The Aleph Hackathon was born during the first pop-up city, in August 2024: an intensive, multi-day event where builders, founders, developers and students gather to build projects across the ecosystem's most relevant verticals. The first edition brought together more than 300 in-person hackers from 20 countries, all at Aleph Hub.
It was nearly 40 uninterrupted hours of development. Twelve leading companies presented challenges to the participants, with prizes adding up to more than 100 thousand dollars: Protocol Labs, ZKsync, Avalanche, Worldcoin, Polygon, Circle, Solana, Arbitrum, Aligned, Chainlink, Filecoin Foundation and GoPlus. The jury gathered leading figures of the global ecosystem, among them Juan Benet (Protocol Labs), Manuel Aráoz (OpenZeppelin) and Mariano Conti.
A total of 55 projects were submitted. There were financial products designed to bring more users to blockchain, tools to decentralize scientific research, tokenization of real-world assets, proposals to improve Web3 legislation, and credit products to connect Latin America's population with the financial system.
Three projects reached the final: TornadoCodes, ValidAR and Certo. Beyond the prize money, all three gained access to grants, consulting and acceleration programs to scale their work.
Since that first edition, the hackathon has repeated at every Aleph. The story of the pop-up where it was born is in Aleph, Ciudad de Crecimiento.