I want to raise a very serious concern about the recent WCHL25 hackathon organized through ICP Hubs and DoraHacks. I’ve spent the time to review the process, the promised prize pool, and the projects that advanced — and what I found is deeply troubling.
Missing Prizes – Qualification Round ($30K)
According to the official prize breakdown, the Qualification Round in July 2025 allocated $30,000 across all funnels.
3 winners were supposed to be selected per funnel (19 funnels total).
No winners were ever announced.
No information was published on who received those funds.
Instead, every project was simply moved forward to the National Round, creating the appearance of legitimacy without accountability.
Ghost Projects Advanced
When the list of “Qualified Projects by Region” was posted for the National Round, I reviewed multiple entries:
1 team member projects with no traction.
GitHub repos missing basic files (dfx.json), or just placeholders/mock code.
Some projects had no repo at all, or links that were broken/private after qualification.
Very little to no presence on DoraHacks (no upvotes/followers).
In some cases, teams can be traced directly back to ICP Hub organizers themselves.
Repo has no backend canister, only a placeholder config pointing at Playground.
Demo consisted of sending ICP “somewhere,” despite no backend existing.
DoraHacks page: 2 upvotes, both from the developers themselves.
Still advanced to the next round.
The Problem
This raises obvious questions:
Who received the $30K in the Qualification Round?
Why were projects with no code or private repos allowed to advance?
Why are ghost projects connected to Hub organizers moving forward while legitimate builders are sidelined?
Why This Matters
Hackathons are supposed to support real builders. Instead, what we’re seeing looks like:
Rigged funnels where insiders are rewarded.
Community funds misallocated with no transparency.
Legit builders punished while ghost projects advance.
As someone who has been building NFTropoly — both with public repos, working backends, live features, and real community traction — I find it unacceptable that projects with no substance were advanced over builders who actually deliver.
Call to Action
I’m asking DFINITY and the ICP Hubs for transparency:
Publish the list of winners and payouts for the $30K Qualification Round.
Justify how projects with missing/broken/private repos were advanced.
Ensure future hackathons are conducted fairly, with clear accountability for ecosystem funds.
Without transparency, this entire hackathon risks being seen not as ecosystem growth — but as a sham funnel that damages trust.
What baffles me the most is the pervasive silence from both ICP Hubs and DFINITY, coupled with a apparent lack of empathy for the community. Not a single official statement has addressed the situation.
Are they simply waiting for this to escalate into a full-blown Web3 scandal? If the goal is publicity for ICP, this situation, whether the outcome is good or bad, provides a powerful case study.
On a separate note, my own investigation into the winners shows a mixed picture. Some ICP Hubs are legitimate and operating correctly. I am currently conducting a full audit of each winner’s code. Surprisingly, several have since made their repositories private, though I suspect this cannot last; they will eventually be required to make their code public.
Due to a low number of submissions from certain countries, the following Tracks were consolidated in order to meet the minimum submission requirements: Poland & Ukraine as well as Korea & Philippines. This reduced the number of tracks from 19 to 17. The corresponding process was clearly outlined on Dora Hacks (https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/wchl25-qualification-round/prizes). Leftover funds post-consolidation of the Tracks were used to stabilize payout value and ensure that all winners received the correct USD equivalent value in ICP amidst token price fluctuations.
Submission Requirements:
Indeed, some projects advanced with private repositories, however, this was expressly permitted as long as judges had access. Over 70 submissions gave private repo access. All advancing projects showed clear code commits, functioning demos, and in some cases, mainnet deployments.
In Summary:
All winners were publicly announced at the end of July and received their Prize Allocation in August.
Private repos were explicitly permitted with reviewer access.
Any concerns about project eligibility or advancement can be raised via Discord tickets, and all cases are reviewed.
Transparency remains a priority: all changes, merges, and prize adjustments were communicated in advance through DoraHacks, Notion, and Discord.
The goal of the WCHL25 is, and remains, to support real builders, allocate resources responsibly, and grow the ICP ecosystem globally.
While criticism is part of open community processes, incorrect information should be corrected with facts.
We reaffirm our commitment to fairness, inclusivity, and transparency, and welcome constructive feedback to continue improving future editions.
I don’t think it’s fair to allow private repos in a hackathon. Sure, the rules don’t explicitly forbid it, but nowhere was it made clear that you could just hide your code from other developers and only share with judges. I kept my repo public the whole time. If I had known that hiding was an option, maybe I would have done the same. Transparency is supposed to be the point of an ecosystem hackathon.
I reviewed the first-round winners and the inconsistencies are obvious:
Projects with only one developer on DoraHacks.
Accounts with brand new GitHub profiles pushing all the code — no track record, no history.
Projects that didn’t even bother with a backend canister, just a static frontend.
Out of the ~70 private repos, it looks like most of them just happen to be the ones moving forward or getting prizes.
Who are the judges?
Where is the list so we can verify their independence? From what I’ve been told, some of them had direct personal or business relationships with certain participants. I don’t need to spell out how bad that looks.
I’m not even defending my own project at this point (with mainnet deployment, database, nft marketplace and frontend) as for me this is over. But from the outside, this looks rigged from the start. And I’ve heard from multiple directions that ICP Hub organizers were charging percentages of grants/prizes if a project was “selected.” That’s pay-to-play, not a hackathon.
So what’s the point of running a competition if winners are pre-selected, repos are hidden, and the rules are applied selectively?
Yes, some great projects did advance — I’m not saying everything was a sham. But the way this was managed is a failure of transparency and fairness. The criteria were so vague and inconsistent that continuing feels meaningless.
And this isn’t just me, plenty of community members are unhappy with ICP Hub management overall. WCHL25 is simply more proof of the same pattern of unethical practices, nepotism, and corruption.
By the way shout out to ICP Brazil, they did it all right from my last investigation and for the way they approached me before this even happened, all other Hubs should follow.
