Colosseum · Sep 14 – Oct 12, 2026

Türkiye joins theCrypto World's Fair.

The world's largest online hackathon, now open. Four weeks, one submission, and a shot at $840,000 in prizes and $2.5M from Colosseum's fund. Your route from here to the deadline, with Superteam Türkiye behind you.

Starts in

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Building opens Monday 14 September, 16:00 in Türkiye

RegisterThe route

Registration opens 3 Sept · Building 14 Sept – 12 Oct

Superteam Türkiye

Count yourself in.

These three take under a minute and they're the difference between competing alone and competing with Superteam Türkiye behind you.

  1. 01Enter via the referral linkRegister on Arena through our referral link.Register
  2. 02Set your location to TürkiyeSelect Türkiye as your team's primary base.
  3. 03Submit to the Türkiye listingSubmit the same project again, on Earn, for 10,000 USDG that only Türkiye teams compete for.Open the listing

Registered? Tell us, so we can put you on the list for kickoff, office hours and idea validation.

Fill in the orientation form

Not a coding contest. A pre-seed funnel.

Colosseum runs the largest hackathons in tech and then invests in the winning teams. Billed as a hackathon, judged as a seed round.

Crypto World's Fair: the arena, in Colosseum's own words.Film by Colosseum
Products submitted
9,000+

Across Colosseum's competitions in two and a half years.

Fund I
$60M

Colosseum's own venture fund, backing the winners.

Portfolio startups
74

Funded out of the arena so far.

Of VC-backed Solana startups
85%

Colosseum's own number, published with this announcement.

01

The largest startup competition in tech

More products have been submitted here than to any other competition in crypto, and the company that runs it writes the cheques afterwards. It is one organisation doing both jobs, which is why placing well converts into capital rather than a certificate.

02

85% of venture-backed Solana startups started here

If you want to raise in this ecosystem, this is the front door, not one of several. Teams that skip it end up pitching the same investors cold, a year later, without the proof.

03

Open to every chain, for the first time

All eight tracks are funded and published. Solana, Tempo, Hyperliquid and Zcash carry $100,000 each; Ethereum L1, Base, Arbitrum and Robinhood Chain carry $25,000. You pick up to three at registration, and every submission competes for the general awards as well, so a track is upside rather than a trade-off.

04

But the accelerator money is still Solana

Colosseum was explicit: the accelerator and venture fund keep investing in Solana founders. Build on Solana and you compete in your ecosystem track, in the cross-chain pool, and for the $250,000. Build elsewhere and the third one is not on the table.

05

Judges score you like investors, not graders

Founder-market fit, unique insight, execution quality, market size, communication, business model, and traction. Clean code is table stakes, not a score.

06

The field got harder on purpose

Colosseum's reasoning for opening it up: competition compounds. You are no longer measured against other Solana teams. You are measured against the best founders in crypto. Plan for that bar, not the old one.

What's actually on the table.

$840,000 in prizes, and $2.5M of Colosseum's fund behind the teams that win. Every figure below is from the official rules, not the announcement.

In prizes
$840,000

Across the general awards and eight ecosystem tracks.

In seed funding
$2.5M

From Colosseum's venture fund, through the accelerator.

Per accelerator team
$250,000

Pre-seed, plus twelve weeks in San Francisco.

Winners announced
5 Dec

On or about 5 December, per the rules.

Open to everyone
  • Grand ChampionOne team. Paid in Phantom CASH.$30,000
  • The next 20 teams$300,000 in total, and the band that feeds the accelerator.$15,000 each
  • Public Goods AwardOne team.$5,000
  • University AwardOne team.$5,000
Pick up to three at registration
  • Solana10 products at $10,000$100,000
  • Tempo10 products at $10,000$100,000
  • Hyperliquid10 products, Hypercore or HyperEVM$100,000
  • Zcash10 products, chain or asset$100,000
  • Ethereum L15 products at $5,000$25,000
  • Base5 products at $5,000$25,000
  • Arbitrum5 products at $5,000$25,000
  • Robinhood Chain5 products at $5,000$25,000

Read the two columns together

Track prizes are additive: every submission competes for the general awards too, whichever chain you chose. But the $2.5M behind this competition is the accelerator's, and Colosseum has been explicit that it still backs Solana founders. A Base team can win $5,000. A Solana team can win $5,000, the general pool, and a $250,000 cheque.

A prize pool only Türkiye teams can win.

