<<H<ACKER MANUAL

Find a Team/Hacker/Idea

Are you missing a team, a hacker, an idea? Or you have an idea that can be implemented during the hackathon? Find a match on Github or join the Hacker Matchmaking session on Friday after the opening ceremony.

Connect and Chat

The only official communication channel is the ETHBerlin Matrix space. Use it to connect with hackers and mentors, and to get updates from the organizers throughout the hackathon: #ethberlin:dod.ngo

Food and Drinks

ETHBerlin will cover all meals and drinks for the entire Hackathon, and conference coffee breaks. There will be vegan and vegetarian options provided. Just come with an open mind, a knowledge-thirsty brain and enthusiasm. Meal and snack times will be on the program.

Hacking and Rules

Hacker teams are made up of maximum of 5 people. You can find some rules and resources useful while you are hacking here.

Hacking Rules

• You must be at ETHBerlin to work on a project for submission
• Your hack must be related to decentralization, cryptography, or privacy
• You can plan ahead of time, but all code for your project has to be written during the event
• You cannot use another team's source code
• The decision of judges is final for determining prizes and awards
• Please comply with all instructions from ETHBerlin organizers
• (Added this) Your project cannot be focused on distributing the prize to event participants
• Please respect our Code of Conduct!

Minimum requirements to be judged

• A link to the open-source code must be provided
• A short presentation file must describe your project
• If applicable, the contract address(es) of your deployed demo must be provided, either on a testnet of your choice or mainnet of a platform of choice.

Prizes and Bounties

Track Awards

• Defensive Tooling: This track is the right choice for you if you want to hack on tools that enhance security and privacy. It's about building projects that prioritize defense, decentralization, and resilience to create a more secure and freer world.
  Think topics like encryption, counter-surveillance, identity protection, anonymity, anti-identity, security, local data handling, and anything that armors the individual against intrusive data collection practices.
• Freedom to Transact: This track is for you if you want to ensure that anyone, anywhere, anytime can facilitate unrestricted transactions.
  We're looking for projects that enable people to access and send money, or value, across borders without restrictions, promoting financial inclusion. This track is for those who want to hack on peer-to-peer solutions, build censorship-resistant applications, and ensure that transactions can be private and secure.
• Social Technologies: This track is all about platforms and tools that enable informed and collective decision-making, transparent governance, and collaboration and coordination among decentralized communities.
  If you want to build credibly neutral systems for voting, governance, and social interaction, and systems that counter disproportionate influence of centralized powers then this track is for you and your team. Other ideas you could hack on are consensus-finding algorithms, sybil resistance, and decentralized social reputation.
• Infrastructure: The backbone of the revolution. This track is dedicated to the architects and builders laying down the underlying infrastructures that robust distributed public goods need to run efficiently and reliably.
  Projects could include protocol specification and implementations, networking, developer tools, and hardware.

Excellence Awards

• Best Smart Contracts: Outstanding smart contract code quality and documentation, security and gas-optimization.
• Best Social Impact: Outstanding positive impact on underserved communities and society as a whole.
• Best User Experience: Outstanding user experience that does not sacrifice on security, privacy or self-custody.

The Meta Award

The Hacker's Choice Award

??? Getting Help from Mentors

Ooops! You had an amazing idea, but now you are stuck? No worries, our experienced mentors will help you as best as they can. And here's how to get in touch:

• Reach all of our mentors via the simple ticket system, HELPq: ask.ethberlin.ooo
• Discuss your issues in the Ask-our-mentors channel.
• Spot our mentors at the venue! They are wearing yellow t-shirts and mentor buttons!

??? Submissions

You have to register and create your project at ethberlin.devfolio.co for submission before Sunday, 11am.

Make sure to provide a link to your open-source repository, a video or a demo, and if applicable, the contract address(es) of your deployed application, either on a testnet of your choice or mainnet of a platform of choice.

All submitted projects will be eligible for the main hackathon prize. In addition, you have to select a category (track), which you would like to pitch for, and up to two meta awards.

Don't miss the deadline! Sunday 11am!

??? Judging

You can find the prizes and bounties in the above section.

This year, we will use a different platform for your submissions. We decided not to use devpost for this edition, since they are sadly excluding participation from some regions by default. This discriminatory and overly compliant behavior is kind of a "no" for us, so instead we shall be collaborating with the much more decentralised crew at Devfolio.

Each team will have one person pitch their project for 3 minutes followed by a 2 minutes Q&A session. The pitch will be in front of three judges each with different areas of exptertise. The presenter should bring their laptop and use it for the pitch. All judging will take place on the second floor. A schedule will be shared after 11:30 Sunday. Please be there at least 5 minutes before your allocated timeslot.

We aim to continuously improve the process. This is why this year we will have three different approaches to judging:

• "Traditional judging": Judges watch live pitches & Judges check submissions async digitally
• Community judging powered by quadratic voting

Overall, we also want to increase the transparency of the judging. This is why all judge voting sheets will be made publicly available after the winning ceremony.

Judging will take place on Sunday 18th September and the judges will be reviewing project submissions, and watching pitches, from the 11am deadline until just before the closing ceremony. Note: we will also be shuffling the judging teams halfway through just to make sure there is no relative bias.

The track specific judges will watch live pitches, while the judges allocated to the meta awards will review the submissions digitally. There will be 24 track judges (8 groups of three), and each group will include one technical person, one product/wildcard and one business/VC judge.

As mentioned above, the meta specific judges will review submissions digitally and there will be two pairs of judges per meta award.

The judges will be reviewing each submission with the following criteria in mind.

• Technicality: How hard was it to build this and how does the quality of the codebase compare?
• Originality: Is this something completely new or are there already projects with grant funding working on a similar scope?
• Practicality: How would this submission survive in the real world, outside of the crypto community? Or, if the project were to be specifically targeted to the crypto community, how correctly targeted is it?
• WOW Factor: What else is there about the submission? Has this project and/or team defied expectations, based on timing, efforts, etc.?