We’re excited to announce a monthly series of contests where developers can learn blockchain engineering through the intuitive Cadence smart contract language, while winning exciting prizes. This Flow sponsored initiative is hosted by Emerald City.

Every month, for about 2 weeks, there will be a new “season”. Each season will consist of the following:

• A unique topic that participants focus on
• Multiple workshops to teach the focused topic and bring in special guests
• $FLOW token prizes for winners

Cadence competitions are a great way to not only showcase your skills with the language, but learn about the focused topic for that season.

September Season

The September Season takes place between September 14th and September 29th.

Workshops

Listed below is the workshop schedule for this season. You can review, or also add, the Google Calendar here where you can find the meeting links for the sessions below.

• Intro to Cadence Competition (September 14th @ 11am EST): Overview the topic, expectations, prizes, workshop schedule, and answer any questions.
• Learn Cadence Workshop (September 15th at 12pm EST): Brief introduction to Cadence to help beginner developers get started.
• Drop-in session (September 18th @ 1pm EST)
• Drop-in session (September 20th @ 6pm EST)
• Drop-in session (September 21st @ 10am EST)
• Drop-in session (September 25th @ 12pm EST)
• Drop-in session (September 27th @ 11am EST)
• Drop-in session (September 29th @ 10:30am EST)

As you can see, there are a ton of drop-in sessions for developers to ask any questions they have about Cadence or their idea. Some drop-ins will also feature small presentations about specific patterns or insights on the Cadence language.

Topic

The topic in focus this month is Composability. That is, taking existing smart contracts and building on top of them by adding new features or making existing features even better. A particular strength of Cadence is that contracts can call other contracts directly, and delegated contracts can even be resolved dynamically at runtime if borrowing a contract via its interface. These powerful capabilities make composing other contracts in your own application very intuitive and easy and we're excited to see what contest submissions you can come up with!

There are a few ways you can go about uncovering composability use-cases including reaching out to projects / developers on platforms like Twitter and identifying new features that are desirable to the community. You may also try coming up with your own unique idea building on existing projects (FLOAT, NBATopShot, Flovatar, Find Labs, Flowty, etc)

Listed below are some additional examples for reference:‍

1. ‍Selling NBATopShot Moments in Bundles‍
2. Bulk Purchasing NBATopShot Moments‍
3. Bulk Delist on NBATopShot
4. Legends of Flow - composes La Liga moments (Aug 2023 Hackathon Mobile Prize 3rd place winners)

Judging

There are a few judging criteria listed below, each on a 1-5 scale. Winners will be decided based on their added total score across all criteria.

1. Idea: Does your idea actually seek to improve the application you’re composing on? Is there proven community interest in your idea?
2. Errors: Does your Cadence code have errors? Are there major / minor bugs in your code that could be exploited?
3. Architecture & Clarity: Is your Cadence code designed clearly and written efficiently? Does the code have proper documentation with code comments?
4. Difficulty: How difficult was the idea & execution? 
5. Blog Post: Write a final blog post shared online or Twitter (see blog requirements below)

Blog post requirements

1. Describe your idea & why you chose it (did the community want it? Did you create it yourself?)
2. Any hardships you faced
3. At least 1 feature you like about Cadence
4. How you implemented the contract. It should provide a basic overview of the architecture and implementation
5. Tag @emerald_dao and @flow_blockchain in your post

Prizes

There are a total of 26,000 $FLOW tokens up for grabs with each season.

The specifics are simple: 

• The top 5 submissions, based on the “Judging” section above, will get 5,000 $FLOW each
• Each winner will also be airdropped a “Cadence Competition Winner” FLOAT to treasure in your collection. Winning across multiple seasons may prove beneficial in the future.
• All participants will be airdropped a “Cadence Competition Participant” FLOAT
• Participating in & collecting FLOATs from multiple seasons may prove beneficial in the future

In addition, there will be a 1,000 $FLOW prize to the individual who engages the most with the competition. This means:

• Showing up to workshops / drop-in sessions
• Asking meaningful questions about Cadence or their idea
• Engaging and/or helping to answer others’ questions during the competition
• Frequently discussing their project openly on Twitter

This winner will be announced by Jacob Tucker (me!) who will be hosting all of the workshops and actively browsing Discord / Twitter for engagement.