Road to Web3
We kicked off the month of February with Road to Web3—an intense, five-day hackathon & workshops built in conjunction with Polygon. Our goals were simple, onboard the next thousand developers and creatives to Web3, and introduce them to all that Polygon has to offer. 1200+ hackers, 310 new projects, and over $250k+ in prizes later, we’re proud to announce Road to Web3 as our biggest event yet!
Road to Web3 By the Numbers:
- 👩🏽💻 1,200+ Staked Hackers
- 👩🏻🦳 60 Ecosystem Mentors
- 🤝 10 Partner Teams
- 💸 $250,000+ in Prizes
- 🌍 84 Countries
- ⌛️ 20 Timezones
- 🛠 310 Projects Submitted
- 🏆 15 Finalists
Hitting the Tarmac: Day 1
Road to Web3 started off strong, pairing a Web3-focused Summit with the Kick-off event filled with talks and discussions that were designed to give hackers direct access to ecosystem leaders and give their projects a competitive edge. Talented speakers like Sandeep Nailwal, Mihailo Bjelic, Ryan Wyatt, Piers Kicks, Justin Kan, Matthew Ball, and Jonathan Glick covered topics from NFTs to Web3 adoption, and everything in-between.
Our hackers took detailed notes, and threw themselves head-first into their projects, carrying an inspiring level of energy throughout the week. From the onset, you could tell Road to Web3 was going to be a special event.
In fact, 66% of our Road to Web3 Hackers self-designated as “new to Web3,” but what they may have lacked in experience, they made up for with enthusiasm. Our hackers wasted no opportunity to use the resources provided, and our Team Formation and Project Brainstorming sessions saw record attendance. Their excitement set a positive tone for the week that made Road to Web3 feel like its own unique blend of community and competition.
Mid-Week: Rubber Burning
On top of the community-oriented programming, excellent speakers like Austin Griffith, Ivan Liljeqvist, Siraj Raval, Leilani Ledingham, Leibing Guo, Vishwa Mehta, and Sam Flamini joined us to give hackers in-depth insights into the tech they would implement in their projects. Our hackers jumped at the chance to learn from our speakers, and the talks spurred hours of spirited discussions. If you missed any of the Road to Web3 Workshops, all of the content will be available on our Youtube channel.
Finishing Strong
If the flurry of frantic Discord DMs or emails were any indication, our hack participants used every last second to polish their ideas before submission. To come up with an idea, create a project, and complete it to the best of one’s abilities is a stretch — to do so in a handful of days is nothing short of incredible. We’re moved by the level of talent and dedication shown by all our hackathon participants over the last week. If you take away nothing else from this event, know that the future of our ecosystem is strong.
Road to Web3 Finalists 🚀
Our 15 Road to Web3 Finalists were selected from a pool of 310 projects, all built from start to finish in mere days. These finalists represent some of the most promising new projects that have come across our stage, and we expect big things from each of these teams as they grow. Read up on our finalists below, and head over to the project showcase to see more of the incredible projects created during the week.
🍎 NFT to Apple Wallet
NFT to Apple Wallet is a tool that lets owners of NFTs on Polygon add the NFTs as coupons to Apple Wallet.
The Team: @jareksyg, @arturWdowiarski
What we liked: We’ll look back on projects like NFT to Apple Wallet and realize they were the stepping stones to the future Web3 we all dream of. In our perfect world, Web3 runs in the background for most users. NFT To Apple Wallet all but achieves that future, today!
Allocate
The Allocate platform is designed to help you and your family learn how to comfortably use crypto in your everyday life. It’s designed for kids, managed by parents.
The Team: @passandscore, @nathan_tarbert, @Acaldas7
What we liked: Allocate is one of the rare projects that seeks to solve a future-based problem with a realistic solution. If the millions of DeFi tutorial videos out there are any indication, we’re going to need to spend some real time thinking about how we pass this technology on to the next generation of users. Allocation does just that, and achieves success with flying colors.
GM Space
GM Space is a web-based social metaverse with virtual apartment NFTs. Each member of the community will own, design, and build an interactive “home” as a virtual apartment NFT.
The Team: @0x_Edison, @GMSpaceNFT, @kunlao88, @Hazeldou123
What we liked: Contextualizing life in the metaverse to our day-to-day needs IRL will progress the space farther in the long-run than attempting to reimagine every aspect all at once. We’re sure we’ll be hearing more about GM Space in the future.
2sq.xyz
2Sq is a project that creates a homepage for NFT holders to post content and connect with their community.
What was interesting: Great idea, incredibly polished (and super useful). 2sq. brings the NFT space to its Myspace era, and offers NFT collectors another reason to diamond hand their JPEGs.
