Solana’s fourth annual ignition event hackathon has delivered $5m in prizes for the most innovative new projects on the ecosystem.
The event came after the ‘Solana summer’ which saw the network explode – in part due to the rise of NFTs – driving SOL’s 870% price rally from $21.85 (on July 20) to a whopping $190 (September 9).
This was the fourth Solana hackathon, and boasted 6,000 participants submitting 586 projects across five categories.
Previous hackathons include the ‘Solana season’ (13,000 participants and 326 projects), the ‘DeFi hackathon’ (3,000 participants and 82 projects), and the ‘Wormhole hackathon’ last year (1,000 participants and 66 projects).
Anatoly Yakovenko – CEO of Solana Labs – highlighted the significance of the event for spotlighting the best developers in the ecosystem.
“The Solana ecosystem experienced amazing growth over this past year, and the IGNITION hackathon has been an exciting showcase of some of the best teams building in blockchain,” said Yakovenko.
“We are thrilled to have these incredible projects building on Solana and look forward to seeing them evolve.”
Solana Ignition winners
The Grand Champion prize was awarded to Katana – an asset management protocol aiming to launch securitised investment products across the risk spectrum on Solana.
The top prize scored the developer team $75,000 in liquid USDC and a formal invitation to present at Solana’s first annual conference – Breakpoint (November 7).
The Web 3.0 track was won by Project Citadel, which aims to aggregate Solana protocols such as yield farms and DEX protocols in an easy-access desktop client – this netted $45,000 USDC.
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