Announcing the thirdweb Solanathon Winners 🏆

The day is finally here — today, we're extremely excited to announce the winners of our first-ever hackathon: Solanathon!!! 🎉

With 200+ developers building the next generation of web3 apps on Solana, it was incredibly difficult for our judges to come to a decision. To our participants, thank you all for building with us — we were blown away by what you were able to do in just 7 days.

And for those looking to get started on their web3 journey, or wanting to take their skills to the next level, we hope you'll get some inspiration out of the creativity in all of these projects.

So without further ado, here are the 3 winning projects...

*drumroll please...* 🥁🥁🥁

🥉 3rd Place: Rakugaki

Built by Taiju Sanagi (@ookimaki_dev)

Rakugaki enables users to create AI-generated images as digital collectibles on the Solana blockchain! Powered by the popular text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion, anyone can use Rakugaki to feed it text prompts (can be as simple or imaginative as you want) and generate stunning images that can be minted as NFTs — all in a few clicks.

Check out the full details & tech stack used in the video here, and try the demo for yourself here.

🥈 2nd Place: RareLabs

Built by Freddy González (@fredoist)

RareLabs is a launchpad platform, enabling creators to launch & manage NFT collections & web3 experiences, easily. On the app, users can create new collections, mint NFTs, and build a custom page to share & showcase the collection with their audiences.

Check out the full details & tech stack used on Freddy's blog, and try the demo for yourself here.

🥇 1st Place: Dungeon3

Built by Giovanni Fu Lin (@giovannifulin)

Dungeon3 is an RPG adventure game, where players can fight enemies, explore dungeons, & collect coins — using their NFT characters, playable in-game! Players start the game by minting their avatars as free NFTs, entering the token-gated game, and then saving their progress on-chain, through a custom Solana program (or "smart contract").

Check out the full details & tech stack used on Giovanni's blog, and watch the demo video here.

...and that's a wrap! A huge thanks to all of our participants again — we're excited to bring you more opportunities like Solanathon in the near future. 🌟 

And if you're looking to get started on your web3 journey, or want to take your business to the next level... what are you waiting for?

🔥 Contract Launch: Unlock Protocol Takes NFT Ticketing, Subscriptions, & Memberships to the Next Level

If you're building in web3, you might know that NFT membership models have been tough to crack. Without a time-based component, such as expiration date, it's difficult for builders to capture recurring revenue & keep creating value for users.

That is, until now: we're excited for Unlock Protocol to launch the gold standard for time-based NFTs on thirdweb — unlocking (pun intended) use cases such as SaaS subscriptions, time-based token membership clubs, events ticketing, and more.

Deploy it with one click here, onto any blockchain, and learn more about how you can use it to power your web3 company or project below:

📹 YouTube Tutorial: The Reddit Avatar Drop, and how you can replicate it (Marketplace App, Web3 Sign-In, & more)

In this video, we'll teach you more about how the popular Reddit NFT Drop worked, and how you can replicate it! We'll take you step-by-step in developing a Polygon-based NFT marketplace, with a powerful user experience for beginners. By the end of this video, you'll have learned how to create:

• A Web3 Marketplace App

• A Web3 Wallet with Email Sign-In (using Magic Link)

• An NFT Drop Smart Contract

... and more.

📚 Guide: How to Create & Launch an NFT Collection (Drop) on the Optimism Network

In this guide, we'll teach you how to deploy and build an NFT Drop (or Collection) on the Optimism Network — one of the most popular Ethereum L2's — using the thirdweb dashboard! Then, we'll take you step-by-step in creating a simple website, using Next.js, where users can claim NFTs from the drop.

🗓️ Events & Workshops

Weekly Office Hours | Monday, November 14th | 12pm EDT / 9am PDT

Have a great rest of your week shippin'! 🚢 🛠️ And if you're ever looking for 30,000+ other builders to learn from & share your web3 journey with, look no further than our Discord community 🤝