CHARLI3 Oracles Hackathon

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

CHARLI3 Oracles Hackathon

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

60000

[Proposal Summary] Time

Please specify how many months you expect your project to last

3

[Proposal Summary] Translation Information

Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated

No

Original Language

en

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

What is the problem you want to solve?

Cardano’s only on-demand (pull) oracle exists but lacks adoption. Developers don’t know how to integrate it, limiting ecosystem growth and real use-case creation.

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://github.com/Charli3-Official/swap-demo-contract
,
• https://charli3.io/products/pull-oracle
,
• https://docs.charli3.io/oracles/products/pull-oracle/summary
,
• https://milestones.projectcatalyst.io/projects/1100090
,
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1trqOYkJ5BL6NJQnGPo1OCRigboIU0T8I/view

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

No dependencies

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

License: Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1).

Source-available for hackathon and non-commercial use. Attribution required. Commercial use requires written Charli3 approval. On Jan 1, 2027, this code will automatically convert to MIT License, making it fully open-source and permissive. Participants may submit improvements; Charli3 retains discretion over inclusion before conversion. Note that we may convert to MIT far sooner and have a funded proposal to do so.

[Theme Selection] Theme

Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal

Hackathons

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Who you’re targeting, how you’ll reach them, and why this matters for Cardano.

We are targeting Cardano developers, builders, and students interested in DeFi and oracles. Outreach will leverage existing Cardano channels (Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Catalyst Town Hall, Cardano Forums) and direct invites to project teams. This matters because adoption of Charli3’s oracle solution creates reliable, low-cost, on-demand data access, filling a critical gap for dApps and increasing Cardano’s competitiveness.

Robert Hever the project lead has a long standing relationship with multiple labs and developer academies. He will put out a call to them to share it with their community.

Provide a list of key activities of your project?

1. Raise awareness and promote the hackathon to attract good developers
2. Allocate as much funding as possible to the prize pool with a minimum of 20k ADA to winners.
3. Host a 3-day hackathon focused on building integrations and use cases with Charli3’s pull-based oracle.
4. Provide open documentation, guides, and mentoring during the event.
5. Showcase winning use cases to the Cardano community through demos and presentations.
6. Collect developer feedback to improve the oracle solution and reduce costs.
7. Publish event recap, outcomes, and guides for wider adoption.

What are your success metrics?

• 40+ participants register, 10+ active teams.
• At least 10 working integrations or use cases demoed.
• 3+ winning projects showcased publicly to Cardano community.
• Post-event documentation updates and cost optimizations published.
• Positive feedback from builders, with measurable adoption pipeline (projects indicating intent to use Charli3).

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

We are proposing a three-day hackathon focused on driving adoption and improvement of Charli3’s pull-based oracle solution. The oracle is already at MVP stage and proven to work, but it needs two things: (1) real use cases that show the community why this matters, and (2) improvements that make the network cheaper, faster, and easier to operate. A hackathon is the perfect way to achieve both in a short burst of creativity.

The hackathon will run with two parallel tracks:

Track A – Integration & Use-Cases

Participants will use the Charli3 oracle to build working examples of how decentralized data can power Cardano DeFi and beyond. This means bots, dashboards, wallets, risk models, insurance proofs, tokenized asset feeds, and more. By the end of the event, we want multiple demos showing our oracle plugged into real-world apps. For example:

A DeFi trading bot that queries live data instead of hardcoded APIs.

A dashboard that compares multiple oracle feeds for transparency.

A micro-lending prototype that uses verified external data to trigger conditions.

Track B – Core Oracle Improvements

For technical teams, we will open up the oracle MVP codebase under a restricted license during the hackathon. This lets participants help us improve it without diluting our IP before it’s ready. They’ll have early access (a week before) so they can explore and plan. During the event, they’ll work on lowering fees, reducing infrastructure complexity, strengthening contracts, and building better monitoring. Examples include:

• Optimizing node setup to make it easier for new operators to join.
• Improving gas usage or off-chain contract logic to reduce costs.
• Adding better error handling, retries, and reporting.

License Transition

Our long-term plan is to release the oracle fully under the MIT open-source license in 2026. The hackathon is an opportunity for the Cardano developer community to start engaging with the codebase before that transition. This way, participants can influence how the oracle matures while knowing that everything they contribute will eventually become fully open and accessible.

Structure and Flow

Pre-hackathon: Documentation and endpoints released to all participants. Technical teams (Track B) also get restricted repo access one week before.

