Based and Build-pilled: Onchain Summer Buildathon
🔆 Onchain Summer Buildathon 2024 🔆
Wow, what a ride! That’s us reeling from the Onchain Summer Buildathon hosted on Devfolio last month. We are beyond happy to have collaborated with Base for their mission to bring the world onchain. A massive shoutout to the Base team, our co-pilots at every step of this journey. It takes two to tango, and tango we did, making this the largest onchain hackathon ever!!!
From May 31 to June 30, thousands of builders around the world worked on projects across payments, commerce, creator tools, social platforms, gaming, trading, discovery, and URL <> IRL use cases.
The Base crew kept things incredibly exciting with a laser-sharp focus on builders having fun while bringing the world onchain. Of course, we couldn't have done it without the support of our wider community and partners: Stripe, Shopify, Farcaster, Zora, Fleek, Nouns, Thirdweb, Aerodrome, and Synthetix, y'all are super based.
✈️ Opening Ceremony and Base Office Hours
The buildathon started on a fantastic note, with the Base team and buildathon partners firing up the vibes at the opening ceremony—props to Jesse (Creator, Base) for setting the perfect mood to build with his hype speech. It set the stage for the building sprint that was to come. To keep this momentum throughout the buildathon, Will Binns, Senior Developer Advocate at Base, joined the builders for weekly Office Hours to share troubleshooting tactics and project feedback.
Let’s talk numbers! 😎
Over 1,250 projects were submitted from 7,500+ builders around the world. The total prize pool clocked in at a mind-boggling 200 ETH (later bumped up to 250 ETH)! Talk about going big or going home. Check out all the projects built here: https://onchain-summer.devfolio.co/projects
💇 From Billboards to Bald Moves…
Onchain Summer Billboard
If we host a hackathon this big (and fun), we HAD to let everyone know. So, Base decided to pull up something impossible to ignore—Billboards!
Inspired by Jesse’s tweet, hundreds of builders made their own super based versions of the Onchain Summer billboard. Seeing the entire community come up with an insane number of creative billboards was invigorating, to say the least. We created Devfolio's version of the Onchain Summer Billboard to solidify our spirit of Never Stop Building. If you weren’t living under a rock, you know what we’re talking about, and you know that we had to get on this boat.
🧑🦲 SupaBald Jesse NFTs
In a galaxy not so far away, Jesse committed to shaving his head bald when Base assets hit 10 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL). We decided to hold him accountable – turning his pledge into a quest and a bonkers, viral marketing campaign. Read our blog to learn more here; oh and just a heads up that there’s a lot to unpack ;)
🏆 Revealing the winners; live from Basecamp! ⛺️
We were waiting with bated breath as the submission deadline approached. We were very, very impressed as we watched the numbers go up every minute leading up to the submission deadline. In the end, over 1,250 project submissions poured in! This set a new record for online hackathons hosted on Devfolio. More importantly, it showed that the buildathon had succeeded in its goal of helping bring more of the world onchain.
Impressed by both the quantity and quality of submissions, the Base team increased the total prize pool from 200 to 250 ETH. This included a 20 ETH prize pool for all participants who submitted projects, regardless of whether they won or not.
The moment of truth had arrived, and we flew down to Basecamp, Idyllwild, to gather with the Base team and builders to announce the winners of the Onchain Summer Buildathon. We couldn’t have been more glad to be there in person—soaking in the palpable energy and excitement of so many based builders. If you missed the live event, you can watch the recording here.
Explore all the winning projects on Devfolio here, or check out Base’s blog post Announcing the Onchain Summer Buildathon Winners!
Quadratic Voting: When we say everyone is a winner, we mean it! 🫡
Base wanted to hear directly from the community, giving builders a voice of their own. Enter Quadratic Voting (QV) on Devfolio, a collective decision-making process—aligning perfectly with Base's vision of community empowerment.
QV goes beyond traditional voting methods, allowing participants to express not just their preferences but the intensity of those preferences. Given the vast number of projects in a buildathon, QV makes it easier to determine which projects are the most liked by the community.
Base decided to go all in for QV with an additional pool of 5 ETH increasing the stakes! And hear from the community we did—with a total of 821 votes cast! Shoutout to the top 3 projects: ZoraCart, BasedCoffee, and Sidebets, all built by builders from the Farcaster Builders India community, building consumer crypto on Farcaster.
BUILD kicked things up a notch by throwing in another 1 billion $BUILD tokens into the mix for Quadratic Voting winners!
How do you take this bounty home? 💰
Winning a bounty is not an easy feat, but bringing it back home should be. Devfolio made it easy to distribute all the bounties, including the buildathon track bounties, QV funds, and (some) bounties put up on Bountycaster by our hackathon partners. So, the builders were able to claim all their bounties in a consolidated way via Devfolio, and our partners could streamline the bounty disbursals and abstract any payment complexities away. We had initially built this payment disbursal feature for our own hackathons like ETHIndia, but now we’re happy to see it coming in handy way beyond.
In fact, it's pretty wild to see this feature grow to help builders and companies across our communities and geographies. In total, we saw 2850 bounties worth 251 ETH get handed out - not bad, eh?
Beyond hackathon…Cheer for Projects 📣
Bringing the world onchain doesn’t have to stop just because the summer is over, right?
Devfolio Cheer is one of our favourite features, because it makes sure that the end of a hackathon doesn’t mean the end of the projects. Also, who doesn’t want a way for the validation to keep pouring in? :P
Devfolio Cheer is a way for anyone to support projects beyond a hackathon by tipping and vouching for them onchain using digital stickers with Ethereum (ETH) value. It's a win-win: Builders can motivate fellow builders and potentially earn rewards for their projects. 100% of contributions go directly to the builders. Devfolio keeps nothing.
Go ahead and cheer for your fave projects here: https://onchain-summer.devfolio.co/projects
Tokens Bound to Your Soul…Claimed Yet? 👀
Throughout history, people have carved "I was here" to leave a lasting mark of their presence. Today, we have a digital equivalent that's even more powerful: SBTs on Devfolio!
In the olden days, people used to carve out “I was here” to show people that they did something or commemorate their presence with something more long-lasting. Well, hey, you don’t have to do that now because we have SBTs on Devfolio!
To celebrate the wins of our talented builders, we have created SBTs (SoulBound tokens) for all the Onchain Summer Buildathon winners and builders. These SBTs will be a based addition to their Basename profiles. Don't have a Basename yet? No problem! If you own this SBT, you can claim your Basename for free.
Ready to claim? Visit devfolio.co/claims to get your SBT now!
See you again, frens! 🫶
The overwhelmingly positive feedback from the builders has been a delight. If you have any additional thoughts or suggestions, we're all ears. Hit us up at hello@devfolio.co and let us know how we can make our hackathon experiences even better.
Looking ahead, we're already gearing up for our next based event ;)
That's all from us for now. Once again, a massive thank you to everyone who was a part of the Onchain Summer Buildathon and took the time to build products to bring the world onchain, making this buildathon the off-the-charts success it was. Here's to many more based Buildathons!
If you're interested in partnering with us, whether it's for organising your own hackathon, disbursing your bounties/prizes via Devfolio, or experimenting with any of our product features, don't be a stranger. Reach out to us at partner@devfolio.co, and let's make it happen.
Stay tuned for more updates and interact with the Devfolio community at:
🐦 Twitter 🦄 Farcaster 🎮 Discord 📞 Telegram
Until then, Never Stop Building 🛠️