Serum x Wormhole Hackathon — Convergence

Project Serum

5 min readDec 20, 2021

Serum & Wormhole Present:

CONVERGENCE — a global hackathon focused on cross-chain DeFi

Up to $5million in prizes and seed funding
Build applications in the multi chain world
Join us to build web3 applications leveraging Serum’s liquidity infrastructure and Wormhole’s cross-chain bridge.

Register here!

Convergence

con·ver·gence | \ kən-ˈvər-jən(t)s
the act of converging and moving toward union

We’ve come a long way since DeFi Summer. Solana glowed with pure, unadulterated potential. Countless teams and visionaries saw a new use case, a new ecosystem, a new world — the vision of web3 was slowly taking shape.

Project Serum is one among many critical primitives that brought Solana to where it is today. Serum also brought with it the open source infrastructural rails needed to inspire and build out the rest of the ecosystem: a wallet, public RPC infrastructure, an AMM (the old Serum Swap), Anchor framework, and more.

Others joined the action soon after. Derivatives; order book-based AMM pools; borrow-lending; asset management platforms and tooling.

Cross-chain interoperability was on everyone’s minds since the beginning too: that’s where Wormhole came in. Wormhole’s flexible messaging layer is ready to connect multiple ecosystems to Solana and to Serum’s full order book.

The veterans of Solana and DeFi Summer have matured. New players are streaming in with increasingly innovative dreams. Everything is in place. As always, Serum’s on-chain order book stands ready for those needing liquidity and matching.

2022 is the year of convergence.

Welcome.

The Convergence Hackathon

We are extremely excited to announce the launch of Convergence, a cross-chain DeFi Hackathon hosted in partnership with Wormhole.

We all know and love Wormhole, the decentralized generic message-passing protocol that connects to multiple chains including Ethereum, Solana, Terra, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon.

Serum and Wormhole aim to attract web2 and web3 developers building on the Solana blockchain to leverage Serum’s decentralized exchange and liquidity infrastructure, Wormhole’s cross-chain bridge, and technology from the other sponsors.

In other words, the Convergence Hackathon is an incredible opportunity for developers building on the Serum, Wormhole, PsyOptions, Terra, Atrix (and more!) to submit what they’re building and to be considered for a variety of prizes!

How it Works

Projects building on specific blockchains and protocols including, but not limited to, Serum, Terra, Atrix, and PsyOptions, can compete for a total of eight different prize tracks.

When submitting projects, developers can choose which awards they would like to compete for. Each prize track will have its own submission requirements that must be met. In addition to the project, each contestant will submit a demo video on the project’s user interface and functionality and its vision and value proposition.

The submitted projects will be judged by members of the DeFi and CeFi community including, but not limited to: Sam Bankman-Fried from FTX, Raj Gokal from Solana Labs, Kyle Samani from Multicoin Capital, Matthew Graham from Sino Global, Dan Matuszewski from CMS, Paul Veradittakit from Pantera Capital and Chris McCann from Race Capital, and many more of your favourites!

In addition to the prize track requirements, judges will be looking at whether the project

fills a need within the Solana ecosystem in an economically efficient manner
betters the ecosystem of each sponsoring partner
has a clean code base with proper documentation
if the accompanying video provides detailed insight into the project.

Projects can be submitted via the devpost site from January 5 to January 31, 2022.

Subscribe to all hackathon events.

Join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/zuJzGHbpa8

Prize Tracks

Main Prize

All submitted projects are considered for this award.

Five total projects will win a prize:

$100,000 (winner)
$60,000 (runner up)
$30,000 (third place)
$20,000 (fourth place)
$15,000 (fifth place)

Community Choice Award

All submitted projects will be able to win this award.

The whole community will be able to vote through the hackathon website.
One project will win the $30,000 award

Serum Award

To compete for this category, developers must build innovative solutions on the Serum liquidity infrastructure and the newly released Serum Core by Bonfida.

The project should increase trade volume and provide better liquidity to the greater Solana ecosystem.

Two projects will win a prize:

First place will receive $50,000
Runner up will win $30,000

Wormhole Award

Projects seeking to win a prize in this category must utilize Wormhole’s message passing protocol to build cross-chain solutions that extend the DeFi use-cases in the Solana ecosystem.

Two projects will win a prize:

First place will receive $50,000
Runner up will win $30,000

PsyOptions Award

For this category, projects must actively contribute to the Psy ecosystem and PSY DAO.

The category will have two winners:

First place will win $50,000.
Runner up will receive $30,000

Pyth Network Award

To win the prize in this category, projects must utilize Pyth’s data infrastructure to build new solutions that solve problems in the DeFi space.

The project needs to appeal to institutional traders, while being intutitive enough for a retail audience.

There will be one winner:

The winner will receive $30,000

Atrix Award

In order to win the prize for this category, projects will need to successfully integrate liquidity pools and yield farm to Atrix UI.

One project will win a prize:

Winning project will receive $30,000

Terra Award

Projects vying to win the Terra award must support the adoption of Terra’s UST stablecoin.

Projects must increase usage of UST and create additional use cases for DeFi within the TerraLuna ecosystem.

Only one project will win the Terra award:

Winner will receive $30,000

Judging criteria

Matching to submission track: The solution has to match the submission prize track’s requirements.
Execution: The solution has to be working, solve one or more business problems and be economically viable, furthering the use case of Serum, Wormhole and partnering prize sponsors in the Solana ecosystem and beyond.
Code quality, technical documentation: The solution should have a clean code base with documentation.
Project video: The submission includes a demo video of the solution, covering the vision and user experience and value proposition of the project.

About Project Serum

Project Serum is a decentralized exchange and liquidity infrastructure protocol for DeFi protocols built on the Solana blockchain. It offers an on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) that gives developers access to matching services and shared liquidity across all protocols built on Serum.

About Wormhole

Wormhole is a generic message-passing protocol that connects to multiple chains including Ethereum, Solana, Terra, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche and Oasis.

Wormhole offers two features built on top of the generic message-passing protocol including: a token bridge that allows users to seamlessly bridge wrapped assets between supported chains; an NFT bridge that allows ERC721 and SPL NFTs to be transferred between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Solana.