Solana Sandstorm Hackathon Opens with $212k in Prizes

Solana Sandstorm is a virtual hackathon organized by LamportDAO and Helius Labs from Jan 13 – 23, 2023 with 40 tracks and prizes totaling $212k USDC.

The Solana Sandstorm hackathon is an opportunity for Solana developers to rally  together and start the New Year off with positive momentum.

Saying the end of 2022 was a brutal time for Solana would be an understatement. With negative press around the failure of FTX the narrative was Solana was a dying, if not already dead, platform. 

So why on earth would anyone in their right mind host a large-scale community hackathon?

After all, Solana was down to just 75 developers, right? 

A funny thing about Solana’s death… 

You wouldn’t know it from the twitter conversations from the Solana community. Yeah, FTX was bad, but it didn’t change the fundamental value proposition of building a dApp on Solana. 

Transaction speeds didn’t change. 
Transaction costs didn’t skyrocket. 
Builders kept building. 

Solana is anything but dead and continues moving forward in 2023 with updates like QUIC, versioned transactions, Token2022, QoS, Firedancer client, priority fees, and the Solana Saga mobile phone.

That’s why LamportDAO and Helius labs have teamed up to host the Solana Sandstorm hackathon. 

LamportDAO is a community and educational resource for Solana developers. The mission of LamportDAO is to:

• Onboard and train developers into the Solana ecosystem and give them the resources to succeed.
• Be the hub where Solana developers come to lounge.
• Build cool (open-source) shit for the Solana ecosystem.
• Encourage developers to be transparent in everything, whether open-sourcing your code or documenting your coding tutorials.

Helius is a developer platform for building on Solana that offers on-chain data with powerful APIs, webhooks, and RPCs.

The Solana Sandstorm hackathon has a wide range of tracks to develop for. Everything from local dev tooling and defi, to app specific tracks from sponsors like Phantom and Dialect. 

There’s even a $BONK specific track with 25B in $BONK up for grabs.

There is no registration required to participate. Submissions will be via a Discord Forum post that will open and teams can apply for multiple tracks at the same time. 

It is strongly encouraged that developers make their code open source. While it’s not a requirement, closed-source projects may not be eligible for some of the bonus prizes and incentives. 

Make sure to check the requirements for each track and sponsor when making the decision to open source your entry or not.

Solana Sandstorm Hackathon