The ChainLink Hackathon 2021 is a worldwide virtual event scheduled to occur from March 15, 2021 through April 11, 2021 to build the next generation of smart contracts.

Users will be able to Harness the power of off-chain data to further build and showcase any innovative DeFi, NFT, Gaming, or universally connected dApp where users will be able to use the industry’s leading oracle network.

By being a part of the Hackathon, users will be able to bring the smart contract app to life, win prizes from top Web3 projects, and also users will be able to join the community for mentorship and support.

The event is free and it does not cost anything to attend.  There are rules and code of conduct to participate in the event.  Anyone from anywhere in the world will be able to participate.  There can be 1 to 5 people per team.

While it will be helpful to have some software engineering experience, it is not a requirement. The projects in most cases will need designers, front end engineers, project managers, and more. They also have talks, workshops, and mentors to help participants with the project. This is a great place to learn all things blockchain and smart contracts.

The sooner the hackathon opens, to keep the playing field fair, teams are not permitted to begin building prior to the beginning of the hackathon. Those who are submitting projects which are an upgrade to an already existing project they need to check with the organizers beforehand.

This event is taking place 100% online.  The hackathon chat/support happens on Discord, workshops happen over Zoom and projects are submitted through Devpost.

For clarity, Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network, which provides secure and reliable inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain.  The Chainlink Price Data secures billions of dollars in value across top Defi projects.

Also, Chainlink have joined forces with some of the most powerful web3 technologies and users will be able to experiment with Chainlink’s blockchain-agnostic oracle network across different environments and projects.

Some of the market-leading protocols and organizations are Aave, Synthetix, Polygon, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Unicef, Truffle, Consensys, Moonbeam, Openlaw, Harfhat and others.

The ease of integrating ChainLink price feeds to different projects is happening almost every other day, thus improving on the guarantees about the reliability and quality of the smart contracts in which they are integrated.  Integrating LINK is a great way to prove the end to end security of smart contracts to users.