The rule in the documents
Both the hackathon plan and the grants programme carry the same correction block, dated 5 September 2026: their RPC, explorer and faucet URLs pointed at empoorio.io, a domain that was never registered. Before announcing this programme, deploy what it promises, or remove it.
Prerequisite 1 — a public faucet
Status: not deployed. The plan needs 500 tDMS per request, one request per hour per address during the event; the grants programme needs 100 tDMS/day standard and 1,000 for grantees. A funding script exists (fondear_cuenta_testnet.py, used by sudo to fund CI accounts); a public, rate-limited faucet service in front of it does not. Blocking: an operator decision on hosting and abuse limits.
Prerequisite 2 — a stable explorer
Status: site live, indexer under repair. empooscan.com serves; the indexer had stopped, its hosted database had exhausted its quota, 58 fields were stored as debug strings and ten event handlers listened for names that do not exist. Judges must verify 100 transactions per project on it. Blocking: the indexer repair list (address decoder, generated types, event loop) and a database that does not go silent.
Prerequisite 3 — verified templates
Status: exist, unverified against runtime 220. Three templates (React dApp, TypeScript scripts, Rust backend). Eight runtime upgrades in ten days mean a template verified against 208 may not build. Blocking: a fresh clone, build and finalized transaction on a machine that is not the author's.
Also needed
- The hackathon's
#hackathon-supportand#hackathon-announcementschannels named in the plan do not exist yet as public channels. - Runtime upgrades frozen for the 48 hours.
- The
emp_*RPC methods at least listed, since Track 2 will hit them.
Why delay rather than announce
Because the ecosystem has already published programmes with infrastructure that did not exist, and the correction blocks are the record of it. A hackathon whose participants cannot get test tokens or see their transactions produces frustration and a reputation, not projects. The date will be set when the three items above are ticked, and this page will change from prerequisites to registration.
Based on the correction blocks in TESTNET_HACKATHON_PLAN.md and TESTNET_GRANTS_PROGRAM.md, the EmpooScan audit and RED.json.