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 in April.

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 the high demand for Solana block space and a failure to promptly implement patches related to its networking stack.

Solana developers planned to implement 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 to 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.

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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.

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