Mike Hale The Solana Foundation launched Hackathons Solana, a platform where anyone can propose a hackathon theme, the community votes on it, and sponsors fund the prizes in onchain USDC escrow.
The first event, Stocklana, is live with $126,000 across a main track and five sponsor bounties, and submissions close September 25. The Foundation still runs the main prize pool, but it no longer decides what the next hackathon is about.
Colosseum has run Solana's flagship hackathons since 2024, starting with Renaissance that spring, and it runs two a year on dates it says it will hold through 2027, five weeks each, with potential accelerator seats for the winners. Hackathons Solana runs alongside that schedule as a smaller and continuous event, where the theme comes from the community and the prize money comes from whoever wants to put it up.
How a hackathon gets made on the platform
A hackathon on Hackathons Solana has to clear four steps before it opens, and the community controls three of them. The Foundation documents the whole sequence on its how it works page.
Propose a theme. Anyone submits a theme describing what builders should make and why it matters to Solana. Proposals get reviewed before they go to a vote.
Vote. Community voting needs no wallet and no token. You click. A theme that clears the voting threshold moves to the funding stage.
Sponsor a bounty track. Approved sponsors create bounty tracks, each one a separate prize with its own brief, and deposit the USDC into onchain escrow. The examples the Foundation gives are the familiar ones, best UI/UX, most innovative, best use of an API, at around $10,000 each.
Launch at roughly $50k. Once deposited bounties total about $50,000, an admin opens the hackathon. Builders get 14 days from launch to the submission deadline.
Only one hackathon runs at a time. The Foundation would rather run one event everybody is in than four half-full ones.
Sponsor bounties change how much one project can win. Every hackathon has a single main track funded by the Foundation, and around it sits any number of bounty tracks put up by individual teams. A bounty is that sponsor's own prize, aimed at whatever it wants to see built, usually its own API, SDK, or protocol. The sponsor writes the brief, deposits the USDC before the track opens, and supplies the judges who evaluate it. A team that wins a bounty gets paid out of escrow even if the sponsor walks away before judging ends.
Submission takes a GitHub repo, a live demo, a pitch video, or some combination, plus your team. You pick up to three sponsor tracks to compete in alongside the main track, so one project can chase four prizes at once with no extra entry. Projects stay private until judging ends.
Two judging passes then run in parallel. Foundation judges review every submission for the main track, and sponsor judges see only their own track's entries and recommend winners that the sponsor signs off on. Main track prizes get paid by the Foundation, and bounty prizes release from escrow straight to the winning team's wallet. Afterward you can make your project public in the showcase, and winners are published there either way.
The leaderboard only pays you back if you enter more than once. Points land when finalized results record a main-track placement or a sponsor bounty win, and they carry from hackathon to hackathon. It sits at zero ranked builders right now because no hackathon has finished yet.
None of this displaces the flagship events. A Colosseum hackathon is a longer, richer competition that ends in an accelerator interview, and the platform is aimed at the months in between.
Colosseum flagship | Hackathons Solana | |
|---|---|---|
Cadence | Twice a year, fixed dates | Continuous, one at a time |
2026 dates | April 6 to May 11, September 28 to November 2 | Rolling, whenever escrow fills |
Build window | Five weeks | 14 days |
Theme chosen by | Colosseum with the Foundation | Community proposal and vote |
Prize money from | Foundation budget | Sponsor USDC in onchain escrow |
Prize for winning | Possible accelerator seat and seed funding | Cash payout and leaderboard points |
Stocklana is the first hackathon to run on it
Stocklana, the launch hackathon, opened with a flat $100,000 from the Foundation and no bounty tracks at all, so for its first week builders registered and submitted through the platform while the escrow sat empty. Five ecosystem teams then came in mid-event with tracks of their own.
PreStocks: $10,000, split $5k / $3k / $2k
Tessera: $6,000
Clawpump: $5,000, split $3k / $1.5k / $500
Meteora: $5,000 for best use of Meteora DBC
Pyth Network: three months of Pyth Pro access, no cash
That is $26,000 in sponsor money deposited after the hackathon had already opened, and the first time any USDC has moved through the escrow on a live event. The deadline moved with it, from the original September 18 out to September 25.
Submissions close Friday, September 25, 2026 at 4:00 pm ET. After that the form stops accepting projects. Judging runs through October 2.
A project does not have to stop there either. Colosseum's Crypto World's Fair is already running to October 12 with $840,000 in prizes and $2.5 million in seed funding attached, and its fall Solana hackathon opens September 28, three days after Stocklana closes.
Four more hackathons are waiting on sponsor money
Three of the four hackathons lined up behind Stocklana have raised nothing at all.
Hackathon | Prize pool | Funding status | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
$126,000 | Fully funded, live | Stocks on Solana | |
$100,000 | Scheduled, seeking sponsors | Perpetuals and prediction markets | |
$0 of $50,000 | Seeking sponsors | AI agents settling payments, spending controls, merchant tooling | |
$0 of $50,000 | Seeking sponsors | Issuance rails, secondary markets, RWA yield | |
$0 of $50,000 | Seeking sponsors | Mobile-first apps with invisible wallets |
Perps and Prediction Markets is the closest to launching. It has a $100,000 pool structured at $50k / $30k / $20k, a deadline of October 2, and one sponsor on board in OrbitFlare, which is offering its $49-a-month developer RPC plan free for a week to entrants. It opens when sponsors fill the escrow.
The platform works for builders already. One URL, one registration, the tracks and deadlines in the open, and the prize money sitting in escrow where you can go look at it. Stocklana had 593 registrations and 81 projects submitted by September 16, its first five days.
Whether the rest of the calendar happens is up to sponsors. Five teams bought a bounty track at Stocklana for $5,000 to $10,000 each, short of the $50,000 it takes to open a hackathon. Three of the queued events still sit at zero. If those escrows fill, Solana gets a hackathon every month.