A month ago, Eric told me that the number of ‘BUIDL’ registrations on the DoraHacks platform exceeded 10,000.
You may not be familiar with the term ‘BUIDL’. On the DoraHacks platform, every ‘BUIDL’ is a startup team. They come to DoraHacks to build a new product, trying to solve an interesting problem. They will participate in one or several hackathons, win prizes, and get funding and grants from the ecosystem. They can also update the platform on major progress of their projects, introduce team members, etc. Often they will develop their products into their own startups.
Honestly, it feels unreal.
I still remember joining DoraHacks in 2018. In San Francisco, I hosted my first hackathon in the United States. It was the last weekend of April, and the event was held in a co-working space in the Mission District. At that time, we were still using Eventbrite (the American event website) for the developer registration form. Huobi was the title sponsor of our global event. The winning team of the event built a monitoring system for inactive Bitcoin addresses. We had 300 developers registered for our event, but only 40 people showed up. I was very frustrated at the time because in the early days of DoraHacks, it was not so easy to attract developers to our hackathons.
In 2018, all DoraHacks hackathons were held offline. We went to 8 countries and 15 cities around the world and held 31 hackathons. The one that impressed me the most was the one in Boston, where we held it with Erick Pinos, a core contributor to the MIT Bitcoin Club. At that time, college students from Harvard and MIT participated together and meditated together late at night; in Bangalore, India, we held an event where Anurag Arjun, one of the founders of Polygon (then called Matic Network), provided guidance to more than 200 developers; in San Jose, the founding team of Injective participated together.
I remember that I got to know every participant. We would call them the day before the event to remind them of the precautions for the competition. I knew everyone's name, their daily work and why they liked to participate in the hackathon.
I learned from my colleagues at DoraHacks that food is important at hackathons. In Seoul, we ate fried chicken together. In Boston, we had delicious Chinese food. In Bangalore, we had vegetarian food: curried tofu and naan. We also invited a local band to perform at the hackathon, and the developers always enjoyed it.
This was all before the Defi summer.
In 2019, we held the largest hackathon in Chinese history: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Microsoft, Bosch, Binance, and even Monster Beverage sponsored and supported this hackathon. More than 500 developers from all over the country came to Chaoyang District to participate, and together with us, they created the history of China's geek movement.
An interesting phenomenon we observed that year was that Polkadot was the hottest ecosystem of the year. Polkadot’s first batch of ecosystem projects, including Phala, Acala, and Darwinia, were all born that year. A year later, more than 30 Polkadot/Kusama parachain projects were born, and many of them came from the DoraHacks community.
In 2020, most of the public chains that we are familiar with today were born and began to build ecosystems, including Solana, Avalanche, Near, and Algorand. In the second half of 2020, we held the first hackathon in the history of BNBChain. That event brought together many elites, including dForce, DeBank, etc. Since then, BNB Chain has grown into one of the public chains with the most active users, helping millions of people get rid of the bad economic system in their country and providing infrastructure for the best on-chain games. To this day, DoraHacks has worked closely with BNB Chain in various developer incentive programs.
In 2020, DoraHacks.io, our hackathon platform, was officially launched. Before the pandemic, 100% of our hackathons were held offline. Now, 90% of hackathons are held online. Developers from Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and even Alaska can participate in the same event and compete for prize money.
Since 2020, DoraHacks has become the co-organizer and preferred platform for global flagship hackathons for multiple ecosystems, including Polygon and Solana.
I remember that on New Year's Day 2021, I made the first call to Chris from Solana to start the cooperation. Chris is the most desperate and hardworking of all the partners we know. He often works at 3 o'clock in the morning to reply to our messages. Since then, Solana has become one of our closest partners. We have co-hosted ten Solana hackathons and developer incentive programs. Solana's focus on hackathons and strong support for hackathon projects is one of the most important factors in the prosperity and development of their ecosystem. In May 2021, Solend was born at the Solana quarterly hackathon. Rooter, the founder of Solend, helped us do the first Sybil attack review in the history of Solana's quadratic funding. At the end of 2021, StepN participated in the Solana Ingition hackathon. Yawn publicly demonstrated StepN's game model and running shoe NFT design for the first time, and also carefully produced the competition video. Two other very hard-working and focused teams, Scallop and Cetus, have also grown into the two most important DeFi projects in the Sui ecosystem.
Developers' enthusiasm for Ethereum has never diminished. Since 2015, developers in the Dora community have begun to spontaneously learn and even teach the Solidity language in hackathons. To this day, EVM developers still account for a large part of the Dora community. In March 2021, we held the ETH Beijing Hackathon. The final presentation of that game was very similar to the YC Super Demo Day. Well-known investors from more than ten institutions came to the game site to discover the next unicorn. In fact, the unicorn project of 21 years was born in that hackathon.
