Catalyst: An Intelligence-Driven Growth Hackathon

Let’s admit: it’s frustrating being in web3 in 2025. Pump-and-dumps, ineffective airdrops, vanity metrics, and constantly hoping the next "big thing" lasts for more than a hot minute. Chasing short-term metas only brought this space short-term results. Riding frequent cycles gives whiplash to devs and degens alike. But what if there's a better way to grow web3 , and to make success last this time?

At Flipside, we’ve worked with blockchains and protocols, digested countless dashboards, dug deep with data science, and found a better way forward.

We found: data across chains holds insights, and insights become recommendations for success. Recommendations get implemented in practice and drive growth results. The more teams we helped, the more common threads emerged. We developed methods that, when applied to data, reveal powerful intelligence.

Intelligence-Driven Growth

What do the highest-value users do onchain? What protocols do they use and for what purpose? How to motivate users to contribute to the success of an ecosystem, not grab rewards and run to the next thing? In answering these questions, a new approach was born.

Intelligence-Driven Growth , or IDG for short, is a practice that transforms raw onchain data into actionable insights. A chain or protocol will then use these insights to grow.

Web3 has been chasing short-term gratification. It’s time for a change. Armed with user insights and data-driven practical strategies, this space is ready to get unstuck from endless hype cycles, and create growth that lasts. We are thrilled to share Intelligence-Driven Growth with you, to catalyze the new era of web3 growth together. Ready to join us?

Hackathon

We are very excited to invite you to Catalyst: An Intelligence-Driven Growth Hackathon at Flipside!

This is a virtual hackathon for onchain data analysts and enthusiasts. We invite you to discover nuggets of blockchain intelligence, and find innovative ways of rewarding the insights that help protocols succeed.

By taking part, you will catalyze the practice of Intelligence-Driven Growth with us.

Also in it for you? $6,000 in prizes.

Start by learning with us

Winning hackathon submissions will demonstrate a close familiarity with Intelligence-Driven Growth. To provide you this familiarity, we invite you to participate in our free and open course on Intelligence-Driven Growth on the first day of the hackathon. You can take the live course (one session), or watch the recording, or read the article version. Sign up for the course here .

Categories

The hackathon offers two tracks: Insights and Incentive System Design.

• Insights
  • Create using Flipside and share on X (Twitter) your onchain data analysis that utilizes the Intelligence-Driven Growth framework.
• Incentive System Design
  • Use your personal experience and/or your observations about our analyst rewards to propose an innovative analyst reward system that enables the best Intelligence-Driven Growth analytics.

Format and criteria

Read about the submission format and evaluation criteria here .

Prizes

The prize pool is $6,000:

• Insights ($5,000)
  • 1st prize - $3,000
  • 2nd  -  $1,000
  • 3rd  - $500
  • 4th  - $250
  • 5th  - $250
• Incentive System Design ($1,000)
  • 1st  prize - $500
  • 2nd - $300
  • 3rd - $200

Rewards will be distributed to winners’ Flipside accounts. Winners are responsible for claiming their reward in USDC on Polygon to a wallet address of their choosing.

Refer to Flipside Docs for instructions to create a free account and to claim rewards . Annual reward claims of US$600 or more require a user to verify their tax information on Flipside via TaxBit to continue claiming rewards.

Judges

Flipside team in collaboration with our experienced Peer Review Network will assess hackathon submissions. Making a submission in a category disqualifies a peer reviewer from evaluating that category. Flipside team retains the final responsibility for selecting the winners.

Timeline

May 1, 2025 - Hackathon announced

May 8, 2025 - Submissions open

May 8, 2025 - IDG Course goes live

May 16, 2025 - Submission deadline (11:59pm EDT)

May 23, 2025 - Winners announced

Make a submission

Everyone can participate! You can make a submission in one or more categories. You can make one or multiple submissions per category. You can win (1st or other prize places) maximum once per category.

Submission link will be published on May 8, 2025 by @FlipsideCrypto on X and in the Flipside Discord server.

Submissions close on May 16, 2025 at 11:59pm (end of day) EDT.

Contact us

Have questions? Join the Flipside Discord server and ask us in the #idg-hackathon channel.

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