AVA, a next-generation blockchain platform, has introduced its first University Hackathon, AVALaunch, with over $50K USD in prizes available to students developing innovative applications on its newly launched, and highly-anticipated public testnet.
As part of the hackathon, participants can focus on developing new applications for financial products and services, build infrastructure tools that could someday be a portal for millions of people to access the network, or dive deep into identifying and solving major bugs. AVA will also be offering summer internships to participants behind the best projects.
“The best open-source projects are defined by their developer community, and we hope the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs will accept our invitation to explore and build technologies that will be foundational to the future of finance,” says Emin Gün Sirer, CEO of AVA Labs.
The AVA platform is uniquely positioned to expand DeFi into the broader scope of Open Finance by providing an extensive toolkit for asset issuers and an engine powerful enough to sustain global, real-time settlement demands. It has comparable speeds to leading centralized payment processing companies, higher security thresholds than other leading blockchain projects, and support for both public and private smart contract-enabled networks that interoperate.
Just last week, a year after its formal launch, AVA unveiled its first public testnet to maximize network participation and further expand the community of developers trialing key functionalities ahead of its anticipated mainnet launch this summer.
“This hackathon is just the first of many to come as part of our AVA-X program of grants, education, and engagement designed to fuel and foster moonshots on the AVA platform,” says John Wu, President of AVA Labs. “It has taken a lot of work getting to this point, but now the real fun starts as developers across the world can dive into the code and create real projects of their own.”
Industries such as payments, tokenization, digital identity, supply chain, and Internet of Things (IoT) are interested in AVA as a flexible DLT platform that enables either unique demands. Developers and enterprises across the globe can now interact with AVA and begin building open finance applications on the public testnet.