Use this guide to shape your hackathon story, keeping in mind that this is a suggested format, not a requirement. Write as much or as little as feels natural, the goal is an authentic account of your experience.
1. Introduce your team
Share your names, backgrounds, and what each person contributed. Help readers understand who you are before diving into what you built.
Prompts: Where are you from? What do you study or do professionally? How did you come together as a team?
Example: We are PayFlow — three developers who met during the Interledger Hackathon and immediately bonded over a shared frustration with how broken cross-border payments are for freelancers. Amara is a backend engineer from Lagos with five years of fintech experience. Priya is a full-stack developer based in Bangalore who has been building Web3 tooling for the past two years. And I'm Diego, a product engineer from São Paulo who spent three years at a remittance startup watching people lose money to fees on every single transaction.
📷 Team photo — A candid from the event works great. Add a caption with everyone's name.
2. Hackathon experience
Reflect on the hackathon and the challenge you tackled -- what did you learn, and how did it shape your approach going in?
Prompts: Which resources stood out? Was there a moment that shifted how you thought about the challenge?
Example: The overall experience was more hands-on than we expected. The Open Payments API session was the turning point for us. Before that, we had been thinking about our problem in terms of traditional payment rails. Afterwards, we scrapped our original idea entirely and started over.
3. Your hackathon background
Give readers context about your experience with hackathons. Is this your first? Your tenth? What keeps you coming back?
Prompts: What do you enjoy about the format? What surprised you about this one specifically?
Example: Amara and Priya are hackathon veterans. Between them, they've competed in over a dozen events. For me, this was my second. What makes hackathons different from regular sprint work is the permission to be reckless in the best possible way: you prototype things you'd never get sign-off for in a normal product cycle. What surprised us about this one was how much the mentorship changed the experience.
4. The problem you tackled
Lead with the "why." What issue did you set out to solve, and why does it matter? Then explain how Interledger technology made your solution possible.
Prompts: Who is affected by this problem? Why was Interledger the right tool?
Example: Freelancers in the Global South lose between 5% and 12% of every payment to international transfer fees — before taxes, before platform cuts. For someone earning $500 a month, that's money gone. We wanted to build something that made cross-border micropayments fast, cheap, and programmable. Interledger was the foundation: the protocol doesn't care about currency or geography, and the Open Payments standard gave us a clean API to build on top of rather than reinventing settlement logic from scratch.
5. Your tech solution
Walk readers through how your project works: the architecture, the stack, the key decisions, and any pivots along the way.
Prompts: What technologies did you use? What tradeoffs did you make? What would you do differently?
Example: PayFlow is a lightweight invoicing and payment layer built on top of the Open Payments API. A freelancer generates an invoice link in under 30 seconds; the client pays into an Interledger-compatible wallet; the freelancer receives a notification and the funds settle within seconds. We built the frontend in Next.js, used Rafiki as our local ILP node for testing, and integrated with a testnet wallet for the demo. The trickiest part was handling the grant negotiation flow cleanly in the UI — we ended up abstracting that into a single hook that other developers could reuse.
🖼 Screenshots or demo visuals — Add captions so readers know what they're looking at. A short demo clip or Loom works great here too.
6. The pitch
What was it like presenting to the judges and other participants? Be honest — vulnerability makes for great reading.
Prompts: Were you nervous? What questions came up? What did you learn from the feedback?
Example: We were nervous. We had 10 minutes and a live demo that we'd only tested successfully three times. One of the judges asked us how we'd handle regulatory compliance across different jurisdictions, and honestly, we didn't have a clean answer. But the question itself was clarifying. It told us exactly where the product needed to grow. The feedback from other teams after the presentation was just as valuable as the judges' comments.
7. Mentorship
Reflect on your interactions with mentors from Interledger and beyond.
Prompts: Was there a conversation that shifted your direction? What's one insight you're still thinking about?
Example: We had a session with one of the Interledger mentors on day two that saved us probably six hours of debugging. We'd been fighting with the incoming payment polling logic, and within 20 minutes he spotted that we were misreading the grant expiry behavior in the spec. Beyond the technical help, something he said stuck with us: "Don't build for the protocol. Build for the person who will never know the protocol exists." That became our north star for the rest of the hackathon.
8. What's next?
Are you continuing to develop your solution? Share your next steps or what you're taking with you even if the project pauses.
Prompts: What would v2 look like? Are you pursuing partners, funding, or open source contributors?
Example: We're continuing. The plan for the next 90 days is to move off the testnet and onboard five real freelancers as beta users — people in our own networks who are already dealing with this problem. We are exploring whether there's a path to building PayFlow as an open source tool that other developers can deploy for their own communities. If you're building on Open Payments and want to collaborate, we'd love to hear from you.
🏆 Closing photo — team with prize — End on a high note, celebrate the win!
The Interledger Hackathon Team
Top comments (1)
This template is great, @bibschan !