What is here for you
A chain you cannot damage. Testnet DMS has no value and resets on major upgrades. Two validators, one operator. Break it — carefully — and report how.
140 pallets to read. The runtime is the best FRAME textbook the ecosystem has: DEX, lending, escrow, NFTs with enforced royalties, account abstraction, identity, compliance, storage, AI oracle, IoT — real implementations, with mocks and tests, in suites by domain.
A written standard. The developer guide's ten-step path, the testing standard (success, permission failure, invalid input, storage mutation, event, accounting, bounds, replay), the bounded-state rule, stable indexes, try-runtime. Learning FRAME against a standard is faster than learning it against a tutorial.
Real bugs to find. The first swap found a missing treasury account. The first signed transaction found a two-byte envelope. The explorer had ten handlers listening for events that do not exist. A student with a fresh pair of eyes and a reproduction script is exactly who finds the next one — and the ecosystem records findings with the finder's name in the correction block.
Documentation to fix. 168 pages, 19 reachable; a Dart SDK README that is still the framework template; a cookbook with undeclared variables. Documentation contributions are scored as highly as code in the hackathon rubric, for a reason.
What is not here
A stipend, credit, a certificate, a university partnership, a mentor programme. The page this replaces announced one for another ecosystem's students. EmpoorioChain offers a public repository, a public chain and public review.
A suggested first project
Pick a pallet with no traffic — pallet-intents, pallet-insurance, pallet-prediction-markets — write the smallest script that exercises its main dispatchable on the testnet, and write up what happened. If it works, you have the first real transaction of that pallet in the chain's history and a place in the Firsts series. If it fails, you have a finding. Both are worth more than a certificate.
When the hackathon opens
Three tracks, testnet prizes, documentation and DevX awards. Students are eligible; there is no student category because there is no need for one.
Based on DEVELOPER_GUIDE.md, TESTNET_HACKATHON_PLAN.md and the September 2026 audits.