Judges of the Global Solana hackathons have to go through hundreds of submissions, hence a crisp demo presentation really boost your chances of standing out.
To make your life easier, we’ve put together a handy script template below - from past projects that not only won prizes at previous hackathons, but also made it to the Colosseum accelerator.
1. A strong opening one-liner
Introducing X, {the one-liner}
Examples:
Urani, Securing trading for the next billion users
“Brining toxic-MEV Minimization at the Application Layer”
Torque, The onchain growth protocol
“Crypto’s growth playbook does not exist”
MetaDAO, The world’s first decision market platform
“Decentralized governance doesn’t work today.”
Ore, A proof-of-work token everyone can mine
“As an industry, our primary call-to-action for new users is “buy my coin”.”
2. Introduce yourself
I am X and.. {some context about your background: “over the years, I’ve seen Y problem first-hand”}
Examples:
Urani
“I am Mia, the CEO. I fell in love with the MEV problem back in 2022 and since then I have been actively researching and building in this space.
Urani was born 3 months ago. I saw the market opportunity and it was a no-brainer. Why? Because there is no solution against toxic MEV at the application layer on Solana. Sandwich attacks are happening at a rapid rate with over ~$500k per day extracted from the users.”
Torque
“We’ve been listening to builders and understand their pain points. Some wish to drive users to a feature, while others are concerned about churn. Most importantly, they all want to grow but are lacking the tools.”
3. Overview of the problem
{Existing products / methods} don’t work
reasons (3 bullet points are plenty)
Examples:
Torque
“Airdrops are one-off high stake events that give away tons of value for a minute of fame. Campaigns and quests are resource intensive and for the most part not effective, leading to many projects having thousands of followers, but very few users.”
MetaDAO
“DAO governance is broken, and that's for a few reasons.
People don’t vote, and when they do they usually have a thin understanding of what's being voted on. The result of this is governance being used as a rubber stamp by insiders rather than as a legitimate decision-making process.”
Ore
“This {continuation of the one-liner} is problematic because it frames onboarding to crypto as an investment. Particularly, an investment in a high-risk, highly speculative asset class that most users have just never interacted with.
We see a real limit to the number of people that are going to onboard through this call-to-action and to really reach the masses, we need to offer a lower risk form of participation in crypto.”
4. How {our project} fixes it
We’re fixing {X} with {Y}
Show how you’re fixing it: Include a working demo / mockup with an example or a video
Examples:
Urani
“At Urani, we're tackling the MEV problem by:
Moving the order flow auction process to offchain matches, eliminating swap fees and the slippage
Gamifying arbitrage. so operators are economically incentivized to contribute positively.”
To support these ideas we’ve been building a suite of solutions:
The Protocol conducts the competition among the agents.
The Arena is the infrastructure for these competitions with strategies to ensure accessibility and meritocracy.
The MEV Agent Templates are inhouse algorithms to onboard and support operators.
[Shows demo: Swapping WIF for SOL, including DEX routes, fees, and sandwich impact]"
Torque
“Growing a crypto company is complicated. We’re on a mission to empower builders to get as many shots on target as possible. Our growth protocol enables continuous token distribution, based on:
hyper-precise audience targeting
conditional offers
a publishing network, and
analytics to measure, grow and iterate.
[Shows mockups]
We're very excited about our no-code targeting interface. Developers and normies alike can create audiences using AND/OR statements. This example shows us targeting wallets that hold a minimum of a 1000 SOL. Our publisher network is permissionless. Every offer contains a publisher award and can be shared by anyone. Our offers are flexible. They crank conditionally based on desired actions. In this example all qualified wallets can stake SOL on Jito to receive a $JTO reward.”
MetaDAO
“We're fixing this with a new system where markets, rather than voters make decisions.
To prove this system we've been using it for our own governance for 6 months. 2 weeks ago, we launched a platform that allows other DAOs to use it. So far we've onboarded Drift, Dean’s List, Future, and soon Dark."
[Shows mockup: Uniswap deciding whether to turn on their fee switch]
Ore
{In continuation to the problem statement}: “We believe that form of participation is mining. Mining is a system that's been here since Day 1 and that everyone intuitively understands at some level. You can click a button on your computer, do some computation, you know your computer gets hot, and you earn a crypto token - people understand that.
The problem with mining has just always been that it's inaccessible to regular people and so our thesis is that this Proof of Work on Proof of State concept really has the potential to make that accessible to regular people and allow us to build a consumer experience out of mining.
Our first product that we launched was called Ore. This was a proof of work token, the community called it “the Solana-native Bitcoin”. It has 21m Total Supply, fair launch with no insider allocation. When we originally launched Ore, it broke Solana with overwhelming demand. We have our V2 coming out very soon, and this token in my view, really validated our Proof of Work on Proof of State thesis."
5. Closing
Options:
About the team, with x years of experience in the ecosystem
User traction
About the broad market opportunity
Brief overview of the roadmap ahead
Social / Historical Proof
Link to socials and a QR for people to try it out
Examples:
Torque
“We see a massive opportunity to the tune of $4B worth of idle treasury tokens being put to good use, beyond just simple grants. Builders can now use their native token to run growth strategies, dApps and Publishers also benefit by having a new revenue streams - all while contributing to the user data layer. We built Torque because we’ve faced these problems first-hand. We're a technical team with years of experience in the Solana ecosystem and we’re just getting started.”
MetaDAO
“This system works because markets are excellent aggregators of information. For e.g.,
Presidential prediction markets beat professional pollsters 73% of the time at predicting election results.
Companies like HP and Google have used internal prediction markets to forecast things like printer sales and when offices will open. Those prediction markets beat their prior expert forecast.
In 1986, when the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded over Cape Canaveral, it took the government 4 months to determine that the root cause was Morton Thikol’s O-rings. The market on the other hand, had priced that information into Morton Thikol’s share price within 16 minutes.
The world runs on markets. Now, decisions will too.”
References
Projects Mentioned:
Colosseum Demo Day Presentations [with Timestamps]
Past Solana Hackathon Winners Directory
Meet Solana enthusiasts near you, and prepare together for the next global hackathon.
