There are grants available here as far as I know.
In my opinion, previous winners should apply for grants instead of competing in hackathons. It is disadvantageous for newer projects.
Having said that, I am very pleased with how the hackathon organizers have taken steps to disqualify projects that haven’t made considerable progress since the previous submission.
So let say USAIN BOLT has been winning gold medals so he should be excluded from running races because it serves as a disadvantage to other athletes.
Will that be fair to Usain Bolt???
What do you suggest other athletes should do in other to win gold?
They have to work harder, be tougher, be more discipline, engage with other athletes to see if their workout are paying off.
If Usain bolt train five hours a day, u should be willing to train 10 hours. If he goes 3miles a day you should be willing to go 6.
It is only through this much dedication that you can overtake him.
The only advantage you have is to build something that will draw attention to your project, something unique. Also spend time building a community.
In the end, u r building for a community yet you dont have a community of your own.
A prime example of comparing apples to oranges.
But let’s run with it (pun intended).
Imagine if Usain bolt competed in regional competitions (hackathons) continuously and stops local runners from winning instead of moving up and participating in Olympics (grants).
I voiced my concerns in the beginning. And I am satisfied with the answer admin gave me here:
And again, I am pleased with how the organizers have made the effort to disqualify low-quality submissions to make it fair for newcomers.
And for tron i think this is the only hackathon available, so how do u expect them to move to a higher tier hackathon here.
Or there are higher tier hackathon for trondao that we are not aware of.
The grants does not give the adrenaline feel most of the projects are looking for. 
This changes really helped.Stronger together
This is it and the best so far.
Community building if of good relevance.
As in he adage goes “two good heads are better than one”.
You have said exactly what was in my mind. Newcomers can’t compete with establish and know teams/individual. What I want to add would be the fact that maybe a difference should be made between a team and individual projects. The number of the members should be reflected in price structure but should also be reflected in project itself(double the members/double the prize/double the work). And another fact I saw that most community voted for nice UI projects rather than functionality. I am saying that because behind the close doors an impressive work for some project was done but due to lack of UI/UX design those project did not had the exposure and reward that they should get.
And maybe some more projects as runner ups. I saw that the prizes are huge amounts. Maybe smaller amount to more project and I am saying that because those project that were accepted had a lot of work behind and an incentive would be created to update them/improve or simply continue the development.
That’s somehow my feedback!
(Not sure if I’m allowed to ping @admin.hackathon without actual violation report, sorry if not)
To ensure publicity and fair voting, it would be great if you share voting results in csv/sql (or other adequate machine-readable) format in public. I have an appropriate academic background and would really like to play with the data in R to look for outliers and suspicious activity. The data should be anonymised, of course, and only admins should check IP sources, nicknames etc. The fields that are necessary for basic statistical analysis, IMO, are the following: project ID, voter ID (random, to join multiple votes from one person together), vote timestamp, and whether the voter represents any of projects (such voters are definitely legitimate).
You can also share two datasets: initial votes (everything we see as of voting close time) and filtered votes (dataset after hackathon team removed suspicious votes).
As an example of why this is important, I did a quick check for one of possible questions. Null hypothesis (assumption): “The amount of link opens (shown near every link) for web3 track projects does not depend on their position in the list”. This hypothesis can be rejected (correlation analysis views ~ index shows a noticeable correlation - -0.48 linear and -0.49 log(views) ~ index, and chart reveals that the correlation is non-linear in fact, so the coefficient doesn’t account for all variation). Even comparison top vs bottom half has shown huge difference, with p<0.04 for assumption “first group has received less views” and p<0.08 - for “first and second halves received the same amount of views”). This data was collected by manually copying the numbers and removing row 4 (where the amount doesn’t show up, which is certainly a bug - I clicked that link).
This is, strictly speaking, unfair - though it doesn’t seem to heavily affect voting results, which also looks suspicious. And this effect could’ve been easily avoided by shuffling rows for every unique visitor (a few javascript lines). What I say above basically means that most voters opened first 5-6 links to examine the project in detail and judged remaining projects by name and pitch in the title only. This is … well, not great, if these 5-6 projects are always the same.
This is not required by any rules, of course, but will give you more participants’ trust. I want to be able to check whether the voting and your analysis were fair.
To sum up (if anyone is interested in my feedback, though I doubt so), I’m really frustrated by the organisation (first time participant here, with 3 other hackathon prizes before), and will definitely not come back to season 4 (and perhaps to Tron ecosystem too, but for different reasons which are broader than hackathon-related forum post and perhaps not worth discussing - I just have much more well-documented and convenient alternatives, plus this may be partially opinion-based). Public voting may be a good idea, but the rules for it have to be much more explicit and well-defined. However, at least some public data could slightly improve current situation - it also includes publishing all disqualification reports and explaining them when participants reasonably disagree with this decision.
The feedback is interesting and every opinion that can help the ecosystem to improve worth sharing 
Your project got a nice 5th place, close to 4. I’ve checked it a while ago and shared it to several devs on Tron who also liked the idea. Actually I wonder why I didn’t give you a vote 
but anyway wait for the result of the judges, you might get a good surprise, who knows. You may also apply to the Trondao developers grant: trondao.org.
Actually it’s 4th place, isn’t it? Two projects have the same votes count (43 each), and the rules don’t seem to define additional ordering under such circumstances. Though it’s kinda interesting how the funds will be distributed…
Please note I say nothing about whether I’m satisfied with the results or not - I just express my opinion on overall process. Tbh, I was not going to do anything to win forum prizes (and still don’t - IMO proper judging is much more interesting, and this is nothing more than a funny side effect), so I’m extremely surprised by this result.
No, I’m not going to apply for tron developers grant and remain tron developer in long future (though I’m going to polish this library just to serve as a cool part of my portfolio).
Nice analysis. Regarding Tron vs. Other hackathons and fair/unfair voting we should always consider that the bigger slice of the cake is awarded by judges (about 1M$ on Devpost and 200k here). The community part is minor and it’s made to engage users and developers into a productive discussion, that would not be present otherwise.
From the rules:
The TRON DAO Forum prizes as seen in Section 8 will be awarded based on community votes on the TRON Forum projects. https://forum.trondao.org/ Projects posted on the forum are required to select one of the Track tags at entry: Web3, DeFi, GameFi, NFT, Ecosystem, or Academy. Potential winners of these prizes must be eligible to participate according to these official rules. The sponsor reserves the right to break ties for this prize.
Ough, thank you! How could I miss that…
The 2nd paragraph from that text is helpful too:
Tie Breaking. For each Track Prize listed below, if two or more submissions are tied, the tied submission with the highest score in the first applicable criterion listed above will be considered the higher scoring submission. In the event any ties remain, this process will be repeated, as needed, by comparing the tied Submissions’ scores on the next applicable criterion. If two or more submissions are still tied on all applicable criteria, the panel of Judges shall vote to decide the winner.
So these are 4th and 5th places of Schroedinger now:)
So you trying to say because one is successful in a thing, he should be pushed away from other opportunities just because he has been successful and winning?, That’s really unfair and will not amount to a good competition.
Did you even read my posts? I’m done arguing on this. Let’s agree to disagree. Hope you have a good day.
The main thing is to submit a quality project.
Always aim high. If party A always win it means the other projects should up their game. This is a challenge for other projects.
We need a healthy competition between projects on tron to send tron to the moon. Projects on Bsc always build to bring more people to their ecosystem. That’s what we need here too. It shouldn’t be team A always but that depends on the other teams. Sit up and work harder