The Oyster
The Oyster is a designer objects marketplace where each purchase is rewarded by an NFT.
The Team: @Celeste_Oyster
What we liked: The Oyster sets out to tackle the disconnect between the NFT-literate builders of the Web3 world, and the yet-to-discover NFT lovers of Web2. We were really impressed by the steps taken by the Osyter team to define and solve the problems at hand, and we think you’ll agree.
Bounty
Inverted Kickstarter. Fans propose bounties and contribute funds for their favorite creators, with all disbursement in the form of on-chain voting.
The Team: @kumquatexpress, @bountyprotocol, @wobsobby
What’s cool: The entire concept of this project is so uniquely relevant to this space and so valuable to the entire community (Web2 included). Clean idea, clean mechanics, and clean design struck our fancy.
Hashcan
Hashscan is an aggregated web3 user analytics. It focuses on users rather than protocols. It allows to compose user segments from on-chain activity and get event-based analytics for that segment.
The Team: @jackqack, @hashscanxyz, @amijkko
What was interesting: Hashscan set out to build event-based analytics for user segments (which is focused more on users than protocols.) They wanted to make this accessible for non technical users, and they’ve achieved just that!
Crypto Wordle
Play Crypto Wordle puzzle against real people to win real money
The Team: @devjutsu
What you should know: A crypto-twist on a classic (read: hot right now) game! Clean execution, and clean UI (and cool kid) made for a great project.
Ollie Share
A Dapp that enables NFT Creators to distribute revenues to all NFT owners dynamically even when there is a change of NFT ownership.
The Team: @Ollieginal
What Stood Out: Great video and incredible presentation on top of simple (but effective) UI. Very much needed product. Ollie Share will no doubt go on to do great things!
Scribe
A compact transpiler to convert Yul code to the Polygon Miden VM.
The Team: @0xKitsune, @controlcthenv, @marcusbuffett
What we liked: Our judges were near-speechless, which says a lot. Impressive project and even more impressive when you realize the team did this in under five days.
0xcorgis
Decentralized Doulingo + Microsoft Clippy that would make documentation into a play-to-earn game.
The Team: @0xcorgis
What we loved: 0xCorgis is a well-built, impressively-executed, (not to mention striking UI) feel-good project that serves an extremely relevant purpose. We’re excited to see what 0xCorgis will do next!
Polysign
Polysign is an esignature collection platform backed by IPFS and Polygon smart contracts.
The Team: @chrisbcore
What we enjoyed: Decentralized DocuSign with killer UX. Proving that sometimes unattractive problems can have attractive solutions!
Apes 2 Punks
Apes 2 Punks are dynamic, on-chain generated, evolutional NFTs. The Apes are living on the blockchain and evolving as time passes.
The Team: @Apes2Punks
What was cool: To be honest, dynamic NFTs are no walk in the park. Apes2Punks tackled a lot of tough problems under the hood, and didn’t break a sweat when parlaying it all to the user.
Beb.xyz
The cold email of web3. Message someone by their address, even if they do not have a Beb account. To prevent spam, you have to stake some token to message request people who do not follow you. The protocol is separate from the client, and you can deploy your own Beb inbox.
The Team: @nicoInMeatworld, @bebdotxyz
What stood out: Beb is a really well thought out solution to the often overlooked issues that stem from working with CRMs. Every detail went towards improving the user-experiene, and the design didn’t disappoint. We we’re all excited to see this come across our stage.
AR NFT Explorer
Finding interesting NFTs is so boring — let’s spice things up and navigate the web of NFTs in AR!
The Team: @jasperdegens
What we loved: AR NFT Explorer put a lot of fun in a small package, and delivered more than expected. We’re excited to see the growth of AR projects at our events!
Road to Web3 Partners
This event could not have been a success without the help of our friends at Polygon and our incredible partner teams. Though we are constantly iterating our approach to hackathons, our driving motivation has never changed — to onboard thousands of developers to the Ethereum ecosystem by any means necessary. The generous support of our partner teams allows us to offer our events for free to our community members and directly contributes to the next generation of web3 developers. Take a look at some of the key partners for this year’s Road to Web3 below.
Up next… BuildQuest!
Our next event is right around the corner! Join us from March 4th — 16th for BuildQuest, a fully-digital hackathon and workshops focused on decentralized gaming and the metaverse, brought to you by our good friends at Protocol Labs. As always, come prepared to meet new friends, build cool projects, and hack the status quo.
Applications are open, and we hope to see you there. Follow us on twitter to stay in the know about future events, share BuildQuest with friends and potential teammates, and tag us in your project updates. We can’t wait to see what you build next!
