TechFlow news, October 20 — According to Cryptopolitan, Coinbase's Base network "Onchain Summer Awards" hackathon has come under scrutiny for allegedly awarding prizes to fake applications linked to its employees.
The competition, held last month, attracted over 500 development teams and offered a total prize pool of $200,000. However, after the results were announced on October 7, developers raised concerns about irregularities in the winning projects. Alanas, co-founder of Ogvio, found that the second-place project owatch and third-place project Opi Trade appeared to be AI-generated basic websites lacking functional capabilities.
More alarmingly, investigations revealed connections between these fake projects and Coinbase employees. Numerous legitimate teams with fully operational products reportedly lost to these "shell" projects. Angry developers have taken to social media demanding explanations from the Base team, but the organizers have yet to respond to the allegations.
