Before judging me, check both winning project and my project in the link. It’s shocking how openly Bolt rigged the results.

I also checked numbers: 17/20 main prizes went to US/Canada/EU projects, even though they were hardly 25% of total projects were from there. Most prize money went to five cities. It’s not about project quality, many projects on Devpost Gallery are far better. This feels like classic bias, maybe they didn’t like our accent or didn’t watch our video. Yet they called it a “Global Hackathon” while collecting paid users.

The winning project doesn’t work. It’s a video editor that doesn’t show video editing. The demo on localhost has errors shown, demo video seems to be fabricated by AI, doesn’t link to Bolt website as must required rule to qualify. When asked why, Bolt said it was a late submission. But are rules not for fair judgment? Most importantly does not work, and no one is able to test it yet. Some times webhook error, sometimes upload error, some times random crash,

When I raised concerns, Bolt moderated me off/blocked me and others to posts on Reddit/Discord. No discussion allowed, so on hacker news

Then their CEO tweeted how they gave us $1K worth of tools to win $100K. But most of those were trial credits, people like me had to buy more tokens just to build properly.

Honestly, I feel terrible. I trusted this hackathon to be fair. I can’t stop thinking about all the time I spent building for this hackathon. I’ve joined another 1-month hackathon (RevenueCat), but can’t even motivate myself. Our community is hosting the kickoff for Tokyo, but Bolt just poisoned my excitement for public hackathon. Rotten potato!

Maybe we’ll never prove it was rigged or irresponsibly judged. But this should be on Hacker News.

Bolt claims all winners’ projects worked, but dev tools show uncaught errors, mock data, CORS issues, even dev themselves consoled log “using mock data” in console. They still blamed traffic. Don't forget winners project is still not running properly. Not a single video has been edited from that website.

One winner didn’t even submit a deployed URL, yet still won. Public URL was clearly marked as “must needed” under submission rules. How was it judged when hosted url itself was not given?

It’s Sunday.So, I was able to documented it all in this thread: https://x.com/NishanBaral8/status/1949242543088283853

I attended lots of hackathons in university and learned pretty quickly that I should spend 9/10ths of my time on the dashboard or an impressive demo.

I once won a prize for scalability by using a serverless end point.

Nobody’s checking, nobody really wants to judge in detail, so you need to make it easy.

I suspect a lot of them is just to get folks to do some things and people with the skills to investigate in detail aren't all the interested in investing the time.