The Open Permaweb Hackathon

You can read this blog post directly from the permaweb using Arweave community member benjo’s new permaweb blogging platform, here!

Since we launched the permaweb back in January this year, we have seen just how immensely powerful hackathons can be to bring more people into the Arweave permaweb community and to get new permaweb apps built quickly! We are super excited to continue expanding these efforts (come and see us at ETHNewYork!) but we also want to go further: in-person hackathons are a local phenomena, while crypto and decentralisation are global by their very nature.

We always enjoy meeting community members face-to-face at events like ETHParis and ETHNewYork, but we know that 99% of those in the Arweave ecosystem won’t be able to physically attend. Further, because of the physical nature of in-person hackathons, they incur significant costs like travel, venue rental, catering, on top of sponsorship fees and prizes etc.. This can make in-person hackathons practically inaccessible to many would-be community developers and too resource-intensive for some projects to arrange.

So, we have recently been experimenting with a different approach: a perpetual, open source permaweb app hackathon via Gitcoin. The idea is simple: Anyone can submit an idea for a permaweb app they would like to build and gain a $250 reward in ETH, as well as $150 in AR, if they build it, launch it, and open source it. This makes our Arweave hackathon open to everyone, at any time, and substantially more cost effective than traditional hackathons, given the overhead costs associated with in-person events. Hackers can also take their time and build whenever suits them — night owls and early birds included. You can head straight to Gitcoin to check out all of the details here.

We are still experimenting with this approach and will adapt it as things progress, but the initial results are promising. Over 25 people have already applied, and many of those are already working on awesome new open source permaweb apps right now! Check out our new index of Arweave apps, itself a hackathon project running on the permaweb and built by community member @Zeus, for a sample of some of the awesome things people are building: https://arweave.net/35IFq9BcIgpSPti9YDYDiaQy4wMfMIKZ25t7hHZrhek

What next? Come over to Discord and join the discussion! We’re looking forward to hearing your ideas and helping you along!

-arweave-team