The format
Virtual. 48 hours. Three tracks. Support channel staffed throughout. That is the entire event footprint.
Why not houses and tours
The network is not ready for a crowd. Two validators, one hosting provider, zero fault tolerance, a public RPC that bans an IP at ten requests per second. A hackathon's traffic pattern — hundreds of developers deploying and polling — is exactly what the current network cannot absorb without the participants running their own nodes. A virtual event with a documented run your own node step is honest about that; a venue full of laptops on one WiFi is not.
The prerequisites are not deployed. No faucet. An explorer with an indexer under repair. Templates unverified against the current runtime. A physical event with a date forces these; a virtual event waits for them.
The team is small and in one place. Logroño, Spain. A tour would be a team on planes instead of at keyboards during the weeks the network most needs them.
Money. The ecosystem has no events budget and no fund. What it has is a treasury that does not exist until mainnet and an operating company that pays for audits, benchmarks and a faucet before it pays for venues.
The rule. Announce after it exists. A tour schedule is a list of promises; a 48-hour window is one.
What virtual gets right
- Everyone builds against the same public testnet with the same documentation — the event tests the documentation as much as the participants.
- Submissions are repositories and on-chain transactions, judged on what can be verified, not on a pitch in a room.
- The support channel's questions become the FAQ the developer site is missing.
- A team in Nairobi has the same access as one in Madrid, which matters for an ecosystem whose messaging product (PompoOS) is designed for the former.
Later
If the network passes its decentralization gate and the grants programme produces ten real projects, a physical gathering becomes worth its cost. The order is: network, then faucet, then hackathon, then grants, then — maybe — a room.
The page this replaces
Announced a summer of hacker houses across cities for another ecosystem. This one announces a weekend online, when three things are true that are not yet.
Based on TESTNET_HACKATHON_PLAN.md, DECENTRALIZATION_REPORT.md and the RPC rate-limit finding.