Polygon announces winners of Buidl It 2K21 web3 hackathon

Polygon, one of the most prominent Indian crypto projects, has announced winners of its web3 hackathon, Buidl It 2K21.  

According to the company, the hackathon saw over 5,000 project registrations since it was announced on October 21, 2021. 

A total of 186 final submissions were showcased in the hackathon, from which three top projects were chosen as the winners of Buidl It 2K21.  

The hackathon offered a total prize pool of $100,000 (approx. Rs 75 lakh), from which winners and awardees across multiple categories were chosen. 

The winning project of Polygon Buidl It 2K21 was judged as Quark by Saurabh Gupta. The project showcases a 3D metaverse-like environment where users can visit as solo or in groups, and interact with tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to either purchase or sell them project offers a “game-like environment”, according to Gupta, its creator. 

The second prize of the hackathon was awarded to LunarPay Crypto Payments by Aarya Gadekar, Raghav Saraf and Pranav Doshi.  

The project aims to bring cryptocurrency payments to mainstream websites by easing implementation of a payment gateway, reducing charges associated with crypto payments and maintaining requisite security standards. 

The third prize of the competition went to Devparty, which is a social media and NFT marketplace aimed at developers. On this platform, developers can interact with each other, showcase their projects as NFTs published through posts on the platform, and purchase or sell their products as NFTs. 

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, said, “We hope to attract more developers to join us in creating a fair internet that is for user ownership and privacy.” 

Nailwal’s opinion interestingly comes as questions regarding the decentralisation, ownership and fairness aspects of web3 projects that had been raised by prominent tech personalities such as Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk -- who have hit out at venture capitalists for attempting to centralise and gain control of “decentralised” projects. 

Read more: Dorsey, Musk, others lock horns over how decentralised web3 really is