2024 Wrapped: A Year of Building Like There’s No Tomorrow
Where we spill the coffee beans on a year of building, breaking records, and occasionally balding people for the greater good.
2024 was a year of shipping like there's no tomorrow, helping our community flourish, and juggling ten thousand things, all of which we wouldn't trade for anything. From launching new platform features to hosting record-breaking hackathons, the year was a packed with building, collaboration, and just enough chaos to keep us on our toes. From witnessing AI go from a transformative technology to a fundamental driver of innovation, to breaking new ground in Web3, every moment was guided by the belief that the best way to predict the future is to build it.
January, February, March: Kicking Things Off Strong 🛫
One of our goals has always been to make emerging technologies more accessible to builders worldwide. So we hit the ground running in partnership with DevRev, launching DevRev Forge, an AI hackathon aimed at simplifying voice-of-customer data using LLMs.
ETHDenver 2024 marked our third partnership with this landmark event, something we'd been preparing for since late 2023. They say third time's a charm, and it certainly was, with top-tier builders, projects brimming with potential, and insightful conversations that reminded us why we do what we do. Catch all the details in our front-row recap blog.
March saw us carrying that momentum to ETHSeoul 2024, because some incredible teams, we love working with again and again. In a true Never Stop Building manner, we managed to break our own record for most hackathons hosted in a single month. The quarter culminated with the first ever Ethereum hackathon in India’s city of dreams, ETHMumbai. Another highlight was hosting the Ethereum team to watch the Dencun upgrade live – nothing quite like witnessing history with the folks making it happen.
April, May, June: Levelling Up Along With Fellow Builders 💪
With a strong start behind us, we decided to have a LOT more fun in the second quarter, and fun we had. So we started off with a series of platform upgrades we'd been working on behind-the-scenes.
- We noticed that builders have a large amount of proof-of work-which needed a better interface and easier discoverability. We created a new ‘Dev’-Folio (currently in beta), a revamped Devfolio profile that not just showcases projects and skills but also journeys, growth curve, and sheer passion for building. Read more here and join our beta updates Discord channel to share your thoughts (DM @faradayfury on X for an invite).
- We introduced revamped pages for Hackathon, Projects, and Settings with an aim to make building easier and more delightful.
- Our Cheer feature made its way to Optimism and Base for builders to have more ways to support each other.
Meanwhile, the hackathon scene was unbeatable. FOSSASIA 2024, ETHDubai, ETHTallinn, Sui Overflow kept builders on their toes in April. May brought in ETHPrague, ZK Hack Kraków, ETHBratislava, Story Protocol v1.0 Buildathon, and something everyone had been keenly waiting for: the month-long Onchain Summer Buildathon by Base.
We had a ton of fun working with the Base team on this and ran the SupaBald Jesse campaign to ensure that Jesse (#001 builder at Base) keeps his promise of going bald when Base hits 10B in TVL (which recently went down in the books along with a historic livestream). Also whipped up a website because who doesn’t need more fun places on the internet, https://letsgetjessebald.com/ :P
June wrapped with ETHSalvador, HackonBlocks, and an in-person Hack-a-Change hackathon with People+ai, building population-scale use-cases for AI in India. That’s what we call a super based quarter.
July, August, September: Colleges to Continents 🌍
Summer brought an unbelievably new level of energy as we kicked off the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon with Google, tackling India's most pressing challenges using cutting-edge AI. At ETH SEA, we saw a collective effort at building blockchain solutions and FOSS Hack 2024 reminded us that open source remains the backbone of technology.
Our partneship with Wallet Connect for Build the New Internet, Skate for their first cohort of Stateless Innovation Program (SSIP#1) and ZK Hack Montreal helped us further help builders to explore new frontiers in Web3. In September, we took Base Around The World for a buildathon series, across Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and LatAm, activating a movement around the world with builders everywhere solving for their community using onchain solutions.
Invisible Garden, the #1 pop-up dev city’s, first hackathon kicked off around the same time to foster synergy among technology, culture, and community. Meanwhile, the Devfolio University Hackathons Season was in full swing with a brand-new partner, Aptos, coming onboard!
We had an amazing time hosting our UniDAO leads at our HQ to brainstorm more ways to bring Ethereum to college campuses in India.
October, November, December: Building Till The Ball Drops 🪩
The final quarter started off with two opportunities for builders to solve real world-problems. We worked with Sahamati, a collective of the account aggregator framework in India for the Sahamati BuildAAthon to drive adoption of the AA framework, and QuickNode for Build On that challenged builders to keep building despite regulatory challenges.
Reclaim Opensource Hackweek had developers building solution for data ownership and privacy control, while ETHKL 2024 turned Malaysia into a hotbed of blockchain innovation.
Fresh off their seven-city victory lap, Jesse and the Base team swinged by the Devfolio HQ to launch Bunny V on ethindia.co, an unexpected but terrific highlight.
December?…Is, where we go all out because it’s ETHIndia time, anon. (Cue shooting stars) 🎵
Accompanied by IBW, Unfold hackathon, and FIL Bangalore, ETHIndia turned Bangalore into a crypto festival for the first 10 days of December. As the year wound down, we managed to squeeze in some groundbreaking work with Anon Aadhaar and hosted the amazing builders at Hack This Fall, because apparently, sleep is for 2050.
Looking back, the numbers tell an incredible story. We hosted 300+ hackathons, disbursed $3.5 million in bounties thanks to our amazing partners supporting fellow builders, and onboarded 350k+ new builders to Devfolio. The second season of ETHIndia Grants supported some of the most promising and game-changing projects in the space.
With India maintaining its #1 position for both crypto and AI adoption, we're more excited than ever about what lies ahead. Stay tuned for our upcoming report with Hashed Emergent, where we'll explore how the Indian Web3 landscape was in 2024, from startups and investments to the developer ecosystem and regulatory environment.
2024 showed us how technology is constantly reimagining how we see and interact with the world. From AI changing how we build and solve problems, to Web3 creating new paradigms for ownership and collaboration, to the intersection of both opening up unknown frontiers, we've tried our best to give builders the platform, tools, and community they need to conquer these innovations.
That said, we're already making moves in 2025, starting with our return to Denver! Join us at ETHDenver 2025, the world's largest and longest-running BUIDLathon. The Devfolio team will be on ground to connect, collaborate, and build together. Register at ethdenver2025.devfolio.co and we'll see you soon!
Stay tuned for more updates and interact with the Devfolio community at:
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Until next time, Never Stop Building 🛠️