Bear markets are ideal for establishing Bitcoin businesses. At least, that's what the Legends of Lightning contest, a nine-week competition for competing businesses, suggests.
The tournament-turned-hackathon featured over 65 events worldwide, with 73 projects competing for 3 BTC ($50,000) split among contestants. The competition's separate tracks, Global Adoption and Building for Africa, crowned Bitcoin startups Lightsats, Mutiny Wallet, and AgriMint winners.
The competition, arranged by Bitcoin startup Bolt Fun, drew 260 makers (builders, developers, startuppers, and hackers) from around the world. According to Johns Beharry, co-founder of Bolt Fun and founder and CEO of Peak Shift, who spoke to Cointelegraph, the hackathon is the biggest yet in the Bitcoin economy: "There is nothing vaguely comparable to this," he said.
Furthermore, the competition promotes the Bitcoin development space as a venue for developing, tinkering, and conducting experiments in ways that would impress Web3 developers. Edward Pratt, the co-founder of Bolt Fun and Senior Product Designer, stated that the Bolt Fun team is laser-focused on driving Bitcoin adoption through creating businesses and expanding the community into new domains.
Despite the fact that it provides the only decentralized infrastructure worth building on, Pratt and Beharry conclude that Web3 ecosystems are attracting attention and talent away from the Bitcoin-building space. The Legends of Lightning competition aims to rectify the situation by highlighting the abundance and breadth of opportunities to build on Bitcoin.
The prize money at Solana Hackathons is massive; this summer, over 350 projects competed for a $5 million treasure chest. The first prize at The Legends of Lightning awarded 3 BTC ($50,000) to one of the 73 competing projects, representing one-hundredth of the total prize money.
"It just demonstrates the distinction between the Bitcoin ecosystem and other ecosystems like Solana," Pratt continued. Ultimately, the Bitcoin space competes for builders and developers participating in Web3 playgrounds like Solana and Ethereum.
Surprisingly, the competition winner, Lightsats, based their project on an idea shared in a Tweet by Bitcoin entrepreneur Brad Mills. The tweet triggered a rapid domino effect of Bitcoin creation. Lightsats built their "Precoiner onramp project" in a matter of weeks, forwarded it to the Bolt Fun team, and won the Global Adoption competition.
Reaching out to developers working in other ecosystems is one way of attracting more individuals to join and build on Bitcoin, according to Pratt. "We want to target people on the outskirts of crypto and Web3," Pratt pondered. "How do we get the stories to talk to those people?" he added.
"Your web3 platform is offline. Bitcoin fixes this," Beharry joked, referring to the numerous occasions when the Solana blockchain simply stopped working.
The Legends of Lightning team hopes to replicate the event annually with larger prizes, more entrants, and more creativity, with the goal of reaching 1,000 entrants next year — a significant increase from its current level.
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