Who are the winners of the Solana Ignition hackathon?

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).

DeFi was a big theme in the competition, and Katana’s grand prize opened the avenue for Atrix – an automated market maker (AMM) which enables creation of liquidity pools and yield farms on Serum – to win the DeFi track ($65,000 USDC).

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.

NFTs were a big fixture of the event, especially after driving growth on the ecosystem this year.

The designated Digital Art and Collectables track – with a $45,000 USDC prize – was won by Neftify – an NFT lending platform set to empower play-to-earn games in the metaverse.

Interactive user experiences in the metaverse were prominent in the Gaming track which was won by a cross-chain interoperable collectables and metaverse framework called Vortex by Rushdown Revolt, backed by Degen Apes.

Finally, the Community Choice award – picked by the Solana community – went to blockchain horse racing game DarleyG0.