Ten thousand BUIDLs
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Ten thousand BUIDLs
Connecting hackers worldwide to solve important and fascinating problems.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsA month ago, Eric told me that the number of 'BUIDLs' registered on DoraHacks' platform had surpassed ten thousand.
You might not be familiar with the term 'BUIDL'. On DoraHacks' platform, each 'BUIDL' represents an early-stage startup team. They come to DoraHacks to build a new product aimed at solving an interesting problem. They participate in one or more hackathons, win prizes, and receive ecosystem grants and funding. They can also use the platform to share major project updates, introduce team members, and often evolve their projects into independent startups.
To be honest, it feels surreal.
I remember joining DoraHacks in 2018. In San Francisco, I organized the first hackathon in the U.S. under my responsibility. It was the last weekend of April, held at a co-working space in the Mission District. Back then, we still used Eventbrite for developer registration forms. Huobi was the title sponsor of our global tour. The winning team built a monitoring system for inactive Bitcoin addresses. We had 300 developers registered, but only 40 showed up in person. I felt deeply discouraged—back in DoraHacks' early days, attracting developers to our hackathons was no easy task.
In 2018, all DoraHacks hackathons were offline. That year, we traveled to 8 countries and 15 cities worldwide, hosting 31 hackathons. The ones I remember most vividly include the event in Boston we co-organized with Erick Pinos, a core contributor of MIT Bitcoin Club, where Harvard and MIT students competed and meditated together late into the night; in Bangalore, India, where Anurag Arjun, one of Polygon's (then Matic Network) founders, mentored over two hundred developers; and in San Jose, where the founding team of Injective participated as hackers.
I remember getting to know every participant personally. The day before each event, we'd call them to go over important details. I knew everyone’s name, their day jobs, and why they loved attending hackathons.
From my colleagues at DoraHacks, I learned how important food is at hackathons. In Seoul, we ate fried chicken together. In Boston, it was delicious Chinese food. In Bangalore, we enjoyed vegetarian meals: tofu curry and naan. We also invited local bands to perform during hackathons—developers always loved it.
This was all before the DeFi summer.
In 2019, we hosted China's largest hackathon in history: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Microsoft, Bosch, Binance, and even Monster Energy supported the event. Over five hundred developers came from across the country to Chaoyang District, creating a milestone in China's hacker movement.
An interesting trend we observed that year was Polkadot's rising popularity. Polkadot's first wave of ecosystem projects—including Phala, Acala, and Darwinia—were born that year. A year later, over thirty Polkadot/Kusama parachain projects emerged, many originating from the DoraHacks community.
In 2020, most of today's well-known public blockchains were launched and began building ecosystems, including Solana, Avalanche, Near, and Algorand. In the second half of 2020, we hosted the first-ever hackathon in BNB Chain's history. The event brought together top teams like dForce and DeBank. Since then, BNB Chain has grown into one of the most active public chains, helping millions escape broken national financial systems and providing infrastructure for leading on-chain games. To this day, DoraHacks continues to collaborate closely with BNB Chain on various developer incentive programs.
In 2020, DoraHacks.io, our hackathon platform, officially launched. Before the pandemic, 100% of our hackathons were in-person. Now, 90% are online. Developers from Europe, India, Southeast Asia, and even Alaska can now join the same event and compete for prizes.
Since 2020, DoraHacks has become a co-host and preferred platform for flagship global hackathons across multiple ecosystems, including Polygon and Solana.
I remember on New Year's Day 2021, I made the first call to Solana's Chris to kick off our collaboration. Chris is among the most hardworking partners we’ve ever met—he’d often reply to messages at 3 a.m., deep in work. Since then, Solana has become one of our closest partners. Together, we've co-hosted ten Solana hackathons and developer incentive programs. Solana’s focused investment in hackathons and strong support for hackathon-born projects is, in my view, one of the key drivers behind its thriving ecosystem. In May 2021, during a quarterly Solana hackathon, Solend was born. Solend’s founder Rooter helped us conduct Sybil attack reviews for our first quadratic funding round on Solana. By the end of 2021, StepN participated in the Solana Ignition hackathon. Yawn publicly debuted StepN’s gameplay model and sneaker NFT design, carefully producing their entry video. Two other highly dedicated teams, Scallop and Cetus, have since grown into two of the most important DeFi projects in the Sui ecosystem.
Developer enthusiasm for Ethereum has never waned. Since 2015, developers within the Dora community have voluntarily studied—and even taught—Solidity at hackathons. To this day, EVM developers still make up a significant portion of the Dora community. In March 2021, we hosted ETH Beijing Hackathon. The final demo day resembled YC's Super Demo Day, with over ten renowned investors attending in person to scout the next unicorn. Indeed, that hackathon gave rise to a 2021 unicorn startup.
