Solana DeFi hackathon winners focus on DEX order books, interoperability

Solana and Serum announced the winners of a recent two-week hackathon focusing on building decentralized finance projects on the Solana blockchain. A total of nine projects were eligible for the hackathon’s official prize pool, with an additional project winning a community prize.

The winning projects are primarily new DeFi protocols, though some infrastructure and tooling solutions also made the cut.

The two first-place winners, Mango Markets and PsyOptions, won $50,000 in USDC-SPL, or USD Coin (USDC) based on Solana. Both projects focus on creating new trading platforms on the Solana blockchain, with Mango Markets building a margin trading and derivatives platform with fully on-chain order books. PsyOptions is building an American options platform that allows exercising options at any point before expiry. Most popular crypto options markets today are based on European options, with a fixed expiry.

The second-place winners include Parrot, a bridging protocol for yield-bearing assets like automated market maker pool tokens; Synthetify, a Synthetix analog for Solana; and Solrise Finance, a decentralized asset management project. These were eligible for $20,000 in USDC-SPL.

Finally, the third-place winners were Serum Tax Time, a tax organizer for Serum traders; DTF Protocol, a yield aggregator similar to Yearn.finance; Sushi Warriors, a no-loss lottery game; and Tenderize Me, a liquid staking solution for the SOL token. Third-place winners received $10,000 each.

The hackathon’s winners include a diverse range of DeFi products. Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX and advisor to Serum, commented on the results:

“It seems like there will be multiple, really awesome protocols going fully live from the hackathon, which should help continue to build out the Serum ecosystem. I was really excited to see the projects from the first hackathon, and these ones are even better.”

Solana positions itself as a low-latency network designed specifically for trading. The hackathon’s winners appear to be projects building on this aspect, with Mango Markets making a point of keeping all parts of its logic on-chain. Order book-based decentralized exchanges are somewhat of a rarity on other blockchains, with many of them being only noncustodial, while their matching engines are centralized.

Many of the projects outside the top two were rehashing concepts from other blockchains or directly connecting Solana with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. Nonetheless, the presence of original and Solana-specific projects is a promising sign for the blockchain project.

Update, 4:30 PM UTC: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that USDC on Solana is based on a wrapper. In reality, it is officially supported by Circle.