Day 1: Kickoff with walkthroughs of the oracle architecture and hackathon tracks. Teams form and declare if they’re focusing on integration, improvement, or both.

Day 2: Build and mentor day. Charli3 developers will be available to unblock teams and share best practices.

Day 3: Final push and demo showcase. Teams present their outputs, judged on creativity, technical quality, and usefulness to the Cardano ecosystem.

Expected Outcomes

1. Concrete use-case demos the Cardano community can see and use.
2. Improvements to the core oracle that lower costs and strengthen sustainability.
3. A stronger knowledge base through guides, tutorials, and onboarding docs.
4. A developer community already familiar with the oracle before it officially goes open source.

By splitting into use-case builders and core improvers, this hackathon creates immediate value (applications people can see) while also securing long-term value (a stronger, cheaper, easier-to-adopt oracle). The 60k ADA budget will fund operations, prizes, mentorship, and documentation. We intend to give at a least 15k as prize money, more if feasible.

This isn’t just a weekend of coding — it’s a catalyst for adoption. We are putting our MVP in the hands of the community and letting them push it forward, both by showing what it can do and by making it better.

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

This hackathon is about accelerating adoption of Charli3’s on-demand, pull-based oracle solution while engaging the community to improve and showcase its potential. Our MVP is live, but adoption depends on use cases, lower costs, and better documentation. A hackathon creates the momentum to achieve all three.

Driving Adoption

Developers need examples, not just infrastructure. By running an integration track, teams will build real demos: DeFi strategies, dashboards, bots, lending protocols, and insurance proofs. These projects remain after the event as references for the next wave of builders.

Improving the Oracle

The second track focuses on strengthening the network itself. Participants will work on lowering fees, simplifying setup, and improving reliability. This makes it easier for new operators to join and ensures long-term sustainability.

Community Capability

Hackathons build talent as much as products. Dozens of developers will leave with direct knowledge of oracles, data feeds, and integration patterns. These skills spread across the Cardano ecosystem, seeding future adoption.

Open Source Roadmap

We plan to open source the oracle under the MIT license. If our separate Catalyst proposal for 100k is funded, this timeline accelerates. If not, our fallback is 2026. Either way, this hackathon is the community’s first chance to get hands-on with the system in a structured environment. We’ll use a restricted license for the event, creating a bridge toward full open source.

Lasting Outputs

• Showcase demos highlighting oracle integration
• Code improvements that reduce cost and complexity
• New guides and onboarding material
• Developers onboarded into the ecosystem
• Visibility for Cardano as a chain with live, functioning oracles

Long-Term Impact

• Keeps Cardano projects from relying on centralized APIs
• Demonstrates to enterprises and RWA partners that Cardano can support real-world data
• Creates network effects: demos → adoption → more developers → better oracle
• Positions Cardano as a leader in decentralized data and RWA-ready infrastructure

Conclusion

This hackathon is more than an event — it is a launchpad. It delivers adoption in the short term, improvements in the medium term, and sustainability in the long term. Most importantly, it starts the community’s journey with Charli3’s oracle, ensuring that when the MIT open source release happens, Cardano already has builders, use cases, and momentum in place.

[Your Project and Solution] Capabilities & Feasibility

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Charli3 is one of the oldest and most experienced projects in Cardano, active since 2021 and delivering 100% of our funded initiatives. We’ve built nonstop for years with zero downtime, making us the de facto oracle experts in the ecosystem.

Our biggest achievement has been developing a Partnerchain-based decentralized oracle MVP — the first functioning example of its kind. It demonstrated how an oracle network can run on Substrate while retaining Cardano’s security guarantees, posting data directly on Cardano, and rewarding validators with payouts on Cardano. This pioneering work proves our deep technical understanding of what it takes to operate oracles in complex, cross-chain environments.

Unlike many teams who only theorize about oracles, we’ve built and run one on mainnet. We know the challenges: coordinating external operators, ensuring data integrity, handling validator rewards, and keeping costs down. These lessons are invaluable to share with the community, and this hackathon is designed to pass on that knowledge.

Robert, our project lead, also brings unique credentials in developer education as a former advisor to Emurgo Academy. That means we don’t just have the technical expertise — we can teach it. Participants will walk away with a grounded understanding of what it means to run an oracle network, the pitfalls to avoid, and the opportunities for innovation.

Participants will benefit from:

Hands-on guidance from the only live mainnet oracle with external operators.

