The winners for the third season of Tron’s 2022 Grand Hackathon have been revealed, with the successful projects sharing a prize pool of $1.2 million.

With over 1,100 participants forming over 270 teams across six tracks, picking a winner from among “lots of talented projects” was a challenge, said Tron DAO’s director of ecosystem development Dave Uhryniak.

The prize pool was divided up among six tracks. Returning for the Season 3 hackathon were the Web3, DeFi, NFT and GameFi categories, with each track winner receiving a grand prize of $60,000.

In the Web3 category, the winner was OpenATM, a free and open-source DIY ATM that enables Tron users to exchange fiat coins for TRX.

The DeFi category was won by Meson-To, which enables Web3 dapps to instantly accept USDT and USDC stablecoins from 16 different chains.

The NFT category winner was Lazara, which enables users to quickly mint AI-generated NFTs created using Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2.

The GameFi category was won by Galaxy Throne, a fully-on-chain, sci-fi strategy game where users own their own planets and ships.

Ecosystem and Academy tracks

Joining the previous hackathon’s DeFi, GameFi, NFT and Web3 tracks for Season 3 were new Ecosystem and Academy tracks.

The Ecosystem track was aimed at welcoming Ethereum projects who are “looking to expand their reach” to the Tron blockchain, said Uhryniak. It was split into two categories—technical and creative—with first prize winners in each category receiving $15,000. The winning project in the technical category was WaveData, a decentralized marketplace for clinical data. In the creative category the winner was B4B. World, a Web3 influencer advertising platform with reputation-based rewards.

The Tron Academy track saw entrants convene in person on the Harvard University campus for a face-to-face competition at the Tron Hacker House.

Again, entrants were divided into technical and creative categories, with the winners in each category receiving a prize of $15,000. The technical category winner, Pneumatic, took on the challenge of creating a solution for insecure group fund distribution, by which group contracts can transact with other group contracts without having to trust an individual to transfer funds. The non-technical Academy award was won by LSP (Tron: Legacy), a proposed Tron smartphone with a built-in cold wallet.

The community votes

Along with judge-selected voting, the Season 3 hackathon also included a community voting component, allowing those projects whose team members participated in the Tron DAO Forum to vote in the peer-evaluated selection of winners across each of the six tracks.

The winners were TronHub by TronNinjas (Web3), T-Boost by USTX (DeFi), Fuzzy Ocean (NFT), Turuverse by TuruGlobal (GameFi) and InterPool by Irruption Lab (Ecosystem), with each project receiving $10,000. The winning Academy project, which received a $5,000 prize, was Tronify.

Three additional bonus prizes were awarded for Season 3 of the Hackathon. The Devpost Community Prize of $1,000 was awarded to Elk Finance based on popular choice voting by Devpost community members. The Project Engagement Prize of $5,000, awarded by the Tron DAO team, went to TronJoy, based on its close engagement with the Community Forum. Finally, ten prizes of $500 were awarded in the Community Contributor Prize, based on their valuable contributions during the Hackathon.