Earlier this year, BOLT🔩FUN announced itself to the world of bitcoin by hosting the first of its Shock the Web hackathons - it was a week long virtual event to promote, explore, build and design web applications that interact with lightning enabled wallets and browsers.

Over the course of the first two events, we saw over 150 makers take part, 20+ apps built, and $5,600 in bitcoin prizes distributed. A new page about Sign in with bitcoin was added to the bitcoin design guide, which usually focuses on the design of bitcoin wallets. Both events generated a huge amount of interest in lightning design and development, onboarding many new makers into the ecosystem.

However, following the events, most projects and their makers went quiet. These projects, and most hackathon submissions, suffer from such losses of momentum, inspiration, and development. So how do we solve this level of fluctuating interest and generate a higher level of consistency in building lightning products? Well, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve been grappling with this question for a while, and we now believe that we’ve discovered a fun solution. Tournaments!

What are tournaments?

Tournaments are a longer format, accelerator style competition for a global audience of makers to get hands-on experience building with bitcoin and lightning. Instead of asking participants to cram their hacking workload into a single weekend or evening, we’re opening up the event’s start and end dates in order to accommodate makers who have busier schedules. This will also give makers more time to explore different ideas and concepts, recruit and form teams, and to build one or multiple projects over the course of the tournament.

Also, in order to encourage consistent interest, quality, transparency, and to increase the developmental momentum of projects, we’ll be rewarding makers who provide the rest of the community with development and design updates, activity, and reporting as they #BuildInPublic.

Legends of Lightning ⚡️

A tournament for makers to experiment with lightning, Oct 12th - Dec 7th.

Welcome to Legends of Lightning ⚡️, a new online global tournament for makers to learn, connect, collaborate, and build innovative applications and tools with bitcoin and lightning. From the 12th October - 28th November makers can accelerate their bitcoin projects through mentorship in design, development, and lightning integration. Forming teams to hack on new or existing projects, makers can show off their progress, activity, and updates as they #BuildInPublic - competing for up to ~$60,000 (3 BTC) in prizes. 

BOLT🔩FUN has partnered with a number of meetups, hackathons, and workshops to provide participants the opportunity to brainstorm, design, build, and accelerate their projects over the course of the tournament. Whether your project is an open-source public good, or a business that you’re looking to build, we want to encourage their longevity and continued development of projects. We’ve partnered up with funding specialists, including VCs firms like Fulgur Ventures, or grant platforms like Geyser and Open Sats to help you figure out your next steps.

At the end of the tournament, our judges will evaluate  all projects entered. The top entries from our two tracks (Global Adoption and Building for Africa) will be selected for the semi-finals, where they will have the chance to refine and pitch their projects on demo day (6th December). We will then announce the individual track winners and grand champions! Have you got what it takes to be the legend of lightning?

How do project submissions and prizes work?

Project entries for the Legends of Lightning tournament will open on October 13th, and close on November 24th. This will be done via the Legends of Lightning tournament portal. In order to register for the event and enter their project, makers must first create their BOLT🔩FUN profile and then add their project to our directory (if they haven't done so already). Once ready, makers can enter their project into the Legends of Lightning ⚡️ tournament and compete for loads of awesome prizes!

Selecting your project track 🛣

When entering their projects, makers will be asked to select a specific project track. Tracks help makers focus their projects over the course of the event, and to solve crucial challenges in bitcoin adoption either online or in specific regions of the world. For each track, there will be 4 prizes available:

• 🥇1st place: $5k

• 🥈2nd place: $2.5k

• 🥉3rd place: $1.5k

• 🎨Best design: $1k

The Legends of Lightning tracks available are…

i). Global Adoption Track 🧡

We will aim our first prize track at solving issues surrounding the global adoption of bitcoin - focusing on product market fit and scalability. With this track, makers can let their imaginations run wild with either lightning or on-chain technology, as well as driving adoption either via online or locally based solutions.

ii). Building for Africa Track 🌍

With an estimated population of ~1.4bn inhabitants, Africa has poised itself as ripe for bitcoin adoption. In partnership with the African Bitcoin Conference 22, this track seeks to encourage makers to build solutions that solve local challenges & increase bitcoin adoption in Africa.

Grand Champion, a.k.a "The Legend" 🏆

Our grand champion, a.k.a. “The Legend” will be the best in show, la crème de la crème. Every project entered into the Legends of Lightning tournament will be automatically registered for this award, no matter what track they choose. The prize for this will be an eye-watering 1 BTC (~$20k)!

• 🏆 Grand Champion: 1 BTC

• 🥈Runners Up x2: 0.5 BTC

Think you've got what it takes?

How will projects be judged?

Each track will have a dedicated panel of judges who will evaluate projects on several elements, including: product market fit, scalability, innovation, design, execution, and more.

On the 28th November, each judging panel will announce a shortlist of semi-finalists from their respective track. We will invite these finalists to pitch their projects live on demo day (6th December), with the winners announced the following day. Our grand champion, a.k.a. The Legend will also be plucked from this group of finalists across all tracks, along with two runners up.

Accelerate your project at one of these events 🏎

Bitcoin Designathon (12th - 23rd Oct)

The folks from the Bitcoin Design Community are hosting a design only hackathon for makers to explore awesome ideas, no-code prototyping, wicked and wacky designs, and more.

Tab Conf 22 (12th - 15th Oct)

TABConf is The Atlanta Bitcoin Conference — an event for building communities, providing education, and supporting developers. The first day of the event will be Builder Day, a friendly place to learn how to contribute to open-source projects in bitcoin.

Bitcoin Amsterdam (12th - 14th Oct)

Meet up with makers in Amsterdam for 3 days of learning, teaching and inspiring the Bitcoin community.

Pleb TLV (23rd Oct)

Join like-minded plebs in Tel Aviv, Israel, for a day of in person hacking and learning.

Lugano's Plan B (28th Oct - 4th Nov)

Accelerate your project in Lugano - attend masterclasses on Bitcoin and Lightning, and also get the big picture from speakers all over the world talking about bitcoin and decentralized technology.

Lightning Halloween (30th Oct - 4th Nov)

Get together for a networking and educational event with interesting speakers. Showcase your projects or code by the beach at this lightning network developer community event in Tuscany.

Adopting Bitcoin 22' (15th - 17th Nov)

Bitcoiners from across the globe will once again be meeting up in El Salvador on November 15-17 to work on the shared mission of bitcoin adoption.

Want to take part?

Create your maker profile 👾

To be part of the Tournament, you will need to create a profile.. To sign in to BOLT🔩FUN you'll need to have a lightning wallet which supports LNURL-Auth. Find out more here.

Register for the tournament ✅

Now that you have a maker profile you can register for Legends of Lightning ⚡! The tournament kicks off on 12th October when project entries open; but until then, go fill out your profile, connect with others, form teams, and write about ideas you're interested in exploring.

Write an introduction story ✍️

Once you've created and filled out your profile, go to the community and click "Write a Story" and title it "Introduction: Your name". Then tell us a bit about your background, your general availability during the event, and the kinds of things you'd like to work on.

Join us in Discord 💬

If you would like to stay up to date with news and updates about Legends of Lightning ⚡, join our Discord and introduce yourself to the maker community!