Mike Hale Solana Mobile and RadiantsDAO have opened Clock In, a four-week hackathon with $135,000 in prizes for mobile-first Solana apps, with submissions closing October 9, 2026. It is the third Solana Mobile hackathon, and the deliverable is a working Android APK rather than a pitch.
There is one category, and it is mobile. Entries have to be dApps built for the Solana dApp Store, judged on how well they work on a phone. Consumer apps, games, tools, utilities, and experiments all qualify. Solo builders, agent orchestrators, and full teams can all enter.
Every submission needs four things:
Functional Android APK
Public GitHub repository someone else can clone and run
Demo video of three minutes
Pitch deck or short presentation.
The app has to run on a device rather than only in a simulator, and a video nobody can install behind it does not count as a submission.
Android only, and ports score badly
The build rules are narrow on purpose. Your app has to produce a functional APK, integrate the Solana Mobile Stack and Mobile Wallet Adapter, and interact meaningfully with the Solana network. Direct ports of an existing web app and PWA wrappers are called out in the rules as scoring poorly, so a React site in a shell is not a competitive entry here.
Submissions close October 9, 2026 at 1:59 AM CDT. After that timestamp the submission form stops accepting entries.
The full schedule runs a month past the build window:
September 8, 2026. Submissions and registration open.
October 9, 2026, 1:59 AM CDT. Submissions close.
October 10 to November 9, 2026. Judging period.
November 10, 2026. Winners announced.
December 10, 2026. Winners must have published to the Solana dApp Store, 30 calendar days after the announcement.
The December date carries a condition. Every winner also goes through a technical review that includes code verification and follow-up questions, so the prize is not final on announcement day.
The prize pool runs ten deep
Ten teams get paid. The top five take graduated USDC awards, sixth through tenth take $5,000 each, and a separate $10,000 pot in $SKR goes to the best SKR integration.
Placement | Prize |
|---|---|
1st | $30,000 USDC, plus a Seeker device for every team member |
2nd | $25,000 USDC |
3rd | $20,000 USDC |
4th | $15,000 USDC |
5th | $10,000 USDC |
6th to 10th | $5,000 USDC each |
Best SKR integration | $10,000 in $SKR |
The non-cash side matters for a first mobile app with no install base. Top projects get featured placement in the Solana dApp Store, which the organizers put at over 100,000 eyeballs from launch. Winners also get go-to-market guidance and amplification through official Solana Mobile channels, plus a call with Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, for direct feedback on what they built.
How the judges score it
Scoring splits evenly across four criteria, 25% each, and none of them is code quality on its own.
Stickiness and product-market fit. Does the app resonate with the Seeker community, create habits, and drive daily engagement?
User experience. Is it intuitive, polished, and enjoyable to use?
Innovation and X-factor. Is the idea novel, and does it stand out from what already exists?
Presentation and demo quality. Did the team communicate the idea clearly, and does the demo show the core concept?
In practice the judges assess completion from the demo video, technical depth from your GitHub commit history, mobile-optimized UX and use of mobile features, how the app interacts with the Solana network, and the clarity of the vision in the presentation. Commit history is an explicit scoring input, so a repo dumped in one push on the last day scores worse than the same code committed over four weeks.
The panel is seven people.
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder, Solana Labs
Mert, CEO and co-founder, Helius
Chase, founder mentor, Solana Foundation
Akshay, BD and ecosystem, Solana Mobile
Beeman, dev marketing and relations, Solana Mobile
Voynich, security researcher, Ethelsec
A2nkF (Ilias), security researcher, Ethelsec
Two security researchers on a seven-person panel for a consumer app contest is an unusual mix, and it lines up with the code verification step that winners face.
Do you need a Seeker phone to enter?
No. You build and test on a normal computer using the free Android emulator, and the hackathon is open to anyone with a working APK. A Seeker is a prize for the winning team, not an entry requirement.
Seeker is Solana's crypto phone, and its apps live on the Solana dApp Store, which accepts plain Android APK files and welcomes crypto apps that the mainstream stores push back on. Your app never touches anyone's secret keys. It uses the Mobile Wallet Adapter to ask the user's wallet to sign a transaction, and the wallet holds the keys in the Seeker's Seed Vault. That is the part of the stack you have to wire up, and it is also the part the rules require.
Four weeks is short for an Android app that has to be polished enough to win on user experience, which is why the ports get penalized and the commit history gets read. The teams with the best shot here are the ones who already have something running on a phone and spend the month making it feel native rather than starting the project on registration day.