Polkadot x EasyA Harvard Hackathon Finalists!

Date of Report: August 2024

Allocation Requested: $370,000 (retroactive funding for Milestone 2, as agreed in our EasyA #180DaysOfPolkadot discussion post and approved in our masterplan referendum with a huge 88% AYE vote).

Short Description:

GM Polkadot family!

By now you’ve probably already heard about #180DaysOfPolkadot, which took the Web3 developer community by storm. We worked day and night to make this dream a reality, and couldn’t be prouder at having finally pulled it off. In our work across Web3, EasyA alumni have been funded by top VCs like a16z, YC, Founders Fund and many more. We’ve now laid the foundations to recreate this success in the Polkadot ecosystem.

This is our proposed referendum for successfully completing the final milestone (Milestone 2) in EasyA’s #180DaysOfPolkadot.

Executive Summary:

For context, the #180DaysOfPolkadot builds on the huge success of our 2023 #60DaysOfPolkadot developer education campaign. After last year’s success, all our stakeholders (Polkadot ecosystem teams, parachains, developers, founders and more) wanted us to build on this momentum and go even bigger. So we took on the challenge and did! We even hosted Indy500 racer Conor Daly at the hackathon so he and his team could see it in action and learn more about the Polkadot developer ecosystem! Safe to say, Conor’s now an EasyA fan too, saying: “Learning about EasyA and going to their hackathon in Boston was incredible”.

First, as reported by Investing.com, in the EasyA app we created massive buzz and excitement, with:

1. Developers starting crash course: 110,000+
2. Developers completing crash course: 88,000+
3. Completion rate: 80%
4. Participating parachains: 12
5. Impressions: 6M+

These Polkadot challenges in the EasyA app created so much excitement amongst builders that our 2 landmark in-person hackathons were highly oversubscribed. We had lines stretching across London and all over Harvard campus to get in!

Polkadot x EasyA IRL Hackathon in London (20-21 July):

1. Hackers: 350
2. Final dApps/projects created: 56
3. Colleges/companies represented: 51
4. Social media impressions: 3M+

Want to see the video highlights from London? Feast your eyes on our wrap-up vid here!

Polkadot x EasyA IRL Hackathon at Harvard (27-28 July):

1. Hackers: 300
2. Final dApps/projected created: 55
3. Colleges/companies represented: 46
4. Social media impressions: 3M+

Seeing is believing, so check out our video summary from Harvard here!

We want to say a massive thank you to everyone from the Polkadot ecosystem who came out to welcome these builders to the ecosystem. We couldn’t have done it without you! Acala, Astar, Bifrost, Subsquid, Composable, Crust, Gear, KILT, Moonbeam, OAK, OriginTrail, Phala, Polimec, Tanssi and Unique Network, your work in guiding us to build the #180DaysOfPolkadot was invaluable!

In addition, we would like to give a special mention to (in no particular order):

— Angela Dalton (Co-Founder & CGO of Dot Play, CEO & Founder of Signum Growth)

— Christopher Wade (Head Ambassador for Polkadot North America)

— Luca Auet (Developer Relations at PaperMoon)

— Conor Daly (Professional Motorsports Driver & Polkadot Global Ambassador)

— Andrew Stallings (Founder x President of Athelo Group)

— Charu Sethi (CMO at Unique Network)

— Max Andreev (Senior Developer at Unique Network)

— Filip Filipovich (Developer Relations Manager at Unique Network)

And of course to Leemo for dropping by and auditing!

Winning projects

As stakeholders in the Polkadot ecosystem ourselves, the most important thing for us is that these hackathons drive long-term results. This all starts with getting the smartest brains into the ecosystem, and it’s safe to say that the developers we brought to Polkadot with #180DaysOfPolkadot are some of the smartest people in the world.

These founders came from the world’s best universities at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and top companies like Google, Meta, Coinbase and many more.

Want to see the projects they built? We’ve summarised them in our Twitter threads:

London: https://x.com/easya_app/status/1816109001546829924

Harvard: https://x.com/easya_app/status/1819302381177258073

We’re connecting these incredible builders with mentors in the ecosystem. So far, Angie Dalton (from Dot Play) has been fantastic in connecting with the builders. We’ve also funnelled these people into the available grants programmes. A key highlight was our success in converting the winners into applying for the Unique Network CodeCraft grants. We’ve been working closely with Charu Sethi and Filip Filipovich from Unique Network on utilising these grants to support with the launch and marketing of the winners’ games.