Colosseum organises its tracks per blockchain ecosystem, not per country, so there is no Türkiye track inside the competition itself. This runs alongside it on Superteam Earn, and it is additive: the project you enter for Colosseum's $840,000 competes here too.

USDG prize pool
10,000

On top of everything Colosseum pays.

Who can enter
Türkiye only

A regional listing. Your Colosseum profile has to say Turkey.

Same deadline
12 Oct

One project, two submissions, one clock.

Results
28 Oct

More than a month before Colosseum announces its own.

  1. 1st5,000 USDG
  2. 2nd3,000 USDG
  3. 3rd2,000 USDG
Five things, and all five are checked
  • Set Turkey as your primary base country on your Colosseum profile.
  • Fill in the Superteam Türkiye intake form so we can track you and get you mentorship.
  • Join the Colosseum hackathon group on Telegram.
  • Submit the final project to both places: the Colosseum portal and this Earn listing. One is not the other.
  • Include a pitch video (max 3 minutes), a demo video (max 3 minutes), and a public repository, or judges granted access if it stays private. Everything in English.
What the local judges score
  • Ecosystem impact. Does this add real infrastructure, tooling or value to Solana?
  • Product-market fit on Solana. Is there genuine demand, and is there early traction to point at?
  • User growth potential. Does it bring new people into the ecosystem, or deepen engagement for the ones already here?
  • Presentation and adherence to the rules. Clarity of the videos, and strict compliance with the steps below.

This track is Solana, even though the competition isn't

Three of the four criteria name Solana explicitly. Crypto World's Fair is open to every ecosystem and this pool is not, so a team building elsewhere can still win Colosseum's general awards and its own ecosystem track, but not this one. It is the same split the accelerator makes, one scale down.

Hackathon tracks on Earn don't consume submission credits. Superteam Türkiye reserves the right to announce results later than 28 October if the volume of submissions needs more review time.

Open the listing on EarnOr fill in the intake form first

Week by week, start to submission.

Four weeks is enough for exactly one strong use case. This is where each week should end.

Every week until the deadline

Four fixed slots a week, all of them free and none of them compulsory. Subscribe once and the whole programme lands in your calendar.

Subscribe on Luma
  • Wednesdays · 19:00Colosseum Community CallX SpacesThe week gets set here. One theme per call, and the room is where teams find each other.
  • Fridays · 10:00Coworking FridaysKolektif House Levent, İstanbulIn person, all day. Bring the thing you are stuck on.
  • Fridays · 19:00Colosseum Office HoursGoogle MeetOne to one. Idea validation, architecture, deck and video review: whatever is blocking you that week.
  • Saturdays · 14:00ShipyardNişantaşı, and livestreamedThe vertical deep-dive. One place Solana actually wins, worked through properly.

Community Calls

Wednesdays, X Spaces

  • 16 SepFind Your Edge
  • 23 SepFind Your Users
  • 30 SepReality Check
  • 7 OctFix What's Weak

Shipyard

Saturdays, İstanbul and livestream

  • 19 SepAI, Speed & Compute
  • 26 SepRWA, Payments & Corridors
  • 3 OctGaming, Consumer & GTM

Before you follow the official guide

Colosseum's own How to Win guide was written for a five-week hackathon and tells you to spend four weeks engineering. This edition is four weeks. Give three to building, and give the whole last week to testing, the two videos and the submission.

