ORE, a Solana-native crypto project, won the grand prize at the Solana Renaissance Hackathon despite causing significant network congestion in April. The project, which disrupted Solana's network by contributing to a surge in mining transactions, was awarded $50,000 in USDC. This congestion was partly due to ORE's mining activities and the meme coin craze, leading to over 70% of non-vote transactions being rejected initially. The Solana Foundation attributed the congestion to high demand and delayed implementation of network patches. Despite these challenges, ORE has resumed mining after a brief pause to optimize its system. The project's creator, Hardhat Chad, aims to provide a fast, cheap, private, and inflation-proof digital currency that is accessible for mining on ordinary laptops. Following the hackathon victory, the ORE token's value surged by 115%.

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The team behind the proof-of-work powered Solana-native crypto Ore has won the “Grand Prize” at a Solana Foundation-backed hackathon despite the project majorly disrupting the blockchain last month. Ore won $50,000 in USD Coin ( USDC ) for its efforts in the May 6 “Solana Renaissance Hackathon” focused on finding Solana’s “next wave of high-impact projects.” However, the sudden rise in Ore mining transactions, combined with the recent memecoin mania, were two of the main contributors behind Solana’s transaction failure issue in mid-April, which saw more than 70% of non-vote transaction requests being knocked back at first instance. The Solana Foundation said the recent network congestion issues were due to high demand for Solana block space and a failure to implement patches related to its networking stack in a timely manner. Solana developers planned on implementing a fix to improve the congestion issue on April 15. However, the non-vote transaction failure rate is still hovering around 62%, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard by scarn_eth. The Ore team also temporarily halted its own mining operations just 13 days after it launched on April 16 so it could optimize its system with a second version. It appears that mining has recommenced, according to Ore’s website. The project’s pseudonymous creator, Hardhat Chad, was pleased to win the award but acknowledged “there’s still a long way to go” before he and the Ore team can offer Solana users a “fast, cheap, private, inflation-proof digital currency everyone can mine.” The Ore (ORE) token is up 115% to $270.8 since its victory was announced 12 hours ago, according to CoinMarketCap. Related: Solana illustrates the dark side of monolithic blockchains Ore’s codebase is based on Bitcoin’s, but was written as a Solana smart contract in a way that allows multiple miners to win a share of the network’s block rewards, instead of it being paid out to a single miner, Hardhat Chat explained in a presentation. He hopes Ore will “make mining fun again” as computation can be performed with ordinary laptops, thus lowering the barrier to entry. Magazine: 5 dangers to beware when apeing into Solana memecoins 

ORE Wins Solana Hackathon Amid Network Congestion Issues