• Real-world lessons on validator coordination, data sourcing, and cross-chain posting.
• Mentorship from developers who’ve built and shipped working oracle systems.
• Practical pathways to apply oracle data in DeFi, RWAs, and beyond.

We’ll structure the hackathon into two tracks:

• Integration Track — build use cases and applications powered by our MVP oracle.
• Infrastructure Track — improve the MVP itself (cost, scalability, UX), directly contributing to the community’s oracle readiness.

Charli3 is uniquely positioned to lead this hackathon. We bring years of continuous Cardano development, the only proven mainnet oracle expertise, and a commitment to teaching the community how oracles really work. This is about more than one event — it’s about raising the ecosystem’s collective capacity to use, run, and innovate with oracles.

Measuring Hackathon success

Apart from the tangible success metrics mentioned earlier in this proposal. We will ask all participants to fill out a survey to measure how valuable they felt the hackathon was on several dimensions including overall satisfaction, importance for future development, and if they learned anything new from the experience; simiar to a CSAT survey.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Setup and Marketing

Milestone Outputs

1. Promote the event. Publish hackathon announcement across website, Discord, Telegram, and X. Reach out to as many Cardano ecosystem members as possible
2. Provide support for participants: create a discord channel and provide active support on it
3. Create and release starter repos, guides, and docs.
4. Launch registration portal for participants to register, access github repos/codebases, and etc.

Acceptance Criteria

1. Announcement of event is completed on all channels specified in output
2. Registration count is above 40 participants meeting success metric
3. Section in discord is setup to help paricipants
4. Relevant github repos / codebases are made available to registrants including documentation and guides

Evidence of Completion

Team will share a report that includes:

• Screenshots and links to the required announcements
• A registration count that exceeds 40 participants
• Link to the discord channel

A demo video showing the flow of registration to access of material.

Delivery Month

1

Cost

20000

Progress

30 %

Milestone Title

Hackathon Delivery

Milestone Outputs

• Run the 3-day hackathon with two tracks: integration and improvement.
• Provide mentorship and technical support via Discord, Telegram, and live sessions.
• Host daily check-ins, Q&A sessions, and record activity for transparency.
• Collect, verify, and categorize participant submissions.

Acceptance Criteria

1. Hackathon takes place across all planned days with both tracks active.
2. At least 10 valid submissions received across tracks.
3. Mentor participation and Q&A sessions documented.
4. Submissions reviewed, categorized, and logged for post-event report.

Evidence of Completion

Team will share a report that includes:

• Agenda and summary of hackathon activity.
• Screenshots/recordings of Q&A and mentor engagement.
• Public record of submissions by track.
• Participant count and engagement metrics.

Delivery Month

2

Cost

20000

Progress

60 %

Milestone Title

Wrap-Up & Reporting

Milestone Outputs

1. Host closing ceremony to showcase projects and announce winners.
2. Publish post-event report including participation numbers, outcomes, and highlights. Includes prize distributions.
3. Gather participant feedback and publish summary of learnings.
4. Final catalyst close-out report
5. Final catalyst close-out video

Prizes will be distributed after completion from the 20k ADA. If feasible, the team will provide prizes upfront and get back paid for it from Catalyst.

Acceptance Criteria

• Closing session completed with winners announced.
• Final report publicly available with event outcomes. Winners declared publicly and prize structure published.
• Participant survey conducted with feedback analyzed.
• Final catalyst close-out report
• Final catalyst close-out video

Prizes will be distributed after completion from the 20k ADA. If feasible, the team will provide prizes upfront and get back paid for it from Catalyst.

Evidence of Completion

Team will share a report that includes:

• Recording of closing ceremony.
• Public link to final report with outcomes.
• Summary of survey feedback results.

Catalyst Close-Outs

• Final catalyst close-out report
• Final catalyst close-out video

Prizes will be distributed after completion from the 20k ADA. If feasible, the team will provide prizes upfront and get back paid for it from Catalyst.

Delivery Month

3

Cost

20000

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

We are requesting 60,000 ADA in total funding. The budget is broken down across 3 milestones, each tied to measurable outputs and deliverables. Costs reflect fair market developer wages, event organization, platform fees, and community engagement expenses. A contingency buffer of ~5% is included in each stage to ensure smooth delivery.

