Harmony announces $1M hackathon aimed at merging traditional finance and DeFi

The hackathon will run for roughly six weeks from Aug. 15 to Sept. 30 and include four challenges from three different categories.

The Harmony blockchain has opened registration for a hackathon starting next month with more than $1 million in seed funding and prizes for participants.

In a Thursday announcement on Twitter, Harmony said the hackathon would be focused on bringing in more people from traditional finance for challenges bridging their fields and decentralized finance. The protocol said there would be four challenges in each category of social wallets and keyless security, cross-chain and trustless bridges, and cross-border with fintech integration.

“In blockchain, finance is where we are seeing product market fit,” said Harmony. “But most of DeFi was created by people who didn’t come from traditional finance. We want to bring more TradFi in to contribute to DeFi. We know they have much to teach us and we can help them understand and harness the power of DeFi and teach them a lot as well.”

SushiSwap core developer Omakase is listed as one of the featured speakers or judges for the event, alongside Earn.com co-founder Lily Liu, DeFi Alliance lead Imran Khan, and others. Sponsors include CoinGecko, Messari, Unstoppable Domains, DappRadar, SushiSwap, DoraHacks, news platform The Defiant, and Hummingbot.

Related: Hackathon challenges developers to build killer blockchain apps using JavaScript

A sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge that separates its chain into segments that process transactions and store data in parallel, Harmony’s mainnet first went live in 2019. The project has since announced multiple partnerships and integrations, including with stablecoin platform Terra for its token to migrate to Harmony and be used on applications in the ecosystem.

Harmony said last month it would be sponsoring the hackathon in its aim to reach 10 billion people. Teams for the event will be limited to 5 people, with registration closing Aug. 15. It will conduct the event over roughly six weeks from the submission deadline until Sept. 30.