Coinbase’s Base hackathon faces backlash over employee-linked fake projects

A recent hackathon by Coinbase’s base network is under fire. Investigation by community members revealed that winning projects were potentially linked to Coinbase’s own employees.

Developers have long questioned whether coding competitions and hackathons actually help the participants. Programmers often share their frustrations online about events that are designed for publicity under the guise of supporting developers.

For instance, some past competitions have faced criticism. The criticism includes CodeX’s small prizes, increased student costs at Hack the Hill, and a 2013 incident where Salesforce allegedly favored pre-selected winners.

Coinbase’s Onchain Summer Awards event is under fire

The latest controversy involves Coinbase’s Base, which held the “Onchain Summer Awards” competition last month. Over 500 developer teams participated in the event and competed for $200,000 in total prizes. Organizers said winners would be chosen based on actual user engagement with their applications.

However, developers spotted problems when the results came out on October 7. Alanas, co-founder of Ogvio, closely investigated the winning entries and uncovered some concerning details.

The top projects seem to be fake apps

The second-place project called owatch and third-place winner Opi Trade appeared to be fake applications, according to Alanas’s analysis posted on X (formerly Twitter). He described both as basic web pages created by AI with no real features or functionalities.

The investigation took an interesting turn when connections were found between the fake projects and Coinbase’s employees. This is particularly surprising since Coinbase owns the Base network that ran the competition.

What makes this situation worse is that legitimate teams with working products lost to these empty shells. The participant list included many developers who had already built and launched real applications that people actually use.

Angry developers have been messaging the Base team on social media, asking for answers about how fake projects won major prizes. The organizers have stayed silent and haven’t addressed any of the accusations.

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