Milestone 2: EasyA x Polkadot: In-person hackathons and in-app Polkadot 2.0 crash course (#360DaysOfPolkadot)

Hey Polkadot frens!

Our #360DaysOfPolkadot has been our most successful Polkadot campaign ever. We worked closely with Parity and Web3 Foundation to create brand new, updated Polkadot content in the EasyA app, and provide the keynote workshop and lectures at our Harvard and London hackathons.

In fact, our work has been so successful that we’ve already inspired an a16z-backed startup (Axal) to build on Polkadot (we’ve now introduced them to Web3 Foundation, and discussions are now in progress)! We have almost too many awesome successes to talk about, so we’ve done our best to summarise the key highlights here.

Of course, this was also made possible with the support of team members from Web3 Foundation and Parity, as well as Papermoon, who helped our team make this such a success. We would like to extend our special thanks to (in no particular order):

Radha Dasari (Web3 Foundation)
Rémy Le Berre (Parity)
Becka Turner (Parity)
Nikolai Kozlov (Parity)
Nico Hussein (Papermoon)

They were invaluable partners in coming in-person to our London and Harvard Polkadot hackathons, in reviewing our new Polkadot content in the EasyA app, and overall in supporting EasyA’s gigabrains coming to build on Polkadot.

This is our referendum for successfully completing Milestone 2 in EasyA’s #360DaysOfPolkadot. Importantly, it includes the funding to be paid out to the winners as well as travel scholarships.

Executive Summary:

For anyone new to EasyA (also known as Duolingo for blockchain), we are the biggest Web3 education app, with over 1 million users. We have been strong believers in the Polkadot ecosystem for many years, and first started educating our community on Polkadot after Parity invited us to host our inaugural EasyA x Polkadot hackathon in London in 2022.

Since then, we have continued working to educate the community on Polkadot, both via the EasyA app and also through our flagship in-person hackathons at Harvard and in London. These hackathons have now become world-famous, having run for 3 years in a row now. We have even started to gain a foothold for Polkadot within Harvard, and were recently invited to Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to discuss further collaboration. We are in active discussions with them, as we look to bring the best and brightest brains as well as top academic leaders into the Polkadot ecosystem.

Each year, we have educated record numbers of developers about Polkadot, and this year was another landmark year. For the first time ever, we were able to secure hosting our Polkadot hackathon right alongside the world-famous Harvard Blockchain Conference. This ended up being a masterstroke. Countless top VCs were able to see hundreds of new builders coming to the Polkadot ecosystem via our hackathon, and chat with them about why they were so excited about Polkadot. At Harvard alone, this included star VCs like Cosmo Jiang (General Partner at Pantera), Anand Iyer (Partner at Lightspeed) and Omar Kanji (Partner at Dragonfly). In London, we leveraged our connections to invite Xiao-Xiao Zhu, Partner at KKR and co-lead of KKR’s blockchain and digital assets taskforce, to judge the hackathon. KKR is the world’s largest asset manager, with almost a trillion dollars in assets under management. We put Polkadot back on the map for these capital allocators, and this wasn’t just them seeing some tweet in passing - this was all in-person, diving into the Polkadot ecosystem for hours and hours.

Great minds attract great minds, and the world’s best startup founders also came to see what was being built by the next generation in Web3. This included previous EasyA hackathon winners, team Axal, who have since been backed by a16z. We inspired them to look into Polkadot more, and we have now connected them with the Web3 Foundation. This is just one example of #360DaysOfPolkadot is driving real results.

Another awesome example is the huge activity we’re driving. Parity shared with us that our work had a massive impact on increasing development activity on Polkadot Westend Hub, which was reflected in their own internal data analysis. Just look at this chart - it went totally vertical!

EasyA hackathons are clearly not just everyday hackathons. They are transformational for the ecosystem. They attract the best builders in the world to launch the new dApps which are the lifeblood of Polkadot, but they are also a powerful marketing tool. They show VCs, private equity, family offices and users (and even as explained below politicians!) that Polkadot is alive and thriving.

And the secret sauce of this all? The EasyA app. In the run-up to our in-person hackathons, our team put in a colossal effort to update the Polkadot content in the EasyA app from scratch, working closely with Web3 Foundation and Parity. The results speak for themselves:

700 developers building at our in-person hackathons
126 projects launched
137,000 total developers starting the in-app crash course

Builders queued around the block to get into our in-person hackathons:

Polkadot x EasyA IRL Hackathon in London (19-20 April):

Hackers: 350
Final dApps/projects created: 63
Colleges/companies represented: 57
Social media impressions: 5M+

Here’s the wrap-up video from London!