Before Sep 14Enter the arena and pick a fightRegister, build a team, and gap-check your idea.
  • Create a Colosseum Arena account through Superteam Türkiye's referral link.
  • Click Register in the upper-right corner and set your team location to Türkiye.
  • Register even if you have no idea and no team yet. The project and team fields open on 14 September. Delaying costs you nothing but the invites and the office hours you'd have had in the meantime.
  • Find teammates. Judges prefer teams of 3+. Solo entries are allowed, but harder.
  • Run your idea through Colosseum Copilot against 5,400+ past projects. Full or partial gap: keep going. False gap: pivot now, not in week three.
  • Fill in our orientation form so we know you're competing. It's what puts you on the list for kickoff sessions and office hours.
  • Write a one-liner you can say out loud without apologizing for it.
Week 1Narrowest possible MVPOne user, one job, one screen that works on devnet.
  • Cut scope until one use case works end to end. Overscoping is the single most common way Türkiye teams lose.
  • Wire the chain integration early: wallet connect and a real transaction. If it can exist without a chain at all, judges notice.
  • Use the existing stack instead of rebuilding it: Helius or Triton for RPC, Privy for auth, Jupiter for swaps, Squads for multisig, Pyth for prices.
  • Post your first build-in-public update. Day one of a track record is better than day twenty.
Week 2Put it in front of humansReal people used it and you have something to quote.
  • Ship a public URL. A GitHub link isn't a demo.
  • Get it in front of ten people who match your ideal customer and watch them use it, silently.
  • Write down what broke. Fix what stops adoption; ignore what only annoys you.
  • Start the pitch materials. Deck outline plus the story you'll tell on camera. Rough is fine. The structure isn't optional: Problem → Solution → Demo → Team.
Week 3Traction and narrativeNumbers on a slide and a story that explains them.
  • Instrument the product. Users, retained users, transactions, volume. Pick the two you would defend to an investor.
  • Build the narrative around the numbers, not around the vision.
  • Record a rough pitch and watch it back at 1x. If the hook isn't in the first ten seconds, rewrite it.
  • Ask Superteam Türkiye to amplify a real milestone. Not a launch announcement. A result.
Week 4 · to Oct 12Submission weekEverything uploaded two days early.
  • Pitch video, max 3 minutes: problem, solution, team, traction. Founder voice, not a voiceover artist.
  • Demo video, max 3 minutes: the product doing the thing.
  • Publish the repo. If it stays private, grant judges access. This is the most common disqualifying mistake.
  • Submit the identical project to the Superteam Türkiye local listing.
  • Know the deadline in your own timezone: 12 October, 23:59 California time. That's 09:59 on 13 October in Türkiye. Teams that assume midnight in Türkiye submit ten hours late.
  • Submit two days early anyway. The platform is slow on the last night, every single time.
After Oct 12Don't stopMomentum is a judging signal and a fundraising one.
  • Keep shipping and keep posting. Judges fund teams that didn't treat the deadline as the finish line.
  • Apply to the grant and accelerator ladder below.

Nine things between you and a valid submission.

Every one of these has cost a team its submission before. Tick them off as you go. Your progress is saved in this browser.

ready0 / 9
  • One-liner and blurb written and reviewed

    One sentence a stranger understands without a follow-up question.

    Review this with us
  • MVP live on a public domain

    Publicly accessible. A localhost screenshot isn't a product.

  • Business and revenue model written down

    How this makes money, in three sentences. Judges score it explicitly.

    Review this with us
  • Your chain integration actually working

    Wallet connect and a real transaction, at minimum. Any ecosystem qualifies this time, but read the note on where the accelerator money sits before you choose.

  • Code published, or judges granted access

    Private repos and locked Google Docs are the most common own goal.

  • Verified X account, posting daily, following the judges

    The full panel is public now: five from Colosseum, plus fifteen track judges from Phantom, Base, Anza, Arcium, Drift, Ellipsis and MetaDAO. Follow them, and build in public. Silent teams read as abandoned.

  • Pitch materials drafted and reviewed

    Deck, pitch video and demo: one story told three ways, structured Problem → Solution → Demo → Team. Bring them to us rough; polishing before feedback wastes the week.

    Review this with us
  • Project and every team member registered on Colosseum

    Members missing from the project is a silent disqualifier.

  • Same project submitted to the Superteam Türkiye listing

    Identical project, submitted twice. The Colosseum portal and the Earn listing are separate places, and doing one is not doing the other.

Everything we know, written down.

Six guides, in the order you'll need them.

  1. 01What judges actually scoreThe seven official criteria, the AI that reads you before a human does, and what they explicitly don't grade.
  2. 02Validate before you buildRun a gap analysis against 5,400+ past hackathon projects before you write a line of code. Takes an hour, saves three weeks.
  3. 03Building AI-native on SolanaWhich chain to build on now that every ecosystem qualifies, and how to reach a working product on infrastructure that already exists.
  4. 04Narrative, and building in publicUsed strategically, X measurably improves your odds. How to run it as a feedback loop rather than a megaphone, including what the algorithm rewards and what it flags.
  5. 05The submission itselfWhat to upload, in what format, why the video matters more than the deck, and the two rules that get teams disqualified.
  6. 06After the deadlineGrants, accelerators, and Eternal: with real terms. The funding ladder for teams that shipped something real, whether or not they placed.

Not another market. A verification layer.

Most of crypto assumes everything has to become a market. The opening here is narrower and more durable: products that pull scattered records together, make them verifiable, and connect them to real capital and real export channels.

