Comment by Zaskoda

Since you mentioned hackathons - A few years ago I was working on a game for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and I ended up going to EthDenver. While there, I discovered a rich and vibrant hackathon scene with a lot of monetary prizes. The hackathons were often for various blockchain platforms and, thus, those prizes were generally awarded in whatever cryptocurrency was native to that platform. From their point of view, it was a smart move. They create a network, retain a huge block of pre-minted currency, establish a market price, and then give out that currency as hackathon awards. As a competitor, you can cash you winnings in right away, so it works well enough. A friend and I cleared almost $30k one year in various contests. Unfortunately, winning a hackathon was often more about creating something that would make for good marketing buzz rather than creating something truly novel or even useful. And, frankly, the actual quality of your execution rarely mattered. We lost one contest where we had a fully working prototype deployed and live but lost to teams with ideas that sounded fun but were technically unfeasible. Still, if you're willing to play the game, it seems there's money to be made. My friend and I have since moved on and have not continued to participate - but it sure made for fun memories.