Another interesting story from that year is that after we held the hackathon in Austin, the Dora team drove from Austin to Las Vegas. On the way, we passed Denver, and ETHDenver founders John Paller and Justin Moskovitz enthusiastically invited us to John's home to bake pizza together. A year later, we became the co-organizer of ETHDenver, and the ETHDenver community also experienced DoraHacks MACI for the first time.
In the same year, Binance Labs strategically invested in DoraHacks and began to further expand our multi-chain strategy. We believe that an ecosystem that focuses on developer relations and community building will eventually prosper. Klaytn (now Kaia), Avalanche, Opensea, Safe, TON, etc. have all begun to work closely with us.
In 2022, after witnessing the success and failure of many hackathon startup projects, we decided to explore a sustainable way to fund startup teams. We created public goods staking, running validator nodes in our closely-knit ecosystem and using node revenue to fund developers. Aptos and Injective are the first two ecosystems to adopt public goods staking. Econia, MSafe, Townesquare, KYD Labs, Gui Inu, Hydro, Neptune, Black Panther, Talis, etc. have all grown from the DoraHacks community to become core projects of Aptos and Injective.
We believe that the future of multi-chain and application chains is essential to guaranteeing the freedom of the crypto and Web3 world, and CosmosSDK is the underlying infrastructure for all application chains. Therefore, we decided to support the development of Cosmos' public goods infrastructure in 2023. I remember attending the Cosmos workshop hosted by Evmos in New York, where Zaki, a core contributor to Cosmos, talked about his vision for ATOM 2.0 and his views on community debates. Since then, we have become the biggest supporter of the application chain narrative. Whether it is traditional Internet applications entering Web3 or Web3's top applications further expanding their token usage scenarios, there is naturally a great incentive to issue their own chains. Using Cosmos to launch a chain is very simple. The Cosmos SDK can achieve one-click chain launch. With the help of CosmWasm developed by the Confio team, a smart contract environment can be quickly generated. Using IBC allows efficient communication and interoperability between chains.
In 2023, we co-hosted most of the major Cosmos hackathons, including HackWasm in Berlin with Confio, AEZ hackathon with AADAO, and HackMos in Istanbul with the CryptoCito team. We launched Dora Ventures II, a strategic investment fund focused on investing in application chains. We have built our own application chain portfolio over the past two years, including Osmosis, dYdX, Rome Protocol, Abstract, FortyTwo, and more.
Since 2024, DoraHacks has become the global flagship hackathon infrastructure and partner for most ecosystems, including but not limited to Celestia, Aptos, Cosmos, Injective, Taiko, EigenLayer, TON, BNB Chain, Akash, Scroll, etc. With the prosperity of the multi-chain ecosystem, more resources can be provided to startup teams, and the developer community of DoraHacks is also thriving. We have held nearly a thousand technical workshops and online presentations for startup teams. At the same time, the DoraHacks platform has become the preferred hackathon platform for the global Web3 community: ETH Vietnam, ETH Bucharest, Funding The Commons, LambdaClass, Superteam. We have also never stopped supporting communities in cutting-edge technology, including Unitary Fund in the field of quantum computing and the Yale Institute for Quantum Computing, promoting the spirit of the geek movement to more cutting-edge technologies and more corners of the world.
In January 2024, there are 5,000 BUIDLs on the DoraHacks platform. In July 2024, there are 10,000 BUIDLs on the DoraHacks platform. The DoraHacks geek movement is growing rapidly.
We believe that innovation happened in Silicon Valley before, and YC was the best incubator. Now, innovation happens in DoraHacks, and our venture capital community is the best accelerator in the future.
Among these 10,000 projects, there is StepN, one of the most interesting games in the history of encryption; there is EVAA Protocol, the most successful lending team on TON; there is Rome Protocol, the first decentralized sorter for the Solana ecosystem; there is SpaceID, the most successful decentralized identity team on BNB Chain; there is YakiHonne, a freedom of speech project based on Nostr; there is KYD Labs, a decentralized ticketing infrastructure based on Aptos, which will push Web3 towards true large-scale adoption.
Behind these 10,000 projects are 160,000 active developers around the world, the most creative group of geeks, trying to solve the most important problems they really care about. Together, these 160,000 developers and founders have created one of the largest and most important geek movements in the world.
DoraHacks will be 10 years old this coming November. The journey of developing DoraHacks has been very meaningful to us, and the road ahead is full of opportunities.
We have launched our new strategic investment fund, which focuses on investing in hackathon projects. We will call it the "Marketplace Fund". As institutions and capital are more inclined towards a very small number of teams, we will prioritize providing the strongest early support to grassroots hackathon teams, give the first investment, and provide the most important help at the stage when they need support the most.
We will work more closely with ecosystems that are willing to provide the best resources for developers.
We are forever grateful to all our developers, startups and partners. Thank you for recognizing our mission and vision that has remained unchanged for ten years:
‘Connecting hackers around the world to solve important and fascinating problems.’