Why this shape

Crypto payments are prohibited here and the Capital Markets Board regulates the rest, so the consumer plays every other market reaches for are closed. That is not a reason to build somewhere else. It is what leaves verification open, and KVKK is what makes provable-without-revealing genuinely worth money. Every idea below uses a chain as an evidence layer, never to issue a token.

01Trade and export

Provenance for Turkish exports

Türkiye produces some of the world's most counterfeited premium goods: Antep pistachios, Malatya apricots, Isparta rose oil, hand-woven carpets. Most of it goes to the EU, where traceability is turning into a legal requirement rather than a marketing line.

Build
A provenance stack from producer to EU importer. Origin attestations, certificates, shipping events, and a verification page a buyer can actually scan.
What counts in four weeks
One product category, one real exporter or cooperative, one flow that runs end to end.

Know this before you start

The chain is the easy half. An attestation is worth exactly what its source is worth, so the real problem is who signs the first record and why anyone should believe them.

02Industry and compliance

Carbon MRV for industry and EU CBAM

The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is in its definitive phase and already bites exporters of steel, aluminium, cement and fertiliser. Türkiye is standing up its own emissions regime alongside it, so the same plant ends up reporting verified emissions to two authorities that don't share a format.

Build
Not a carbon marketplace. A measurement, reporting and verification layer with tamper-evident audit trails, verifier sign-off, and exports shaped for both regimes.
What counts in four weeks
One sector, sample facility data, one report a compliance officer would actually file.

Know this before you start

Real emissions data lives in ERP systems nobody opens for a hackathon. Work from a published methodology with synthetic but correctly shaped data, and say so on the slide. Overstating the data you hold is the one thing a verification product cannot survive.

03Insurance and lending

Vehicle history and underwriting

Türkiye runs one of the region's largest used-car markets, and the record of any given car is scattered across service networks, insurers, notaries and marketplaces. Odometer fraud and undisclosed damage price into every loan and every policy written.

Build
An aggregation and verification layer that turns those fragments into a vehicle profile a lender, insurer or marketplace can rely on.
What counts in four weeks
Mileage and service-history integrity across one fleet or one service network, plus an underwriting API something else can call.

Know this before you start

The national registries are not open to you. Start where consent already works: one service network that holds its own records and will let you attest them, rather than the dataset you can't reach.

04Credit and mobility

Portable credit history

Skilled professionals leaving Türkiye for Europe arrive with no credit history at all, after years of borrowing responsibly at home. They pay for that gap in deposits, in rates, and in applications that just get refused.

Build
Zero-knowledge proofs of creditworthiness derived from Turkish credit records, verifiable by a foreign lender or landlord without exposing anything underneath. Consent and KVKK belong in the design, not bolted on at the end.
What counts in four weeks
A working proof flow, and a verifier demo on the receiving side.

Know this before you start

The blocker is access, not cryptography. The bureau holds the records and will not hand API keys to a hackathon team. Build over the report a person can export for themselves, which is where consent belongs anyway.

What this list isn't

Deliberately narrow, and not a condition of anything. Nobody scores higher for picking from it, and we aren't only interested in these. It's where our partners and our own experience let us help most. If you're building elsewhere, the Shipyard sessions cover AI and compute, payments and corridors, and consumer go-to-market.

Who we want to hear from

Teams with real operator experience in fintech, insurance, trade or industry, and teams who already have a domain partner. If that's you, tell us before you start building rather than after.

Tell us what you're buildingOr talk it through in the group

Superteam Türkiye

You're not competing alone.

What we run, and what we expect back.

01

Events and workshops

Four sessions a week, in person in İstanbul and online. The full shape is in the route above. Free, and none of it compulsory.

See the weekly rhythm
02

Mentorship and pitch review

Product, technical and pitch questions, one to one. We read the deck and watch your videos before the judges do.

Ask on Telegram
03

Social amplification

Shipped milestones, in front of the Solana ecosystem through our channels. Results only. We don't amplify announcements.

04

Membership, grants and perks

Membership is earned, not given. Ship something real these four weeks and you have the strongest application we accept.

How membership works

Three ways in, one team behind them.

Registering tells Colosseum you exist. These tell us, and each one unlocks a different kind of help.