Polkadot x EasyA IRL Hackathon at Harvard (26-27 April):

Hackers: 350
Final dApps/projected created: 63
Colleges/companies represented: 97
Social media impressions: 6M+

Check out the awesome highlight video from Harvard!

Winning projects

Our judges were blown away by the projects which launched at our two in-person hackathons. There were far more top projects than we could have allocated prizes for, so Radha from Web3 Foundation has been working to set up the retroactive grants for builders as an additional funding opportunity for them.

Founders flew in from all over the globe, and came from world-class companies such as Google Deepmind, Gemini and Jefferies, as well as top universities like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and so many more. We even had a serial entrepreneur who had previously founded a FinTech company which went public at a $100m valuation.

We’ve shared more on their incredible projects in our full progress report (see below).

These builders are hungry to make their mark and continue building on Polkadot. They’ve been applying for the Polkadot Fast-Grants, and the first ones have already now been successfully approved!

KPI Report

KPI	Target 🎯	Actual	Achieved
Total developers starting crash course	120,000	137,000+	✅
Total developers completing crash course	100,000	108,000+	✅
In-person hackathon attendees	600	700	✅
Hackathon projects	100	126	✅
Social Media Impressions (LinkedIn/Twitter/TikTok/Instagram, YouTube etc)	10M+	14M+	✅

Full Progress Report

The above summarises Milestone 2 of our #360DaysOfPolkadot, which has been a massive success. We’ve also included the full report for completeness, which includes the precise budget allocations and future plans. You can reach the full report here!

Milestone 2 Requested Allocation Breakdown Summary (Retroactive Funding)

Our proposal for #360DaysOfPolkadot 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 is important to note, since this funding is required for distributing the travel scholarships and prize money to builders, so they can continue building their awesome projects.

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 been a core part of the Polkadot ecosystem since 2022. We’ve been through the different cycles together, and shared its ups and downs as we build this resilient and decentralised network. We share Polkadot’s long-term vision, and as such always plan well beyond the next milestone or hackathon.

As part of this long-term roadmap, we’re actively working on bringing developers to Polkadot Hub. We’ve already started this with #360DaysOfPolkadot, with the incredible builders we’ve attracted. However, we also need to support them with continuing to build. This is why we worked tirelessly with the ecosystem to set up the Polkadot Fast-Grants and get developers fast funding, as well as worked closely with the Web3 Foundation to funnel the best projects for their fast-track grants. Both avenues have already started to show results. Last year’s EasyA x Polkadot hackathon project Intercaster was funded by the Web3 Foundation, and the first batch of projects have already now been approved for the Polkadot Fast-Grants.

We’re also working with other players in the ecosystem to support them as much as possible. For example, at Consensus Toronto we’re supporting WebZero with bringing developers to their Polkadot hacker house, as well as getting them building on Polkadot at the in-person hackathon. We are highly engaged within the Polkadot community well beyond the scope of #360DaysOfPolkadot, and came in-person to ETH Denver to help recruit builders at the Polkadot booth, as well as presented our vision for the future on-stage with Polkadot co-founder Rob Habermeier.

There’s still lots of work to be done, and we’ve been collecting feedback non-stop from builders to get smart contracts on Polkadot Hub ready for prime-time, including sharing this directly with Parity and Web3 Foundation. However, the great news is that the pieces are all finally coming together for Polkadot’s renaissance.

Further down on the roadmap, JAM is of course coming up and we are supporting as much as we can while the details get fleshed out. We caught up with Gavin Wood recently at Stanford, who shared with us how EasyA could support with scouting JAM implementers. We already know that one EasyA gigabrain is working on his implementation, and we expect more to come soon.

In summary, #360DaysOfPolkadot has been an incredible success. The EasyA app has educated builders on Polkadot at scale, our hackathons have brought the best in the world to launch (and impressed VCs), and our social media has got the attention of the world. We’re at the ground level, building the Polkadot ecosystem from the ground up, as part of the mission we’re all on.

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 on our discussion post here! The time has come for Polkadot’s renaissance, and we’re honoured to be helping lead it.

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