to find a team, or want to receive updates, join the dedicated Discord chat.

Further technical information:

• Solana Documentation: https://docs.solana.com/
• Official Solana Github: https://github.com/solana-labs/defi-hackathon
• Serum Repository: https://github.com/project-serum/awesome-serum
• Solana Developer Framework: https://github.com/project-serum/anchor
• Solana Program Library: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana-program-library

**The Solana Foundation x Serum DeFi Hackathon is a competition where projects will be evaluated by judges on their technological merits without consideration of legal viability. Participants in the Hackathon will create software solely for purposes of evaluation by judges as part of a competition and not for commercial deployment or release as part of the Hackathon.All participants must comply with applicable laws and regulations when releasing any software that they develop as part of the Hackathon.

The Hackathon ideas and developer resources that Solana Foundation (“SF”) provides are for educational and inspirational purposes only. SF does not encourage, induce or sanction the deployment of any such applications in violation of applicable laws or regulations. SF does not encourage, induce or sanction the deployment, integration or use of any such applications (including the code comprising the Solana blockchain protocol) in violation of applicable laws or regulations and hereby prohibits any such deployment, integration or use. This includes use of any such applications by the reader (a) in violation of export control or sanctions laws of the United States or any other applicable jurisdiction, (b) if the reader is located in or ordinarily resident in a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions administered by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), © if the reader is or is working on behalf of a Specially Designated National (SDN) or a person subject to similar blocking or denied party prohibitions, or (d) in violation of the Commodities and Exchange Act.

The reader should be aware that U.S. export control and sanctions laws prohibit U.S. persons (and other persons that are subject to such laws) from transacting with persons in certain countries and territories or that are on the SDN list. As a project based primarily on open-source software, it is possible that such sanctioned persons may nevertheless bypass prohibitions, obtain the code comprising the Solana blockchain protocol (or other project code or applications) and deploy, integrate, or otherwise use it. Accordingly, there is a risk to individuals that other persons using the Solana blockchain protocol may be sanctioned persons and that transactions with such persons would be a violation of U.S. export controls and sanctions law. This risk applies to individuals, organizations, and other ecosystem participants that deploy, integrate, or use the Solana blockchain protocol code directly (e.g., as a node operator), and individuals that transact on the Solana blockchain through light clients, third party interfaces, and/or wallet software.