A few months ago, @ericzhang90 told me we had just reached and broke 10,000 BUIDLs on the DoraHacks platform.
If you’re unfamiliar with ‘BUIDL’, each BUIDL represents a new team of hackers registered on DoraHacks.io. They came to DoraHacks to build a new product to tackle an interesting problem and compete in hackathons for grants, bounties. They can also update their milestones, introduce their team members, etc. Oftentimes they grow their demo into a working product and start building their startups around it.
To be honest, it felt surreal.
I remember joining DoraHacks in 2018 and hosting my first hackathon in the States in San Francisco. It was on the last weekend of April 2018 in a co-working space in the Mission District. We used Eventbrite for hacker registration forms. @HuobiGlobal was our title sponsor. One of the winners of that hackathon built a monitor system for inactive Bitcoin addresses. We had 300 hackers registered, and only 40 showed up. I was frustrated that weekend as, back in the day, it was challenging for us to attract good developers to join our hackathons.
In 2018, all of the DoraHacks hackathons were in-person. We went to 8 countries and 15 cities and hosted 31 hackathons worldwide. Some of the memorable ones for me include the one in Boston co-hosted with @erickpinos and @BlockchainEdu, where we had Harvard and MIT students hacking and meditating together, the one in Bangalore where @anuragarjun joined 200+ hackers as a mentor in his early Matic Network days, and the one in San Jose where the @Injective founders teamed up and hacked together.
I remember knowing every hacker who participated in our hackathons and calling them a day before the hackathon to brief them about the guidelines. I knew their names, their day jobs and why they loved hackathons.
One thing I learnt from my Dora colleagues was that food was always critical in hackathons. In Seoul, we had fried chicken. In Boston, we had Chinese food and in Bangalore, we had 200+ portions of curry tofu with naan. We also always invited a local band to play during the hackathons, and hackers enjoyed the music a lot.
This was before the Defi summer.
What we focused on in 2019 is to host the largest in-person hackathon in China’s history. And we did it. It was called ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution Hackathon’. We had Microsoft, BOSCH, @Binance and even @MonsterEnergy, the energy drink company as sponsors. Over 500 hackers travelled to Chaoyang District in Beijing and joined us for a memorable weekend to build history with us.
One interesting trend we observed was that @Polkadot was Asia's most popular ecosystem among developers in 2019. The first batch of Polkadot projects, like @PhalaNetwork, @AcalaNetwork, and @DarwiniaNetwork, were all born that year. One year later, 30+ teams launched their Polkadot/Kusama parachains, and quite a few were part of the DoraHacks community.
In 2020, most of the Layer 1s you might be familiar with today launched, including Solana, Avalanche, Near, and Algorand. The one that worked very closely with us first was @BNBCHAIN. In Q3 2020, we co-hosted the very first BNB Chain hackathon. It was a unique gathering for many interesting teams, including @dForcenet, @DeBankdefi and, later in the year, @ethsign. Since then, BNB Chain has become an ecosystem with the most active users, unbanked millions of people worldwide and hosted the best on-chain games. Today, DoraHacks partners closely with BNB Chain on most of their developer initiatives.
Also, in 2020, DoraHacks.io, our hackathon platform, was officially launched. Before the pandemic, 100% of our hackathons were in person. Now, 90% of DoraHacks hackathons are virtual. Hackers from Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and even Alaska can participate in the same hackathon and compete for prizes.
Since 2020, DoraHacks become the home of the global flagship hackathons for multiple ecosystems, including @0xPolygon and @Solana.
I remembered hopping on an intro call with Chris from the Solana team on New Year's Day in 2021. Chris was one of the most hard-working people we have ever worked with in crypto, and he often replied to our messages at 3 AM. Solana became one of our closest partners. We co-hosted around ten Solana hackathons and grant programs. Their commitment to hackathons and dedication to the success of hackathon teams is one of the core reasons the Solana ecosystem thrived. In the Solana Season Hackathon in May 2021, @save_finance graduated and became one of the core leading platforms on Solana. @0xrooter helped our team with anti-sybil checks while we ran the first quadratic funding rounds in Solana's history. Later in the year, @Stepnofficial came out from the Solana Ignition Hackathon. I interviewed Yawn when they built an excellent prototype for the move-to-earn game and sneaker NFTs. Another two hard-working teams, @Scallop_io and @CetusProtocol, became core projects in the @SuiNetwork ecosystem in 2022.
The developer’s enthusiasm for Ethereum never really stopped. In 2018, developers in the Dora community volunteered to learn and teach Solidity in many of our hackathons. For many years, even today, EVM developers dominated our community demographic. In March 2021, we hosted the ETH Beijing Hackathon, one of the most popular hackathons that year. The final demo session felt a lot like YC demo day. I remember more than notable investors attending the hackathon trying to find the next unicorn.
