Bolt.new World's Largest Hackathon

What it was

For four weeks in June 2025, Bolt ran what they accurately billed as the
World's Largest Hackathon. Over 130,000 builders registered. Prize pool
broke $1M, with Anthropic, Cloudflare, Supabase, Sentry, and Algorand
contributing prize sponsorships in addition to Bolt and Devpost themselves.

The format was generous: any tool was allowed as long as the primary build
happened in Bolt.new. Submissions ranged from games to internal-tool
replacements to AI agents. The sheer scale produced a long tail of
quirky, niche projects that wouldn't have shipped without the hackathon
constraint.

The Grand Prize

Tailored Labs by Adrian Humphrey ($100K) — an AI-powered video timeline
editor that takes raw, unstructured footage and produces polished cuts from
natural-language commands ("make this a 60-second highlight reel for
Instagram with the best moments from minute 12 to 18"). Adrian shipped the
working app over the four-week window using Bolt.new as the build
environment.

Why it mattered

Three things:

• Scale validation: 130K registrations made vibe coding hackathons a

legitimate top-of-funnel for AI tool adoption. Bolt's user base reportedly grew measurably during and after the event.

• Format proof: month-long online hackathons with $1M+ prize pools work.

Several brands (AWS, Lovable) have since announced similar-scale events.

• Project quality range: the long tail showed what's possible with vibe

coding tools when the constraint is "ship something working" rather than "ship something architected." Many submissions are still live as standalone products.

What's missing

The recap above lists only the Grand Prize since Bolt's own winners blog
publishes fewer category-specific names. As more category-winner pages get
indexed, this page will be updated with second/third-place projects. If
you participated and want your project listed, message us via
the submission form.

Sources

• Bolt's blog — Announcing the 2025 Bolt Hackathon winners
• World's Largest Hackathon on Devpost
• Awards page on bolt.new