Hey @ThanXFinance, we appreciated your rational feedback. Let us make clarification on the Hackathon Rules. As you know, most of the hackathon competitions out there only allow newly-built projects that are built during the hackathon. We extended our gratitude to accept existing hackathon participants to our hackathon each time.
However, doing this introduces another problem where new participants may feel it is not fair for existing projects to compete with newly-built projects, therefore we need to have stricter rules for existing participants to make the hackathon fair for all participants.
Therefore the requirements our team is looking for while evaluating existing projects is to ensure that projects that have participated in existing hackathons will have to launch their project live on mainnet and made available for the public to use. There needs to be a public announcement of some sort so the project won’t simply deploy their possibly buggy testnet project on the mainnet. This is to prevent people from recycling their projects into a new hackathon season without ever launching their projects or launching a project that is unusable.
The project team also needs to ensure all their milestones set during the past season are completed to show that they are competent in fulfilling their promises. The project team does not need to complete all future milestones that were set during S2 as you have said, but they need to ensure whatever was planned during the existing hackathon is completed according to the timeframe set.
Projects that simply break their projects into “new” ones, or projects that simply rebrand themselves also don’t qualify. Therefore, we are seeing a lot of projects that didn’t make it to the eligible list as we are being strict with all of the projects. Projects that “improve” their existing project are eligible provided that they have made “significant updates” and stated them clearly.
If the new features added to existing projects are significant enough to become an app or dapp of its own, then it most likely will be eligible for the hackathon as it can be considered as a “new project”. If the project only makes non-significant updates, such as UI rebrand and adding similar features as what it already had, or introduced features that were supposed to be launched during the past milestones, then it most likely won’t be eligible.
We launched the TRON HackaTRON to attract and retain as many projects as we can in our ecosystem; simply removing eligible projects from our hackathon defeats the purpose. We have a strict pre-judging stage to make the hackathon as fair as possible to all participants and we thank you for your understanding and continuous support!