Another memorable story that year was after we hosted our hackathon in Austin, the Dora team went on a road trip from Austin to Las Vegas. While we stopped in Denver, I reached out to @mmjustin and @PallerJohn, the founders of @EthereumDenver, and were warmly welcomed to John’s house for a fun pizza cookout. Later, in 2022, ETHDenver was hosted on the DoraHacks platform for the first time. Many hackers in the States joined the Dora community after the event.
That year, we raised strategic investment from Binance Labs and doubled down on a multi-chain approach. We believe the ecosystems that prioritize developer engagement and support will eventually triumph. Klaytn(now @KaiaChain), @Avax, @Opensea, @Safe, @TON_blockchain, etc., started to work very closely with us.
In 2022, after seeing the success and failure of many hackathon projects through the market cycles, we decided to find a way to provide sustainable incentive flow for developers. We developed Public Goods Staking, where we started to run public goods validators and use the yield to fund developer initiatives on DoraHacks. We began with @Aptos and later on Injective, the two ecosystems to which we have contributed the most since the initial phase of bootstrapping their developer community. @EconiaLabs, @MomentumSafe, @TowneSquarexyz, @KYDLabs, @GuiInuonaptos, @Hydro_fi, @Neptune_finance, @BlackPanther_Fi, @ProtocolTalis as part of the DoraHacks community all rose to become core teams in Aptos and Injective communities.
Followed by our partnership with Injective, we got warm welcomed into one of the largest decentralized developer communities in Web3, @Cosmos. I remembered joining an ATOM workshop hosted by the @Evmos team in New York City where @zmanian shared his thinking of ATOM 2.0. Since then, we have dedicated ourselves to the Appchain Thesis. Regardless of Web2 teams getting into Web3 or Web3 apps expanding their narrative, it’s natural for them to launch their own chain. It’s already so easy with Cosmos, almost an one-click experience for anyone to use Cosmos SDK to launch their own chain, integrate CosmWasm developed by @Confio_tech to enable smart contracts. The new chain will be interoperable with other chains with IBC.
In 2023, we co-hosted most of the important Cosmos hackathons, including HackWasm in Berlin with Confio, the AEZ hackathon with @ATOMAccelerator, and @Hackmos in Istanbul with the @Cryptocito team. We also launched Dora Ventures II, our strategic venture arm dedicated to the Appchain Thesis, and have built a portfolio of the best appchains and infrastructures, including @Osmosis, @dydx, @RomeProtocol, @AbstractSDK, @FortyTwo_money, etc.
Starting from 2024, Dora become the home of the flagship global hackathons for many ecosystems. @Celestia, @Aptos, @Cosmos, @injective, @Taikoxyz, @Eigenlayer, @TON_blockchain, @BNBCHAIN, @Akashnet_, @Scroll_ZKP, you name it. As multi-chain and appchains ecosystems thrived, DoraHacks thrived with much more abundant resources to provide for global developers and founders. We have hosted hundreds if not thousands of virtual workshops and demo sessions. We have never been closer with some of the best communities like @ETH_Vietnam, @ETHBucharest_, @Fundingcommons, @Class_Lambda, @Superteam, supporting frontier technology communities like @UnitaryFund and universities like @Yale_QI, etc, bringing the hacker movement and the Web3 movement to frontier tech communities around the world.
In January 2024, 5,000 BUIDLs registered on DoraHacks. In July 2024 we had 10,000 BUIDLs. The hacker movement on DoraHacks is growing exponentially.
We really believe that before, innovation happened in Silicon Valley, and @YCombinator is the best incubator, and now, innovation happens on DoraHacks and happens globally, and our venture network could be the best incubator in the future.
In those 10,000 BUIDLs, were StepN, one of the most creative games in crypto history, were @EVAAProtocol, by far the best lending protocol in TON ecosystem, were Rome Protocol, the first shared sequencer in Solana, were @SpaceIDProtocol that enabled decentralied identity on BNB Chain, were @YakiHonne defending freedom of speech based on Nostr, were KYD Labs on Aptos bringing mass adoption to Web3 via their ticketing infrastructure.
Behind those 10,000 BUIDLs are 160,000 developers around the globe, the most creative minds trying to solve a critical problem they deeply care about. Together, it’s one of the world's largest and most important hacker movements.
This November, DoraHacks will be ten years old. For us, it has been such a meaningful journey, and the road ahead is also full of exciting opportunities.
We’ve launched our new venture arm dedicated to hackathon founders. We will call it the ‘Bazaar Fund’. While institutional capital and resources are available to the select few, we will stand by the most grassroots founders in DoraHacks hackathons and provide the strongest support by writing the first check and helping them with the most critical resources they need at their earliest stage.
We’ll partner more closely with ecosystems that are willing to provide the best resources for developers.
We’ll be forever thankful for all the developers, teams, partners and friends who shared our mission and vision that haven’t changed in the past ten years:
‘Connect hackers around the world to solve fascinating problems together’