Stacks Builder Challenges: Earn Weekly STX for Building on Bitcoin

December Builder Challenge

Three Weeks of Shipping, Learning, and Earning on Bitcoin.

The December Stacks Builder Challenge has officially wrapped.

From December 10–30, builders across the ecosystem participated in three hands-on challenges designed to help them explore new tools, ship real work, and earn STX for meaningful impact.

This initiative was led by Stacks in collaboration with Talent Protocol, with rewards distributed to winners automatically based on Talent Protocol’s scoring system across verified onchain activity and open-source contributions.

If you build on Stacks, you earn. And throughout December, builders did exactly that.

Week 1 - Clarity 4

Builders shipped smart contracts using new Clarity 4 features, leveraging Hiro’s tooling to advance safer, more expressive programming on Stacks.

Week 2 - Chainhooks

Builders created reactive applications using Chainhooks, in collaboration with Hiro, enabling real-time responses to onchain activity across the Stacks ecosystem.

Week 3 - WalletConnect

Builders integrated WalletConnect into Stacks apps, improving wallet connectivity, transaction signing, and cross-device user experience.

For the full list of winners and rankings, view the live leaderboard on Talent Protocol.

Who Participated

To be eligible, builders needed to:

• Connect a Stacks compatible wallet on talent.app
• Pass standard compliance checks at payout
• Meet eligibility requirements outlined in the Terms & Conditions

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Builder Challenges

Three weeks, three challenges, three STX payouts. Builders could participate in one challenge or all three, with a new opportunity to earn each week.

How Rewards Work

Each challenge had its own STX reward pool. Builder contributions were ranked weekly across three tiers, with rewards distributed proportionally based on impact and activity. Rankings were determined using Talent Protocol’s scoring system, and any fraudulent activity resulted in disqualification.

Getting Paid

• Rewards were sent automatically to the linked STX address
• No submissions, no claims, no extra steps
• Rewards applied only to the work shipped during each challenge window
• Participants are responsible for any taxes associated with rewards.

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What This Shows

The December Builder Challenge showed that clear, time-boxed incentives tied to real, onchain-verifiable work can meaningfully accelerate builder activity.

Over three weeks, builders shipped production-ready contributions that strengthened core infrastructure across the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem.

More challenges are coming, and for those who missed this round, now is still a great time to start building on Stacks. More details are available in the Stacks Builder Challenges FAQ.

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