This past weekend, the Lightning Bounties team returned to the MIT Bitcoin Hackathon — not as participants, but as mentors. Just one year after winning Track 1 with our GitHub-Bitcoin payment integration, we found ourselves guiding 510 hackers through the challenges we had faced ourselves. This full-circle journey from competitors to coaches at the “Freedom Tech” hackathon highlighted not only Bitcoin’s growing ecosystem but also the powerful community knowledge transfer that drives innovation forward. Here’s our story of mentorship, technical challenges, and the incredible projects that emerged over those intensive 30 hours.

The Birth of Lightning Bounties Last spring, we huddled around a table at MIT, frantically debugging Lightning Network connections as the final minutes of the 2024 hackathon ticked down. Our project — a system to automatically reward open-source contributors on GitHub with Bitcoin — was held together with equal parts code, grit, and Red Bull.

Lightning Bounties 2024 MIT Bitcoin Hackathon When Lightning Bounties was announced as the Track 1 winner we experienced that rare moment of validation every builder craves. The enthusiastic response from judges and fellow participants confirmed we’d identified a genuine problem worth solving in open-source development.

That single weekend transformed our trajectory entirely. Within a year, we evolved from a hackathon project to a vibrant startup featured in Bitcoin News and selected as a finalist in PlebLab’s Top Builder competition

Why We Returned as Mentors We chose to mentor at this year’s hackathon because Lightning Bounties is living proof that a weekend project built on grit can evolve into something meaningful. The doors that opened for us — media exposure, accelerator programs, industry connections — are waiting for the next wave of builders too.