Within the tech world, the real usefulness of hackathons is a subject of
ongoing debate. Many developers have expressed concerns online that these
events can be exploitative, merely public relations exercises, or that
they take advantage of participants’ ideas and effort without proper
compensation, all under the banner of “community building“.
Looking back, it’s difficult to find a hackathon without some sort of
issue. There was the CodeX event, criticized for
offering underwhelming prizes. Hack the Hill faced controversy over
increased student fees. And back in 2013, Salesforce had a
winner chosen using a pre-made project
.
The latest hackathon to cause uproar among developers is
Coinbase’s
“Onchain Summer Awards”
event, held on September 2nd. The purpose of this competition was to
showcase the most original, engaging, and popular consumer mini-applications
within the Base network.
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Over 500 teams of developers participated, competing for a
$200,000 prize fund. It was said that the winners would be
selected based on on-chain engagement, reflecting actual user interaction.
However, after
the announcement of the results
on October 7th, concerns were quickly raised about the validity of some of
the winning projects.
An X user,
Alanas (@alanonchain), a co-founder of
Ogvio
(an international money transfer service), started looking into the winners.
When examining projects within the
Top New Consumer Apps category, he found something odd about
owatch (second place) and Opi Trade (third place) in
particular.
His analysis revealed
that these projects seemed to be basic, AI-generated websites with very
little, if any, actual functionality.
Further investigation suggested that some of these rudimentary AI-generated
projects were
connected to Coinbase employees. Coinbase is the company
that developed the Base network and organized the hackathon.
Alanas noted that many participants submitted
promising projects with working products. The stark
difference between these projects and the winners highlights the reason for
the community’s outrage.
There is literally no functionality. <…> Doesn’t matter what you
press, none of it is working.
Community members have been mentioning the Base team in replies to Alanas’
post, requesting an explanation, but Base has not yet responded.
Hackathons are frequently presented as amazing opportunities for networking,
developing your idea, and potentially getting funding for your startup.
However, this recent issue with the Base hackathon has further damaged the
reputation of these events, leading many to demand answers from the
organizers.
The Base hackathon controversy follows Coinbase’s plans to list
BNB
read more about it here.