Summary

LayerTwoLabs is paying $60,000 in an ongoing hackathon!

Six weeks, $10k per week!

Objective

The fastest time wins!

  1. Visit thunder-rust and fork it (into a private repo).
  2. Observe the sync time – automatically calculated via GitHub Actions, which will run cargo bench via check_lint_build.yaml. (Currently 60.257 seconds, for 5x 160MB blocks).
  3. Improve the performance – and check your new score.
  4. Message Paul on Telegram – (to deter spam, you must pay 405 stars ($5), sorry) – saying “I am entering the contest, and I have read the whole announcement” – and invite/link to your code!

Prize Money

Money to be awarded as follows:

image

Let me clarify:

  • Colors correspond to contest periods. The contest repeats every week.
  • The very first contest, is 2 weeks long (instead of 1 week).
  • The columns correspond to how many entrants there are.
    • If only one person enters the contest (and qualifies), then they will earn $10,000.
    • If three people enter the contest (and they all qualify), then 1st place gets $4,500, and 2nd and 3rd places each get $2,225.
  • The final contest, ends Aug 19, 2025 – but may continue!
  • Blocks are currently set to 160 MB – but we may increase this, up to 800 MB, over the life of the contest.

Also, you only Qualify (as a potential winner) if:

  • You improve the published sync time by at least 5%.
  • Your code includes a (short) ReadMe where you explain…
    • …what you decided to change,
    • …and why.
  • You did not “cheat” – (by, for example, just commenting out all the validation code).

Drastic changes – such as rewriting the codebase in a different language – are technically allowed, but it will be very difficult for us to evaluate your work. So you may lose (if, for example, we feel we cannot trust the benchmark calculation).

More Details

  • The submission window ends on NOON, Eastern Time (NYC). So, the first submission window ends July 15th, at noon (in New York City).
  • Message Paul with your submission, by then!
  • The winner will be announced by Thursday at 5 PM (NYC time). Their winning code will be made public! (It will become the new reference implementation.)
  • You may collect your reward in either BTC, or USD.

Helpful Suggestions

  • Eric Voskuil improved Bitcoin Core’s performance by a staggering 50x (-98%). He obviously has an idea or two. Perhaps you should study his work; or ask him for ideas.
  • There’s some useful information, at drivechain.info/dev.txt.
  • (I’ll add more suggestions here, if I think of any.)

Fine Print

  • We reserve the right to cancel this whole experiment (at any time) – if it turns out to be a disaster.
  • We also reserve the right to increase the prize amounts – or award extra prizes, if there are many great submissions.
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