HUMAN Protocol’s Alex Newman joins top judges for Solana’s global hackathon 

Protocol Designer at HUMAN Protocol Alex Newman joins world-class judges and speakers for the global Solana Season Hackathon, which began on May 15. In addition to expanding the technical scope of the hackathon to include Web3, DeFi, and NFT solutions,  Solana is expanding this third hackathon with regional tracks in China, India, Eastern Europe, and Brazil. 

“I’m excited to be a judge on this truly global hackathon, as Solana is a tech team that moves fast, with a platform that delivers high-speed, low-cost transactions, enabling the next generation of HUMAN Protocol applications,” said Alex. “HUMAN's integration with Solana allows users of the Protocol more flexibility in operating nodes, with interactions on the network happening at a much lower latency when compared to Ethereum.”
‍

Announcing the hackathon, Anatoly Yakovenko, President of the Solana Foundation, said: “It is exciting to watch the blockchain ecosystem adapt as it continues to make significant progress. That is why we are hosting a third hackathon.” 

Yakovenko added the Foundation would support the development of projects spanning across the globe, while providing both monetary and technical help to developer teams.

About 10,000 builders were registered for the Solana Season Hackathon, all competing for up to $1MM in prizes and seed funding. A grand prize of $30,000 will be awarded to the team with the best project submission. There are three category tracks: DeFi, Web3, and NFTs, each with first, second, and third place winners that will receive $20,000, $10,000, and $5,000 prizes respectively, paid in USDC-SPL.

Significantly, Solana announced that as part of this expanded global hackathon there are additional prizes for regional tracks, including an Eastern Europe track with a $155,000 prize pool, a China track with a $125,000 prize pool , an India track with a $50,000 prize pool, and a Brazil track with a $25,000 prize pool. Solana reached out to local crypto-native companies to help run these local hackathons in areas with strong developer communities. 

In January, HUMAN Protocol partnered with Solana to support decentralized labor markets running on HUMAN, and to take advantage of Solana's performance and cost benefits. Faced with the challenge of onboarding millions of laborers into decentralized work pools, it became a priority to explore multi-chain support, and the partnership with Solana and its validators is a consequence of this. 

Commenting on the importance of the partnership with HUMAN Protocol, Anatoly Yakovenko, stated: “Blockchains possess the ability to coordinate large-scale human and economic resources. HUMAN Protocol is doing just that by pioneering decentralized labor markets. After making huge strides in gaining market share in machine vision models, an area that has historically been monopolized by Google’s reCAPTCHA, we’re proud to support HUMAN Protocol developers as they unbundle the rest of the machine learning market and unlock new applications that are uniquely enabled by blockchain.”

Alongside a mutual respect for their innovative technology, the partnership is formed by a compatible blockchain mission: Solana’s aim to provide an open, fair, censorship-resistant global marketplace aligns with the proven application of HUMAN Protocol, as the underlying technology that supports hCaptcha, the world’s most used blockchain application. hCaptcha’s trustless labor market already spans over 15% of global internet traffic and utilizes HUMAN Protocol technology to publish work requests and escrow task bounties on the blockchain, securely outsourcing them to a global, distributed workforce. 

The Solana Season Hackathon is a competition in which projects will be evaluated by judges on their technological merits without consideration of legal viability. It is open to any use case that involves Solana. Participants in the hackathon will create software solely for purposes of evaluation by judges as part of a competition, and not for commercial deployment or release as part of the hackathon. 

Following its completion, any hackathon projects that are interested in building on Solana full time will have the opportunity to connect with leading venture capitalists, ecosystem funds, and angel investors for seed funding to accelerate the growth of their project. The recent Solana winter hackathon attracted 3,000 builders and received 100 project submissions, with around 30 teams going on to build full market-ready products and raise funds. To learn more, visit the Solana Season Hackathon page.

For the latest updates on HUMAN Protocol, follow us on Twitter or join our community Telegram channel.‍

Legal Disclaimer

The HUMAN Protocol Foundation makes no representation, warranty, or undertaking, express or implied, as to the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or reasonableness of the information contained here. Any assumptions, opinions, and estimations expressed constitute the HUMAN Protocol Foundation’s judgment as of the time of publishing and are subject to change without notice. Any projection contained within the information presented here is based on a number of assumptions, and there can be no guarantee that any projected outcomes will be achieved.