Imagine you’re a fresh-faced developer, hyped up and ready to build your first big project. You’ve got at least 3 RedBulls in your veins, a GitHub repo open, and a dream.
Then you see it: a hackathon. Big names, big prizes, big opportunity. Sounds… perfect… right?
On September 2, Base hosted the Onchain Summer Awards, a hackathon celebrating the most innovative and widely used consumer mini-apps in the Base ecosystem. 500+ developer teams joined in to chase a $200,000 prize pool.
Pretty solid deal, props to Base for supporting the community…
… is something I’d be saying if this thing wasn’t rigged.
On October 7, Base announced the winners.
That’s when an X user named Alanas, co-founder of Ogvio (an international money transfer service), noticed something… off.
While browsing through the Top New Consumer Apps category, he realized two of the winning projects – owatch (second place) and Opi Trade (third) – were hella sus.
According to his findings, both apps were basically AI-generated landing pages with no working buttons, no product, and no real functionality.
Further investigation revealed that some of these AI-generated shell projects were connected to Coinbase employees – the same company behind the Base network, and, conveniently, the hackathon’s organizer.
Which is VERY interesting, to say the least.
Hackathons are supposed to be these exciting, open events where anyone can showcase their skills, meet other builders, and maybe even turn a side project into a funded startup.
But when insiders and AI-generated projects win over actual working products, that whole community empowerment thing starts to sound a bit hollow.
And it’s not just Base. Developers have been skeptical about hackathons for years.
Across forums and social media, people have complained that many of these events are more about PR and brand image than genuine innovation.
Some even call them exploitative – getting developers to pour hours into building ideas that companies can then use for free, all under the cozy banner of “community building.”
The list of hackathon controversies is long, actually: CodeX with its underwhelming rewards, Hack the Hill raising fees on student participants, Salesforce’s “pre-made project” winner scandal back in 2013…
It’s almost like you can’t host a hackathon these days without a bit of drama. So, it makes you wonder: are hackathons even worth it?
Maybe the better answer is: not in the way we’re told they are.
Hackathons sell the idea of “the best builders win.”
But in practice, they often reward connections, presentation skills, or simply being on the inside. The judging is opaque, the timelines unrealistic, and the prizes disproportionately small compared to the value companies extract from the publicity and submissions.
That doesn’t mean no one benefits – just that it’s rarely the participants:
👉 For organizers, a hackathon is cheap marketing: a burst of social media buzz and free R&D disguised as community engagement.
👉 For developers, it’s unpaid labor dressed up as opportunity.
Sure, you might still learn something or meet someone useful – but those are side effects, not the point.
So maybe the question isn’t “are hackathons worth it?”
It’s “worth it for whom?”
