Which Radar Hackathon Winner Will Be Solana’s Next Killer App?

Solana has been the crypto industry’s success story in 2024, but the network’s builders are hard at work ensuring that Solana retains its newfound dominance for years to come.

Powered by Colosseum, the Radar Hackathon witnessed record numbers of submissions. With 1,359 submissions from projects across every sector, Radar was the largest Hackathon in Solana history.

Amidst dozens of winners, which emerging Solana projects are worth keeping an eye on?

Radar Hackathon Standouts

Reflect, a DeFi protocol, was crowned the event’s Grand Champion and took home the $50,000 prize to support its continued development. Leveraging yield generated from LSTs (Liquid Staking Tokens), Reflect introduces Reflected Digital Currencies, or RDCs, to the Solana Ecosystem.

Reflect’s RDCs aim to provide a greater variety of stablecoins, including the Hong Kong Dollar and UAE Dirham. Combining delta-neutral strategies and LST yield, Reflect expects to deliver higher yield generation than existing DeFi solutions.

While the platform is still in its early stages, Reflect has enormous potential. Reflect has been compared to Ethereum’s Ethena protocol, which currently boasts over $3B in TVL (Total Value Locked) and offers around 12% APY on USDC yield.

Stepping away from DeFi, the Radar Hackathon highlighted dozens of emerging consumer apps that aim to onboard the masses. Winning the Consumer Apps track, PreGame is an online sportsbetting platform with a unique twist.

Leveraging Solana Blinks and Actions, PreGame introduces a social aspect to onchain Sports Bets. Users can set their own odds and issue a challenge across social media, enabling them to bet against anyone. 

Another standout consumer app, trenches.top aims to tokenize memecoin reputation and performance, adding a layer of responsibility to Solana’s thriving meme economy.

At an infrastructure level, the top prize went to txtx, a team developing smart contract runbooks.

Txtx aims to streamline the developer experience, as evidenced by an October demo wherein txtx was used to deploy contracts on both Solana and Eclipse, an SVM Layer-2, simultaneously.

Solana’s flourishing DePIN sector will soon be reinforced by a wealth of progressive Radar Hackathon projects. Taking the top spot in the DePIN track, SvachSakthi will leverage Solana to build out an off-grid network for promoting renewable energy.

Solana is for the Builders

Contrary to popular belief, one of the biggest indicators of Solana’s future growth and potential isn’t seen in price charts. With over 10,000 participants from 120+ countries, the Radar Hackathon was the biggest hackathon event in Solana history.

Remarkably, that is also the case for every Solana hackathon ever, barring the Riptide event in February 2022. Solana’s developer scene is consistently growing year after year, meaning the number of meaningful applications on the network is expected to continue to grow.

This sentiment was echoed by dYdX Foundation CEO Charles d’Haussy, who praised Solana’s builder culture at Breakpoint 2024.

The Radar Hackathon proved that Solana’s explosive growth goes beyond what people see in the charts. The event shone the spotlight on thousands of emerging projects across various sectors, all united by their combined belief that Solana offers the best environment for building the applications and protocols of the future.

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