Monad has launched Metropolis, a six-week global hackathon aimed at turning early-stage ideas into working applications and startups on its Layer 1 network. The official Metropolis portal opened registrations and building on September 1, with submissions due October 13 and a total prize pool exceeding $250,000. The program gives developers more than a month to move from prototypes toward deployable products across finance, payments, social applications and AI infrastructure.
The competition is organized around four tracks: Onchain Finance & Trading, Consumer Products & Payments, Social, Attention & Culture, and Trust, Identity & AI Infrastructure. Each track carries $30,000 in prizes, while additional funding is available through an overall award and sponsor-specific challenges. Metropolis is structured around functional applications rather than a single technical theme, giving teams room to build across several of Monad’s emerging use cases.
Sponsors Add AI and Infrastructure Bounties
The sponsor roster extends the competition beyond Monad’s core prize pool. Partners include MetaMask, Alibaba Cloud Qwen, Kimi, Nansen, Chainlink, Alchemy, Agora, Privy and Dynamic, among others, with participants receiving access to combinations of cash bounties, infrastructure, developer tools and AI resources. The additional challenges encourage teams to combine Monad with existing wallet, data, AI and application infrastructure rather than build every component from scratch.
That developer environment is supported by infrastructure providers already connected to Monad. Alchemy’s Monad developer platform describes the network as fully EVM-compatible and provides RPC, API, webhook and gas-management tooling for applications built on it. For hackathon teams, EVM compatibility lowers the integration barrier by allowing established Ethereum development frameworks and smart contracts to be adapted to Monad without an entirely new software stack.
Metropolis also includes one-day physical hacker houses in New York, San Francisco, London, Buenos Aires, Singapore, Hangzhou and Shenzhen. The events combine technical sessions, mentoring and coworking during the online build period. The seven-city format adds local development support to what remains fundamentally a global online competition.
Top Teams Can Continue Beyond the Hackathon
Judging is scheduled for October 14 through October 27, with winners expected to be announced November 3. Top-performing teams will also be eligible for ecosystem support and invitations to a residency program alongside other Monad builders. The residency pathway gives selected projects a route to continue development after prize judging rather than ending support when the hackathon closes.
That distinction matters because hackathon participation alone does not establish sustainable application demand. Prize incentives can generate substantial short-term development activity, but adoption depends on whether teams continue building, attract users and maintain products after the competition. Metropolis gives Monad a large developer-acquisition program, while the more meaningful test will be how many of its six-week experiments develop into durable applications and startups.