Milestone 1 — Planning, Tooling Prep, Promotion (20,000 ADA | 33%)

• Core Developer (1): 70 hrs × 50 ADA/hr = 3,500 ADA
  • Prepares the oracle MVP for hackathon use, sets up access, cleans up docs, ensures stability.
• Community/Comms Lead (1): 60 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 2,400 ADA
  • Writes guides, manages announcements, prepares onboarding materials for participants.
• Event Manager (1): 50 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 2,000 ADA
  • Coordinates event logistics, platform setup, and scheduling.
• Marketing/Promotion Budget: 5,000 ADA
  • Social promotion, outreach, and onboarding participants from Cardano and beyond.
• Admin & Ops (incl. contingency): 7,100 ADA
  • Covers unforeseen costs, admin, and platform fees.

Subtotal = 20,000 ADA

Milestone 2 — Hackathon Execution (20,000 ADA | 33%)

• Core Developer (1): 60 hrs × 50 ADA/hr = 3,000 ADA
  • Provides live technical support, reviews participant submissions, ensures backend runs smoothly.
• Support Developer (1): 40 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 1,600 ADA
  • Assists with debugging, helps teams integrate APIs, resolves participant issues in real time.
• Community/Comms Lead (1): 50 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 2,000 ADA
  • Hosts live Q&A, manages Discord/Telegram channels, and provides ongoing comms during event.
• Event Manager (1): 40 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 1,600 ADA
  • Runs day-to-day hackathon operations, ensures milestones, keeps event on schedule.
• Judging and Evaluation (panel of 3): 5,000 ADA
  • Independent judges score projects and ensure fair assessment across all teams.
• Ops and Contingency: 6,800 ADA
  • Covers infra spikes, event platform fees, and unplanned needs.

Subtotal = 20,000 ADA

Milestone 3 — Closing Ceremony, Outcomes, Reporting, Prizes (20,000 ADA | 33%)

• Event Manager (1): 40 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 1,600 ADA
  • Organizes closing ceremony, coordinates prize distribution, ensures smooth wrap-up.
• Community/Comms Lead (1): 40 hrs × 40 ADA/hr = 1,600 ADA
  • Publishes outcome report, runs post-event survey, prepares close-out media for Catalyst.
• Core Developer (1): 20 hrs × 50 ADA/hr = 1,000 ADA
  • Verifies winning submissions, ensures they integrate with our oracle correctly.
• Prize Pool: 15,000 ADA (paid after Catalyst release, winners declared at ceremony)
  • Distributed to winning teams (e.g., 7.5k / 5k / 2.5k across 3 tiers).
• Final Reporting + Close-out Media: 800 ADA
  • Video, report, and written outputs shared with Catalyst and community.

Subtotal = 20,000 ADA

Budget Summary

Milestone 1 (Planning & Promotion): 20,000 ADA

Milestone 2 (Execution & Judging): 20,000 ADA

Milestone 3 (Ceremony, Outcomes, Prizes, Reports): 20,000 ADA

Total Request = 60,000 ADA

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal requests 60,000 ADA to deliver a hackathon that directly accelerates adoption of Cardano’s first decentralized oracle network. The investment is lean compared to typical Web3 hackathons yet delivers significant educational, technical, and adoption-focused returns.

Success Metrics

1. 40+ participants across two tracks (improving the oracle + building with it).
2. 10 projects submitted, with at least 10 viable demos or POCs.
3. Educational outputs (guides, docs, tutorials) created during the hackathon remain available to the wider ecosystem.

Benefits

• Education at scale: Dozens of developers gain hands-on experience with oracle integration — knowledge they carry back to their own teams, raising ecosystem-wide capacity.
• Safer ecosystem: With more developers understanding oracle design, Cardano gains stronger, more secure integrations for DeFi and RWA use cases.
• Critical infrastructure adoption: Improvements to our oracle network during the hackathon can directly lower costs and drive higher adoption of this core service.
• Commercial upside: New projects may evolve into viable businesses that increase Cardano adoption; early prototypes can serve as proof-of-concept to secure funding or community traction.
• Access to premium infrastructure: Builders with limited resources get free access to a sophisticated oracle system — enabling innovation that might not otherwise happen.

Cost Efficiency

• 15,000 ADA prize pool ensures real outputs at just 1,500 ADA per project if 10 submissions are achieved.
• Event execution, developer mentoring, and educational materials represent investments that continue to pay dividends long after the hackathon ends.
• By comparison, Ethereum and Polkadot hackathons often cost 100k–250k USD, making this a highly lean initiative.

✅ **In summary: **For 60,000 ADA, Catalyst enables at least 40 developers, 10 working projects, reusable educational resources, improvements to critical oracle infrastructure, and potential new commercial projects that grow Cardano adoption. This is a high-leverage use of funds with enduring impact.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes