Web3 education and acceleration platform Rise In and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) have launched the APAC Stellar Hackathon, a developer competition focused on building financial applications across Southeast Asia.
The event is primarily conducted online for developers across the region and includes localized support through workshops, community meetups, and university activations in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The program is currently underway and will conclude with an in-person finale day held simultaneously across the three participating nations.
Registration link: https://www.risein.com/programs/apac-stellar-hackathon
Hackathon Tracks and Focus Areas
According to the organizers, the hackathon offers a prize pool of up to $60,000 to participating teams, which include web3 developers, startup founders, student engineers, and technical builders. The competition requires participants to build functional, user-facing financial applications rather than standard prototypes.
- The initiative specifies several priority development areas, including cross-border payment applications utilizing Stellar infrastructure and stablecoin-powered solutions for savings, payroll, transfers, and merchant payments.
- Additionally, participants are tasked with developing decentralized finance (DeFi) applications using Stellar’s smart contract platform, Soroban, as well as digital wallets, identity tools, and localized fiat on-and-off-ramp integrations.
Expanding Regional Web3 Initiatives
The event expands on previous joint initiatives conducted by Rise In and Stellar.
- According to company data, the organizations previously organized the Hack Pera Hackathon in Istanbul in June 2025, which drew over 400 developers and resulted in 70 projects.
- They also operated the Soroban Developer Education Program in India, which trained over 3,000 developers, alongside a recurring monthly builder challenge program called the Stellar Journey to Mastery.
Rise In, which claims to maintain a community of over 400,000 developers across 100 countries, expanded its operations into the U.S. market following its acquisition of BlockBeam in 2024. The Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 2014, maintains the codebase and manages ecosystem growth for the open-source Stellar decentralized network.
The hackathon timeline is structured to run from its initial launch phase through late July 2026, when top regional finalists are scheduled to pitch their completed applications live to panels of industry judges, partners, and investors.
Listen to our latest episode
This article is published on BitPinas: Web3 Education Platform Rise In and Stellar Launch APAC Hackathon
What else is happening in Crypto Philippines and beyond?
