ack3 Sponsors Metropolis, Monad's Global Hackathon

Metropolis is Monad’s flagship global hackathon: six weeks, online-first, September 1 to October 13, 2026, with about $250,000 across prizes, bounties, and credits. ack3 is a sponsor, and the sponsorship is specific: every finalist project receives an ack3 AI scan of its codebase, and Michal Převrátil mentors builders through the build window.

The event

Metropolis runs on four tracks:

• Onchain Finance & Trading: asset primitives, markets, and trading infrastructure that only work with fast settlement.
• Consumer Products & Payments: consumer finance experiences where the chain stays invisible.
• Social, Attention & Culture: open social graphs, feed algorithms, and attention markets native to the chain.
• Trust, Identity & AI Infrastructure: protocol primitives for an AI-native internet, from proof of personhood to cross-app AI memory.

The prize pool includes $30,000 for the overall winner and $30,000 per track, with the top three projects in each track receiving $10,000 each, plus sponsor bounties on top. One-day hacker houses run during the build window in San Francisco, New York, Buenos Aires, London, Singapore, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou.

The dates: the build window opens September 1 and closes October 13, judging runs October 14 to 27, and winners are announced November 3. Registration is at hackathon.monad.xyz.

Finalists ship reviewed code

Every project that makes the Metropolis finals gets an ack3 AI scan, the same scan we run during the manual review of every ack3 audit, and the team receives the resulting findings: build fast, still ship reviewed code.

A mentor through the build window

Michal Převrátil, author and lead developer of Wake, our open-source testing and fuzzing framework, is a Metropolis mentor for the full six-week window, available to builders on testing, fuzzing setups, and the security questions that come up while the code is still cheap to change.

ack3 is an AI-native security partner: auditors running manual audits with our own tooling in the loop. Metropolis is that work moved one step earlier: review entering a project during its first six weeks.