OpenBuild Dev Digest #40 | AI, Bitcoin, Solana Scaling & Web3 Dev Opportunities
Mar 1 - Mar 7
Welcome to OpenBuild Dev Digest #40!
This week we spotlight key hackathons driving AI, Bitcoin, and Web3 innovation, alongside opportunities for developers. We also explore Solana's ambitious scaling roadmap, the Monad EVM testnet, and the RPC landscape. Finally, we highlight significant grants and bounties for securing Web3 infrastructure.
Next Top AI Agent
📅 March 3 – March 31 📍Online 💸 500,000 USD Apply
The Next Top AI Agent 2025, a virtual AI startup competition starting March 3rd, offers over $500K in prizes and grants. Organized by GDA Capital, Alpaca Network, and others, it aims to unite over 4 million developers and tech leaders. Participants will undergo a one-month incubation period with mentorship and expert webinars. The competition encourages innovation at the intersection of AI and blockchain. Multiple tracks are hosted by various organizations, focusing on diverse AI applications. It's a platform for accelerating AI project development and providing resources for market-ready solutions.
BUIDL BATTLE | The Bitcoin Builders Tournament
📅 March 4 – March 17 📍Online 💸 90,000 USD Apply
Buidl Battle is a three-week virtual competition celebrating innovative projects built on Bitcoin. It offers builders a platform to showcase their work, connect with investors, and engage with the Bitcoin community. The competition features two rounds, with winners from each track advancing to compete for the overall championship. Participants can gain momentum, while new talent is welcomed into the ecosystem. Over $90,000 in prizes are available, including funding opportunities and accelerator interviews. The themes include Bitcoin DeFi, the 3.0 Digital Economy, Real World Ordinals & NFT Usage, and Tooling & Infrastructure.
Beyond boundaries with ICP
📅 February 28 – March 28 📍Online 💸 10,000 USD Apply
Beyond boundaries with ICP aims to kickstart a Vietnamese Web3 developer community familiar with ICP, Motoko, and Canisters. It's designed to gather ICP enthusiasts and present opportunities to engage with passionate developers. The event features a meet & greet with key figures, exploring ICP possibilities and fostering interest in the ecosystem. It seeks to establish connections between ICP and local Vietnamese developers/startups, gathering feedback and ideas. Potential collaborations with project representatives and builders will be explored. A total of $10,000 USD worth of rewards are offered, including cash prizes, scholarships, and incubation opportunities.
✍️ Solana's Block Space Revolution: Anza's Engineering Vision 👉Read(EN)
Anza is focused on doubling block space this year on Solana as well as hitting 1M TPS in the future. Remember, Solana is focused on decreasing latency and increasing bandwidth: DoubleZero is doing this, Firedancer is doing this, and the team at Anza is dialed in on this. One of the major bottlenecks technically was that applications and blockbuilders could not build blocks based on shards because of potential slot skip rates that were far too frequent - the percentage of time a slot is skipped due to a delinquent leader node has now dropped below half of a percent.
✍️ Monad Breakdown as testnet releases 👉Read(EN)
With the next parallelized EVM releasing its testnet, Monad and its apps are now being battle tested across the ecosystem. ASXN, most known for their work in the Hyperliquid community, just released their report on it, so let's dive in. The crux of Monad is to attract EVM developer mindshare along with Solana-like performance with a team that is equipped with some of the smartest distributed and high-performance engineers in the world. Hopefully, this next wave of chains can unlock applications that are truly next-gen; the idea of real-time or semi-real-time blockchains is super cool! Monad is a 1 billion gas-per-second chain with 500ms block frequency and single second finality. While Solana's gain in mindshare has been rapid over the past year, the vast majority of capital and developers are using EVM, which can stymie the proliferation of Solana's ecosystem.
✍️ RPC Market Competitive Landscape 👉Read(EN)
RPCs are critical as they are the way we all interact with any blockchain, they basically are the blockchain. Now typically validator nodes are well covered because you can earn an easy 5% on your tokens for clicking a button. Full nodes are a thankless job that don’t get you any incentive (these are what RPCs usually are). If we’re talking about archive nodes, someone better be paying you otherwise you have close to 0 incentive to run one.
💸 Cork Bug Bounty
Maximum Bounty $100,000 👉 Apply
Cork is the protocol for tokenizing the risk of depeg events for stablecoins and liquid (re)staking tokens. It introduces Depeg Swaps, permissionless tokens representing the risk position of a certain asset losing its correlated peg.
💸 Astar Network Bug Bounty
Maximum Bounty $250,000 👉 Apply
Astar Network supports the building of dApps with EVM and WASM smart contracts and offers developers true interoperability with cross-consensus messaging and cross-virtual machines. Rewards are distributed according to the impact of the vulnerability based on the Immunefi Vulnerability Severity Classification System V2.2.
💸 Linea Bug Bounty
Maximum Bounty $100,000 👉 Apply
Linea is a type 2 zero knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM). Rewards are distributed according to the impact of the vulnerability based on the Immunefi Vulnerability Severity Classification System V2.2.
Selected open courses from technical skills to practical tasks, accessible to everyone with no cost!
🌟 ZKP FRI And STARK Open Course
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