ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 is a three-day in-person Ethereum hackathon running Friday July 24 to Sunday July 26, 2026 at the Carlos Lopes Pavilion in Lisbon. It brings roughly 600 builders together to ship onchain applications from scratch and compete for more than $125,000 in prizes. If you want a single weekend that turns you from an Ethereum user into an Ethereum builder with a finished, judged project to your name, this is one of the best on the calendar.
What it is and who runs it
ETHGlobal is the most established hackathon organizer in the Ethereum ecosystem. Its in-person events are intense: you arrive Friday, form or join a team, build for roughly 36 hours, and demo to judges on Sunday. Lisbon is one stop on ETHGlobal's 2026 circuit alongside Cannes, New York, Tokyo and Mumbai, and it draws a serious, global crowd of developers.
Prizes and sponsors
The prize pool is $125,000 and up, split across a main ETHGlobal pool and dozens of sponsor bounties. Confirmed sponsors include 1inch, the Uniswap Foundation, The Graph, Sui, World, Hedera, ENS, Yellow and 0G Labs, among others. In practice the sponsor bounties are where most teams win: each sponsor posts specific challenges (best use of their protocol, best integration, best new primitive) with their own cash prizes, and a focused project can win several at once.
Tracks
Lisbon spans the usual ETHGlobal surface area: DeFi, AI plus crypto, Layer 2s and scaling, developer infrastructure, privacy, governance, identity and interoperability. There is no single rigid track you must pick; you build what you want and target the sponsor bounties your project naturally hits.
How to actually win
The winning pattern at ETHGlobal is well understood. First, read every sponsor bounty before you write a line of code and design your project to hit two or three of them at once, because stacked bounties are how small teams out-earn big ideas. Second, scope brutally: a small thing that fully works and demos cleanly beats an ambitious thing that half runs. Third, the demo is the product. Judges see dozens of teams in minutes, so a sharp 2 to 3 minute walkthrough with a live, working flow wins over a better project that fumbles its pitch. Fourth, ship something real onchain, not a mock, because verifiable onchain activity is exactly what judges and sponsors reward.
Why building here positions you
Winning or not, a finished ETHGlobal project is durable positioning. You walk away with a deployed contract or app on Ethereum or an L2, under your own wallet and git, plus a submission page that is public proof you built. That is the footprint future ecosystem rewards look at, and it is the opposite of the anonymous farming that sybil filters remove. ETHGlobal's own new Continuity Track, which rewards ongoing software with real users rather than fresh empty repos, is a signal of where the whole space is heading: toward builders with a track record.
Ship it with DEPLOYR
Most people who mean to enter a hackathon never ship, because the gap between an idea and a deployed, demoable app is wider than it looks. DEPLOYR closes that gap. We get you a working, deployed onchain app on your own wallet before the event, so you walk in with a foundation and spend the weekend extending it toward the bounties, not fighting your toolchain. Tell us the track you want and we build the base with you. Register on the official ETHGlobal Lisbon page, then come position to win.