Project Serum (“Serum”), a decentralized exchange and platform that provides the underlying liquidity infrastructure for protocols built on Solana’s fast and censorship-resistant blockchain, and Wormhole, a decentralized token and data bridge protocol that connects to multiple chains including Ethereum, Solana, Terra, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche and Oasis, today announced co-sponsorship of a cross-chain, DeFi focused, global online hackathon, Convergence. The hackathon aims to attract web2 and web3 developers building on the Solana blockchain to leverage Serum’s decentralized exchange and liquidity infrastructure, Wormhole’s cross-chain bridge, as well as technology from the other sponsors, including PsyOptions, Terra, and Atrix. The Convergence sponsors, including Jump Crypto, have committed $5M in prizes and seed round capital to be invested into hackathon participants.

Project submissions can be made via the website from January 5, 2022, to January 31, 2022, and must include a video that properly demos the project, while also detailing the project’s vision and value proposition. Projects can compete for a total of eight different prize tracks and each will have its own submission requirements that must be met. In addition to the prize track guidelines, judges will be looking at if the submitted projects fill a need within the Solana ecosystem in an economically efficient manner, if it betters the ecosystem of each sponsoring partner, if the project has a clean code base with proper documentation, and if the accompanying video provides detailed insight into the project.

JHL, contributor to Project Serum, commented on today’s news, “The Serum protocol is designed to supply users with the underlying infrastructure needed to quickly and efficiently build projects and Convergence provides the next generation of crypto developers with an opportunity to showcase those innovative projects. Past hackathons have incubated some of the most well-known and successful DeFi programs and our community is looking forward to seeing what developers come up with.”

The submitted projects will be judged by members of the DeFi and CeFi community including, but not limited to, Sam Bankman-Fried from FTX, Raj Gokal from Solana Labs, Kyle Samani from Multicoin Capital, Matthew Graham from Sino Global, Dan Matuszewski from CMS, Paul Veradittakit from Pantera Capital and Chris McCann from Race Capital. Winners will be announced via the hackathon webpage on February 8, 2021.

Evan Gray, developer at Jump Crypto, continued, “DeFi has seen explosive growth over the past year and a half. There are still many hurdles to adoption as liquidity is fragmented across ecosystems and trading remains expensive on many chains. There is an opportunity to build efficient and powerful tools for financial applications by using Wormhole’s flexible messaging layer to connect multiple ecosystems to Serum’s full order book.”