With HackMeridian launching in two days, Stellar developers and judges answered hacker questions about competition tracks and what wins. Genesis focuses on building new projects from scratch; Scale supports teams refining existing projects using new Soroban primitives now live on mainnet.
Stellar's core development team answered hacker questions ahead of HackMeridian 2026, the flagship two-day hackathon launching October 24-25 in Lisbon with $30k XLM distributed across six winners. The event features two builder tracks: Genesis for developers building new ideas from scratch during the hackathon, and Scale for teams refining existing projects using the ecosystem's latest tools. Judges emphasized that the Scale path addresses a gap in Web3 hackathons — rather than always starting from zero, builders can use the event to modernize existing prototypes with newly-released Soroban capabilities like confidential tokens. Stellar Unlocked encourages hackers to experiment with new primitives, while Stellar Composed offers complementary thematic guidance. The devrel team outlined how mentorship differs between tracks to support builders at their development stage.
