Format & schedule
01Group stage, then the draw. First an open group stage: every valid project is judged and ranked, and the top 32 qualify. Then the draw — those 32 are seeded by their group-stage finish, and every knockout fixture is set from there to the final. From the Round of 32 it's pure head-to-head: 32 to 16 to 8 to 4 to 2 to one. The brief: build AI-native apps, agents, companions, or games using 0G — decentralized AI storage, compute, and chain.
02Every deadline is a cut. The full calendar, registration to crown. One date matters above all: JUL 8 is the last submission deadline anywhere in the competition — after that lock, no more changes.
03Deadlines lock a snapshot. You submit a public repo URL plus a description, and at each round's deadline we freeze a snapshot. That exact version is what gets judged — push after a lock all you want, it counts next round, until the final lock on JUL 8.
04One project, one team. Each team fields one project, and each builder rides with exactly one team — the platform enforces both. Lock in your squad early; mid-tournament roster churn is how teams lose.
JUN 15Registration opens
JUN 24Submission deadline · Group Stage
JUN 27Group Stage results + the draw — top 32 seeded into the knockout
JUL 1Submission deadline · Round of 32
JUL 3Round of 32 winners announced — through to the Round of 16
JUL 5Submission deadline · Round of 16
JUL 7Round of 16 winners announced — through to the Quarter Finals
JUL 8Final submission deadline — locks your build for the rest of the cup
JUL 8–10Community voting · Quarter Finals
JUL 11Quarter Finals winners announced
JUL 12–14Community voting · Semi Finals
JUL 15Semi Finals winners announced
JUL 16–18Community voting · Final
JUL 19Winner announced
Judging & voting
05Judges run the early rounds. From the group stage through the Round of 16, judges score every locked snapshot against the round's rubric — normalized across judges, so a harsh judge can't sink you and a generous one can't carry you. In the group stage that score ranks the field; once the knockout starts, the higher score wins your head-to-head.
06Community takes the quarters. From the quarter finals on, public voting settles each head-to-head — quarters JUL 8–10, semis JUL 12–14, the final JUL 16–18. Votes outside a window don't count. Ship something people want to vote for.
07No judging your own team. A judge never scores a project from a team they belong to. Conflict-of-interest is enforced by the platform, not the honor system.
Advancing
08Improve and resubmit, that's the meta. Between the judged rounds your project is open for upgrades, and your latest snapshot is the one that counts — until the final lock on JUL 8, when one build rides through the quarters, semis, and final. The teams that go deep aren't the ones that started best — they're the ones that shipped the most between cuts.
09Win your match, advance. The group stage is a ranking — the top 32 qualify. After the draw it's pure knockout: each round you're drawn against one specific team, and you only have to outscore that team to go through. Win and you move on to your next fixture; lose and you're out, however strong your build is. The draw is fixed, so you can trace your whole potential route to the final from the very first knockout round.
10A level match is an organizer's call. If a knockout match finishes dead level — the two projects score exactly the same — a hackathon organizer decides who goes through. The call is made on the record and it's final; there's no automatic tiebreak in a head-to-head.
Prizes
11Prizes stack as you climb. $17,000 total, and every tier adds to the last. Crack the Top 8 and $500 per project is locked in, guaranteed.
12The exact ladder. Top 4 adds $1,000, Top 2 adds $2,000, and the champion adds the $5,000 grand prize on top of everything else.
13Champion takes $8,500. $500 + $1,000 + $2,000 + $5,000 — the full stack. Runner-up walks with $3,500, and even a quarter-final exit pays.
Fair play
14Vibe coding is the game. Building with AI tools and prompts isn't cheating — it's the whole point of the tournament. Use every model, agent, and copilot you can get your hands on; just own the result and know how it works.
15How you get cut. Submitting someone else's work as your own, rigging the community vote — bots, bought votes, sock puppets — misrepresenting what your app actually does, or taking your repo private mid-tournament. Any one of them is a disqualification, no rematch.
16Appeals exist, organizers decide. Think a call went wrong? Your team can file an appeal through the platform and organizers review it on the record — but their decisions on scores, head-to-heads, advancement, and the cup are final.
Wondering whether your project can enter at all? That's the project submission criteria.