KPI	Target 🎯	Actual	Achieved
Developers starting crash course	48,000	110,000+	✅
Developers completing crash course	40,000	88,000+	✅
In-person hackathon attendees	500	650	✅
Hackathon projects	100	111	✅
Social media impressions (LinkedIn/Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/YouTube etc)	10M	12M+	✅
Participating Polkadot parachains/projects	8	12	✅

Full Progress Report

We’ve been absolutely thrilled with the success of #180DaysOfPolkadot, and have put together a full report here on our outcomes from Milestones 1 and 2. We know you love seeing the projects that come out of the hackathons, so we’ve included them in the report, along with further context on the EasyA in-app developer challenges! This full report also includes the precise budget allocations.

Milestone 2 Requested Allocation Breakdown Summary (Retroactive Funding)

Our original proposal for #180DaysOfPolkadot split our costs into two phases. Milestone 1 (approved here) covered the creation, technical implementation and distribution of the in-app content, as well as the venue/logistics deposits. Milestone 2 (this milestone) is retroactive funding to cover the final costs of the in-person hackathons, prize money and educational campaign.

This retroactive funding after the successful completion of our proposal reflects EasyA’s deep respect for the Polkadot treasury and OpenGov. Rather than the community needing to take any risk with EasyA, we take on the responsibility ourselves of delivering on the KPIs and targets which we set out for the community originally.

The full breakdown of the costs and budget is available in our full report.

What’s next?

EasyA has played a key role in growing the Polkadot developer ecosystem since 2022, and we intend to continue building on our successes. Our philosophy has always been to start small, prove ourselves and our results, and then double down on the key areas of success. It’s this approach which has enabled us to drive such big results with our #180DaysOfPolkadot.

In keeping with this guiding philosophy, we’ve already been assessing which areas we should double down on next, and have been discussing our key learnings with our Polkadot ecosystem partners/parachains, Parity and Web3 Foundation. We have detailed these in our full report. However, in summary, our core next step is to get the top teams and builders whom we’ve already recruited, to continue building on Polkadot. The huge EasyA developer community is filled with founders and entrepreneurs and we are excited to get them launching their startups in the Polkadot ecosystem.

We have already started working towards this. We’re working closely with the Unique Network team to funnel builders using NFTs on Unique Network towards their CodeCraft grants programme, which supports builders with launching and marketing. A record number of teams have already now applied for the programme. We’re connecting top games developers with Angie Dalton, who has been welcoming them into the Dot Play initiative. In fact, we have personally introduced all the gaming winners from our Harvard hackathon directly to Angie Dalton. We’re also mentoring teams ourselves, inspiring them about all the opportunities coming up in Polkadot, such as JAM and Plaza. There’s so much more we’re doing too, and we’re currently planning a whole suite of post-hackathon support for our builders, all the way up to getting them funded. We’re very excited to share more on this next month.

Builders who have joined Web3 through EasyA’s in-app challenges and hackathons have gone on to get funded by a16z, YC, Founders Fund and many more top VCs. We’re bringing the top talent who will be able to do that on Polkadot.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and there are many different areas of the technical and ecosystem-wide funnel in Polkadot which we need to fix. However, we’re working night and day to get these builders launching the next big thing on Polkadot. This includes aligning efforts with Parity, Web3 Foundation, and other ecosystem support teams like Papermoon. Together, we’re nurturing a whole new wave of builders to breathe fresh life into Polkadot!

Thank you for taking the time to read our proposal for retroactive reimbursement. If you have any questions at all, or would like to get involved with our work bringing the next wave of builders to Polkadot, please do feel free to comment here! We’ve never been more excited about our work in the Polkadot ecosystem; it genuinely feels like we’ve started a renaissance here, hand in hand with the rest of the Polkadot ecosystem parachains, projects and stakeholders.

-- Phil, Dom (EasyA Co-Founders) and the EasyA Team!