Prize: Lego set This prize is for the hack that incorporates the best UI/UX design. Factors considered will be innovation, aesthetics, service to the project/challenge, and the process.

Technica embraces its mission to promote diversity and inclusion! We want to see your hacks that utilize technology to provide more inclusive, accessible, and empowering solutions.

Technica welcomes you to explore the wonder that awaits this weekend! Whether it's by gamifying an everyday task or embarking on a new adventure through a video game hack, we hope your imagination runs wild!

The Techni-fam loves being active and focusing on their personal growth, whether it means dedicating more time to self-care, attending gym classes, or spending time with friends! We'd like to see your best hack related to active wellness and health.

Submit any and all hacks related to sustainability, climate change, biodiversity, and more! We invite you to return to your roots and create the coolest hack related to sustainability!

Is this your first time attending a hackathon or creating a hack? We want to encourage all first-time hackers to submit their creations! At least one member of the team has to be a first-time hacker. Team members submitting for this category must be in middle or high school. We're excited to hear about what you learned and what you came up with for your first hack!

Is this your first time attending a hackathon or creating a hack? We want to encourage all first-time hackers to submit their creations! This should be the first hackathon for at least one member of the team. Ideally, this must be the first hackathon for all or almost all team members. All team members should be at least 18 years old, and participants are expected to have limited to no prior coding knowledge. We're excited to hear about what you've learned and what you've come up with for your first hack!

Our hackers love to learn! From attending workshops about a range of topics to traveling to Technica with their classmates, Technica weekend provides a wealth of opportunities to learn. We want to see your hack focused on education! From financial literacy to learning new recipes, we'd love to see what you've created. Submit a project related to education, educating others, or improving education!

The Techni-fam loves innovation! Whether it's a disruptive tech solution, a creative app, or a groundbreaking product, we're looking for hacks that have the potential to revolutionize the startup world. Show us your entrepreneurial spirit and take your project to the next level.

Capital One challenges you to reimagine the banking experience by
building an innovative application that leverages the Nessie API. Featuring access to
mock financial data including accounts, merchants, bills, and peer-to-peer transactions,
Nessie is your sandbox for solving real-world financial problems. We want to see
projects that creatively integrate Nessie’s endpoints to empower users and improve
their financial lives.

1st Place Prize: $250 Giftogram to each member of the winning team

Use Sensor data to protect people or places. This could be personal, environmental, etc.

1st Place Prize: Gift Cards ($1,000 total split between the teammates)

The financial industry is being reshaped by exchange-traded funds (ETFs), artificial
intelligence (AI), and digital assets and tokenization. This challenge asks teams to
identify a real financial problem and show how one or more of these technologies could
be used to solve it responsibly.
Your Mission
Create a prototype, tool, experience, or concept that helps users understand a financial
problem and demonstrates a practical technology-driven solution. Teams may focus on
one area or combine multiple areas below.
 ETFs: Fund comparison, active/passive strategies, fees, exposures, portfolio
construction, and investor use cases.
 Digital Assets and Tokenization: Tokenized funds or assets, settlement, smart
contracts, custody, and systems that support how digital financial products are
issued, transferred, stored, or tracked.
 Artificial Intelligence: Research, personalization, risk discovery, financial
education, fraud awareness, and workflow efficiency.
Project Ideas
 AI-enabled ETF allocation simulator that helps users compare fund types, costs,
exposures, risks, and portfolio trade-offs.
 Tokenization use-case simulator showing how a fund or asset could be issued,
transferred, settled, or tracked digitally while highlighting regulation, custody,
security, liquidity, and trust challenges.
Key Questions
 What user need or financial problem does the solution address?
 How is the technology applied in a realistic financial setting?
 What risks, limitations, or adoption challenges should users understand?
 How does the solution build trust through transparency, accessibility, and
responsible design?

Prizes
 (4) Portable Monitors

Judging Criteria
 Impact and Application: Addresses a meaningful financial use case and
demonstrates practical value.
 Innovation: Presents a creative, forward-looking idea relevant to next-generation
finance.
 Clarity and Accuracy: Explains financial and technical concepts clearly without
overstating benefits or minimizing risks.
 Accessibility: Is simple, inclusive, intuitive, and understandable for users with
different levels of financial knowledge.
 Feasibility and Responsible Design: Shows a realistic implementation path while
addressing privacy, security, bias, regulatory constraints, transparency, and
human oversight.

Digital forensics topics include but are not limited to: Data
carving\reconstruction\recovery tools, finding specific objects (other than faces) in a large
collection of digital images, steganography detection or exploitation, registry or memory
artifact analysis, encryption detection, or anything else that could aid investigators who are
looking at computers recovered from crime scenes.

