Event alert: Mars Hackathon launched in India to empower developers with robust decentralized storage solution

Filecoin, an innovative open-source cloud storage network in association with Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a unique peer-to-peer storage protocol, announced the launch of Mars Hackathon 2021 today.

Launched in partnership with Polygon, an Indian layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution and organized by Lumos Labs, an innovation management firm,  this virtual hackathon spanning over two months is part of the larger Asia Hackathon Season 2021.

The Asia Hackathon Season is a multi-month Asia-focused hackathon series aimed at identifying, accelerating, and highlighting the impressive advancements being achieved on Filecoin and IPFS stacks by talented developers in the Asian subcontinent.

The Web3 wave in India has attracted global attention and the Indian developer community has proven its competency by solving relevant real-world issues through accessible solutions. The overall Indian public cloud services market is likely to touch $7.4 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 22.2% for 2020-24.

With its first India-focused hackathon, the Mars Hackathon 2021, Filecoin aims to strengthen the community further and pave the path towards more creation and innovation within decentralized storage technologies. It will be focused on providing the right tools to the robust developer ecosystem of India and helping them in creating and improving their innovations.

This eight-week hackathon is open to beginners as well as experienced coders and is a platform for developers to explore the world of decentralized storage. Participants can learn by creating new or enhancing existing dApps that solve everyday decentralized storage problems on FIlecoin or IPFS networks or by building on Polygon while exploring the utility of Filecoin and IPFS for their storage requirements. Starting from September 7, 2021, this unique hackathon is aimed at revolutionizing the world of storage in Asia.

Grants and prizes worth $500K are available to the teams, startups,  projects, and entrepreneurs choosing to continue their journey of building on the Filecoin and IPFS stacks. Beyond hackathons, together with the collaborators and partners of the FIlecoin and IPFS ecosystem, participants stand to gain networking opportunities that will open various platforms for their ideas to grow into winning ventures.

“We are looking forward to witnessing the new and innovative solutions that will come through during the Mars Hackathon. The growth of the Indian developer ecosystem in the decentralized space has been highly impressive till now and we are delighted to have the opportunity to see it in real-time. Through Mars Hackathon, we hope to encourage and empower developers and entrepreneurs to solve significant problems, ship innovative applications and shape the future of the web to be more decentralized, robust, and secure. Asia is a budding technology ecosystem and blockchain technology has brought certain regions of Asia to the forefront globally. We hope to be a part of this growing ecosystem through Filecoin, our decentralized storage solution and help in fixing the pitfalls of the current centralized cloud infrastructure,” mentioned Angie Maguire – Head Of Growth and Marketing, Filecoin.

“We have seen the decentralized world boom rapidly due to its independent nature and have seen India at the forefront of this boom since the beginning. As part of the Indian developer community ourselves, we have witnessed the growth right in front of us, and are well aware of the potential of the Indian blockchain ecosystem. Through this hackathon, we are excited to see what more can the developer and builder community of India create in the Web3 ecosystem space,” added Sandeep Nailwal, COO and Co-Founder, Polygon.

The Hackathon is launched in partnership with Lumos Labs, an innovation management firm specializing in running technology open innovation programs in India. The entries will be judged by a distinguished panel of industry leaders and subject matter experts on three primary aspects of problem selection, solution innovation, and impact achieved. The registration window will be open from September 7 – October 10, 2021, which will be followed by multiple rounds of filtration, and finally five teams in the final cohort will present their solutions in the Final Demo Day.