2026 has been a minute! We've been on the Web3 Database bus to Argentina, Cannes, Malaysia, Portugal, Rome and soon, to Mumbai! We're running one more stop on Tour before Devcon 8. It runs online for ten days with @devfolio and @ns, with $5,000 USDC and five Devcon 8 tickets in prizes. Here's how it works:
[ ARKIV ] Web3 Database Tour Explained
This Global Tour Stop is an online builder challenge. You build a working app on Tiramisu, Arkiv's public testnet, between 9 and 18 October, and you submit it on Devfolio. Anyone, anywhere can enter. There's no fee, and teams can have one to five people.
We open it live from Network School Astana on Friday 9 October. At 7pm IST we kick off with an X Space alongside Devfolio, Network School and friends (check our tweets to see who's joining in).
Why we're doing it
Devcon is in Mumbai, and we want two kinds of builder in this challenge: the best developers in India, and the ones who can't get to Mumbai in November. The prize ticket gets a winner on the plane. Running the build online on Devfolio gives everyone else a shot at it from wherever they are.
We've onboarded hundreds of people to Web3 databases thanks to earlier stops with Ethereum Argentina, Salta Dev, Network School, Web3Bridge and at ETHRome. This stop is the last one before Mumbai.
Our theme: CROPS
CROPS is the Ethereum Foundation's mandate for Ethereum to stay censorship resistant, open source, private and secure. Most of the conversation about it happens at the protocol layer. We want to see it in the data layer, because that's where apps quietly give it up.
There are five prizes, and each one comes with a Devcon 8 ticket:
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Best Indian Use Case: $2,000 USDC. An app for Indian users or built on Indian public data. At least one Indian national on the team.
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Censorship Resistance: $750 USDC. Keep data the ecosystem depends on readable and queryable with no single point of takedown.
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Open Source: $750 USDC. An open, queryable dataset or tool that another team could build on without asking. MIT licensed.
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Privacy: $750 USDC. An app built on data minimisation: minimal attributes, encrypted or hashed payloads, expiry set by the user.
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Security: $750 USDC. A registry or alert feed where every record's author can be checked on chain.
Each team can win one prize at most. Winners get the chance to demo at Devcon in Mumbai.
How we judge
Every project is scored out of 100, with 25 points for each of four questions:
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Why this track? Who is harmed today if this data is censored, shut down, leaked or forged? For the India track: who in India uses it, and what problem does it solve for them?
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Why [ARKIV]? What would break on Postgres, IPFS, a subgraph or your own API?
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How do you use Arkiv? We score depth and purpose. Using lots of features doesn't necessarily earn points on its own.
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Friction report. What you expected, what happened, versions, and the steps to reproduce it.
You need 50 points to win.
What you need to submit
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A public deployment that works without logging in
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A public repo under the MIT licence, with reproducible build steps
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/arkiv/schema.md and /arkiv/friction.md in the repo
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The wallet addresses that create your entities on Tiramisu (our testnet)
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A demo video of three minutes or less
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Disclosure of any pre-existing code
Never put private keys, secrets or real personal data into Arkiv. Doing so disqualifies the entry.
Apply now at arkiv.devfolio.co
Key dates (IST)
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Fri 9 Oct: the build opens, with the X Space at 7pm IST
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Mon 12 Oct: a video walkthrough goes live
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Between Tue 13 and Fri 16 Oct: office hours in Arkiv's Discord (check tweets or in Discord for precise timings, ask anytime on Discord)
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Mon 19 Oct, 4:29am IST (Sun 18 Oct, 23:59 BST): submissions close
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Fri 23 Oct: winners are announced
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3 to 6 Nov: Devcon 8, Mumbai
Start here
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Apply: arkiv.devfolio.co
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Docs and Tiramisu: docs.arkiv.network
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Community & Help: discord.gg/arkiv
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Dev Hub: https://hub.arkiv.network/
See you in Mumbai.