1st Place PRIZE: $100 Amazon e-Gift Card and Cipher Tech swag package valued at over $100. to
include a Yeti Tumbler and Nike hat, to each member of the winning team of up to 4
members) who design the best application that pertains to digital forensics or reverse
engineering.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Anyone can participate in our company challenge during the
hackathon, but when it comes to awarding a prize, individuals must be based and living in
the United States to receive a prize. Non-US based individuals are not eligible to receive a
prize.

Prize: Wireless Earbuds Deploy natural, human-sounding audio with ElevenLabs. Create realistic, dynamic, and emotionally expressive voices for any project, from interactive AI companions to narrated stories and voice-enabled apps. ElevenLabs will empower you to build rich, immersive experiences without the need for actors or complex audio production, using simply the power of AI.

Integrate fully autonomous audio experiences into your hack with ElevenLabs and give your project a voice, along with giving your team the chance to win some wireless earbuds!

Prize: MLH Swag Kits It’s time to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI using Google Gemini. Check out the Gemini API to build AI-powered apps that make your friends say WHOA. So, what can Gemini do for your hackathon project? Understand language like a human and build a chatbot that gives personalized advice Analyze info like a supercomputer and create an app that summarizes complex research papers Generate creative content like code, scripts, music, and more Think of the possibilities… what will you build with the Google Gemini API this weekend?

Prize: Stream Deck Mini

Building high-performance apps under hackathon deadlines shouldn't mean spending half your weekend configuring complex databases or learning obscure query languages. Tiger Data extends PostgreSQL to give student developers an ultra-fast foundation for real-time data, time-series metrics, and complex analytics.

Why build with Tiger Data this weekend?

- Standard SQL Power: Query massive datasets instantly using the SQL you already know, with no complex NoSQL aggregation pipelines required.

- Unified Data Stack: Store relational user profiles and high-frequency metric streams side-by-side in a single database.

- Instant Dashboards: Serve lag-free, real-time frontend charts using pre-computed Continuous Aggregates.

- 90%+ Data Compression: Store millions of events on free-tier cloud instances without running out of disk space.

Whether you’re building real-time IoT monitoring, AI-driven analytics dashboards, or financial prediction engines, show us how Tiger Data powers your project. The team that demonstrates the most innovative, impactful, and performance-driven use of Tiger Data will take home some great prizes!

Assorted Prizes

The world of development is evolving fast and Solana is leading the charge with a network built to handle all of your infrastructure needs. Forget high fees and slow confirmations, it’s time to build applications that are fast, efficient, and scalable.

Harness Solana’s core advantages like blazing fast execution and near-zero transaction costs to make your hackathon ideas become real world projects. With Solana, the possibilities are endless.

- Create a game, social app, or consumer product that relies on instant, high-frequency transactions.
- Design a sophisticated trading, lending, or decentralized exchange (DEX).
- Build a prototype for supply chain, identity, or payments that can handle massive, real-world volume.

Show us how you can innovate with Solana for a chance to win some cool prizes for you and each member of your team!

Prize: Tile Essentials Pack

Every AI model API is stateless by default. That means your app forgets everything the second a session ends. State management should be the first step of any AI build, regardless of what LLM you are using, and Backboard gives you that for free. But Backboard is not just state management. It is a single, unified API built on the world’s #1 AI memory that gives you everything you need in one place: long-term memory, RAG, embeddings, tool calls, model routing across 17,000+ LLMs, and persistent context that stays alive across every page refresh, session, and user. No stitching together five different services. One API. One integration. Built on the best memory in AI.

Here’s just a small list of things Backboard can make possible for your AI app!

- AI-powered Travel Guide: Remembers allergies and preferences from past trips.
- Personalized Fitness Coach: Adjusts workouts based on progress and injury history.
- Smart Home Controller: Learns routines over time to anticipate lighting and climate preferences!

Use Backboard to build a seamless, persistent user experience without the usual infrastructure headache! Each winning team member will receive a Tiles Essentials Pack because, just like AI, we all need an occasional reminder of where things are!

Prize: M5Stack Official Tab5

Vultr empowers hackers to bring their high-performance projects to life instantly; providing everything from the speed of one-click deployment and scalable cloud compute, to specialized Vultr Cloud GPUs that can power AI-driven applications. We want you to push the limits of what can be built when infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck!

Sign up for a Vultr account today and claim your free cloud credits! Take your next hack to the cloud with Vultr for a chance to win some awesome prizes for you and your team!

Prize: $100

Give your project another chance to shine!

Your hackathon may end after the weekend, but your project story is just getting started. Publish what you built on DEV and help other developers learn from your process.

Each month, the DEV editorial team will select at least one favorite project. Additional projects may be selected depending on submission volume.

Selections consider technical substance, originality, clear storytelling, and community popularity. Great work deserves an audience, so make your post useful, memorable, and easy to share.

Prize: Digital Gift Card

GoDaddy Registry is giving you everything you need to be the best hacker no matter where you are. Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win some amazing prizes!