  1. 013 – 21 September
    Orientation
    • Kickoff and workshop invites
    • Idea validation slot
    • Cofounder matching
    Tell us you're competing
  2. 0222 September – 6 October
    Acceleration
    • One-liner and blurb iterated with us
    • Camera and audio for your recordings
    • Introductions to judges
    Ask for intensive support
  3. 03From 6 October
    Post-hackathon
    • Grant and accelerator support
    • Launch amplification
    • Membership review
    Ask about what comes next
Come with
  • Idea validation and gap analysis, before you start building.
  • Technical direction: architecture, stack choices, what to cut.
  • Pitch material review: deck, pitch video, demo, across as many rounds as you need.
  • Demo and pitch video feedback before you upload.
Telegram

Superteam Türkiye

Workshops, mentors and every other team competing from Türkiye, in one place. Ask here first. Most answers help more than one team.

Join the groupOr message us directly

Questions worth answering.

Before you enter
Do I need to be a developer?

No. Winning teams combine technical and business people. Founders, designers, product people, and domain experts are all needed, but a team with nobody who can ship code will struggle in four weeks.

What does it cost?

Nothing. Registration is free, the competition is free, and everything Superteam Türkiye runs around it (workshops, office hours, pitch reviews) is free. The only thing it costs is four weeks.

Do I need to speak English?

For the submission, yes, and it's a rule, not a convention. Section 12 of the official rules: all content must be in English. You don't need to be fluent. Clear beats polished, and judges watch hundreds of these. We'll review your script and your video before you upload, in Turkish or English, whichever you think in.

Do I need to know blockchain, or Rust?

No Rust. Most winning products are applications, not protocols, and modern Solana work is largely TypeScript against hosted infrastructure. If you can ship a web product you can ship here; the chain-specific part is a wallet connection and a transaction. Start with the AI-native stack guide.

How big should my team be?

Two to five people with complementary skills. Solo is allowed and judges have funded solo founders, but you're competing against teams.

I don't have an idea yet.

Start with the Superteam Idea Bank, then run a gap analysis against past projects before you commit to anything. Cofounder matching on Arena is where you find people to build it with, and Colosseum publishes the ecosystem tracks on 14 September, which is the sharpest prompt list you'll get.

Am I eligible?

Eligibility is narrower than most people assume: this is for new startups that haven't raised significant outside capital. If you've already raised a round, read Colosseum's rules before you commit four weeks to it.

Can I enter more than one project?

No. One product per team, and one per person: you can't submit two projects, and you can't appear on two submissions. This is a disqualifying rule, not a guideline.

Does creating an Arena account register me?

No, and this catches people every year. Create the account, then separately click Register on the hackathon page. Both steps are required.

Does every team member have to register?

Yes, individually, and this one is a disqualifier. Section 6 of the official rules: every member must register on colosseum.com before 11:59pm PT on 12 October, the same moment as the submission deadline. After that the individual registration form is disabled, and any member who hasn't completed it is disqualified. It takes two minutes per person, so do it in week one rather than on deadline night.

Do I have to build on Solana?

No. Crypto World's Fair is the first Colosseum competition open to builders across blockchain ecosystems, with prize tracks per ecosystem and a general pool across all of them. One thing didn't change, though: Colosseum's accelerator and venture fund still invest in Solana founders. So Solana teams compete for their track, the cross-chain pool and the $250,000 accelerator place; teams on other chains compete for the first two. Build where your product genuinely belongs, and know what you're trading if that isn't Solana.

While you're building
Can I compete remotely?

Yes. The hackathon is global and online. Superteam Türkiye's sessions run online, with in-person events announced on the calendar.

Can I compete with a project I started before?

Yes, and a running start is an advantage: judges are evaluating a company's trajectory. Two conditions, though. Only work done inside the window is judged, so you still need dated proof of work: commits, shipped features, users acquired. And you have to disclose all prior development on the submission form. Colosseum's own words for teams that don't: they disqualify the team, ban the builders from future hackathons, and revoke prizes. Disclosing costs you nothing. Building on other people's open source is fine and encouraged; this rule is about your own earlier work.

Prizes and after
When do we find out?

Section 13 of the official rules puts it on or about 5 December 2026, roughly seven weeks after the deadline. Judging isn't instant, and the teams that keep shipping through those seven weeks are the ones the accelerator interviews.

Is this a hackathon or a startup competition?

Colosseum calls it a hackathon and runs it as a startup competition. Five of the seven judging criteria are business criteria, the prize money is smaller than the accelerator cheque behind it, and winners are interviewed as founders rather than graded as entrants. Build accordingly: a working product with real users beats a technically impressive weekend project every time.

Still stuck? Ask in the group

Everything else, in one place.

Colosseum

How to win

Other chapters

Build and fund