Another fun story from that year: after hosting a hackathon in Austin, the Dora team drove from Austin to Las Vegas. Along the way, we stopped in Denver, where ETHDenver founders John Paller and Justin Moskovitz warmly invited us to John’s home to make pizzas together. A year later, we became co-hosts of ETHDenver, and the ETHDenver community experienced DoraHacks’ MACI for the first time.
That same year, Binance Labs made a strategic investment in DoraHacks, further advancing our multi-chain strategy. We believe ecosystems that prioritize developer relations and community building will ultimately thrive. Klaytn (now Kaia), Avalanche, OpenSea, Safe, TON, and others began collaborating closely with us.
In 2022, after witnessing the successes and failures of countless hackathon-born startups, we decided to explore a sustainable way to fund early-stage teams. We created Public Goods Staking—running validator nodes within our closely partnered ecosystems and using node rewards to fund developers. Aptos and Injective were the first two ecosystems to adopt Public Goods Staking. Projects like Econia, MSafe, Townesquare, KYD Labs, Gui Inu, Hydro, Neptune, Black Panther, and Talis have since grown from the DoraHacks community into core projects on Aptos and Injective.
We believe a multi-chain and appchain future is essential to preserving freedom in crypto and Web3, and Cosmos SDK is the foundational infrastructure for all appchains. Therefore, starting in 2023, we committed to supporting the development of public goods infrastructure in Cosmos. I remember attending the Cosmos workshop in New York hosted by Evmos, where Cosmos core contributor Zaki passionately shared his vision for ATOM 2.0 and his thoughts on community governance. Since then, we’ve become the biggest advocates of the appchain narrative. Whether traditional internet applications entering Web3 or leading Web3 apps expanding their token utility, there’s strong incentive to launch their own chains. Launching a chain on Cosmos is simple—Cosmos SDK enables one-click chain deployment, CosmWasm developed by Confio allows rapid smart contract environment setup, and IBC enables efficient inter-chain communication and interoperability.
In 2023, we co-hosted most of the major Cosmos hackathons, including HackWasm with Confio in Berlin, AEZ Hackathon with AADAO, and HackMos with CryptoCito in Istanbul. We launched Dora Ventures II, a strategic fund focused on investing in appchain projects. Over the past two years, we’ve built our own appchain portfolio, including Osmosis, dYdX, Rome Protocol, Abstract, FortyTwo, and more.
Since 2024, DoraHacks has become the infrastructure and partner of choice for flagship global hackathons across most major ecosystems, including Celestia, Aptos, Cosmos, Injective, Taiko, EigenLayer, TON, BNB Chain, Akash, Scroll, and others. As the multi-chain ecosystem flourishes, more resources are available to startup teams, and DoraHacks’ developer community continues to grow rapidly. We’ve hosted nearly a thousand technical workshops and online startup showcases, establishing DoraHacks as the go-to hackathon platform for the global Web3 community—ETH Vietnam, ETH Bucharest, Funding The Commons, LambdaClass, Superteam. We’ve never stopped supporting communities in cutting-edge tech fields, such as Unitary Fund and Yale Quantum Institute in quantum computing, spreading the hacker spirit to more advanced technologies and corners of the world.
In January 2024, DoraHacks’ platform hosted five thousand BUIDLs. By July 2024, that number reached ten thousand. The DoraHacks hacker movement is growing rapidly.
We believe that in the past, innovation happened in Silicon Valley, and YC was the best incubator. Today, innovation happens at DoraHacks, and our venture community is the accelerator of the future.
Among these ten thousand projects are StepN, one of the most fascinating games in crypto history; EVAA Protocol, the most successful lending team on TON; Rome Protocol, the first decentralized sequencer in the Solana ecosystem; SpaceID, the most successful decentralized identity team on BNB Chain; YakiHonne, a free speech project based on Nostr; and KYD Labs, a decentralized ticketing infrastructure on Aptos pushing Web3 toward true mass adoption.
Behind these ten thousand projects are 160,000 active global developers—the most creative hackers striving to solve the most important problems they care about. Together, these 160,000 developers and founders have created one of the largest and most significant hacker movements in the world.
This November, DoraHacks will turn ten. For us, the journey of building DoraHacks has been profoundly meaningful, and the road ahead is full of opportunity.
We are launching a new strategic investment fund dedicated to hackathon-born projects. We’re calling it the “Marketplace Fund.” As institutions and capital increasingly concentrate on a select few teams, we will prioritize strong early support for grassroots hackathon teams—providing their first investment and crucial assistance at the stages they need it most.
We will deepen collaboration with ecosystems committed to providing developers with the best possible resources.
We remain forever grateful to all developers, startup teams, and partners who have supported us and believed in our mission and vision—one that hasn’t changed in ten years:
“Connect hackers around the world to solve important and fascinating problems.”
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@daongok
