Hackathon: LUKSO's Final Hackathon Round Offers Devs $150K to Build Gasless, Programmable Accounts

Is This the Smartest Hackathon to Join Before May 2025?

LUKSO is closing out its multi-phase Hack the Grid hackathon, offering developers a final chance to build decentralized applications using its Universal Profiles and smart contract stack. With over $150,000 in LYX grants at stake and submission deadlines approaching in early May, the event positions itself as a testing ground for programmable accounts and gasless user experiences.

Unlike traditional hackathons focused on launching tokens or simple dApps, Hack the Grid centers on identity-first applications, permission control, and composable account architecture. Developers can apply here: lukso.gitcoin.co.

What Are Developers Building With?

At the core of LUKSO’s smart contract ecosystem is the Universal Profile, a programmable account standard that replaces externally owned accounts (EOAs) with modular, smart contract-based identities. These profiles are built using components from the LUKSO Standard Proposals (LSPs), including:

• ERC725X/Y – For logic execution and metadata
• LSP6 – Fine-grained permission control
• LSP1 – Reactive interactions with external contracts
• LSP17 – Support for modular, upgradable extensions
• LSP25 – Enables gasless (relayed) transactions

Universal Profiles are deployed as smart contracts and compatible with standard EVM tools such as Foundry or Hardhat. For example, a DAO could assign spending permissions to a contributor through a Universal Profile, or a wallet could relay a user’s transaction without them holding ETH.

These are not conceptual blueprints; they are live on LUKSO’s production mainnet and ready to be tested under real conditions.

Grant Tiers: What Can Developers Win?

The hackathon offers three grant tracks based on project maturity (Origin, Core, Prime), followed by a fourth round: Community Grants on Gitcoin, where the public votes on top submissions:

Level 1–3: Direct Grant Awards

• Prime Grants: 2 projects × $9,000 in LYX
• Core Grants: 3 projects × $5,000 in LYX
• Origin Grants: 4 projects × $2,250 in LYX

Developers submit their projects, and the LUKSO team assigns them to the appropriate grant tier based on technical scope and quality. Winning submissions from these rounds move into Level 4: Community Grants, with a $24,000 prize pool distributed through quadratic funding. This allows the LUKSO community to vote on which projects receive support, the more contributors a project attracts, the more funding it unlocks.

📌 Submit here: https://lukso.gitcoin.co

📚 Best practices guide: Medium article

What Kinds of Projects Can You Build?

Developers are encouraged to explore themes that reflect the real capabilities of Universal Profiles:

• Social dApps: Token-gated feeds and community-managed treasuries
• Identity tools: Persistent profiles that tie NFTs, roles, or credentials to users
• Walletless onboarding: Relayer-based systems that abstract away gas fees
• DAO tooling: Profiles that can act as programmable agents for treasury management or voting

Unlike EOAs, Universal Profiles allow for more granular, composable features, like assigning delegate permissions or integrating app logic directly into accounts. For example, one past project created a DAO-owned Universal Profile that dynamically issued NFT rewards based on proposal activity. Another built a gasless onboarding system for creators that embedded licensing metadata directly into profile-bound NFTs.

Developer Resources and Support

To support adoption, LUKSO provides detailed documentation, GitHub repositories, and dev tooling. Projects are evaluated on functionality, UX, innovation, and how well they showcase the potential of the LUKSO smart contract standards (LSPs).

Developer support includes:

• Access to workshops and office hours
• LSP smart contract repositories: github.com/lukso/lsp-smart-contracts
• Mainnet deployment capability for real testing
• Milestone-based grant payouts to reward working prototypes, not just ideas

Why This Matters

Account Abstraction (e.g. Ethereum’s ERC-4337) has yet to reach widespread adoption. LUKSO’s approach, already live on mainnet, implements many of these concepts, including permissioned control, metadata-rich identities, and native gasless UX without waiting for ecosystem-wide support.

By using smart contract-based accounts as first-class identities, LUKSO allows dApps to become more user-centric. Developers can build experiences where contracts interact on behalf of users without depending on wallet plugins or browser extensions. If you're building with or exploring tools like ENS, Farcaster Frames, or ERC6551 (Tokenbound accounts), LUKSO offers a complete, working implementation that expands on those ideas.

My Final Take

LUKSO’s Hack the Grid is a serious experiment in how user accounts could evolve in Web3. It’s not just another token launchpad or NFT marketplace sprint. The value lies in prototyping systems where users own identities, control permissions, and move away from the constraints of EOAs.

For developers, the incentive structure is meaningful and the architecture is interesting enough to build something unique that may be hard to prototype elsewhere. The window to apply is closing, and for those looking to push smart contract logic and UX design into new territory, this is a well-resourced opportunity.

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