Hefty Hacks is a fully-online Finance × Trading hackathon presented by TechZap. Over one intense sprint, engineers, quants and designers turn market chaos into working product — trading systems, market predictors, fintech, risk engines, DeFi and everything in between.
Pick a niche. Go absurdly deep. Ship something the street hasn't seen yet.
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Exclusive Career Opportunity: The Top 10 teams will get a chance to participate in direct hiring rounds with leading companies and fast-growing startups.
(Selection for interviews and hiring is solely at the discretion of the participating companies and subject to their individual eligibility criteria and recruitment policies.)
Finance. Trading. Innovation.— one laptop, a thesis worth defending, and 36 hours to prove it.
The markets never sleep, and neither do great builders. Hefty Hacks challenges you to build at the intersection of finance and trading — from high-frequency execution engines to market predictors, robo-advisors, fraud radars and on-chain quant tooling.
There's one rule that decides winners: go narrow. Anyone can build "a trading app." The teams that win pick a niche so specific it sounds obsessive — then own it.
Build on either track — or fuse them into something nobody has shipped yet.
Reinvent how money moves, grows and stays safe — on-chain or off.
Turn market microstructure into a working edge.
Combine both tracks into something genuinely unique.
Bring the idea. Let AI sharpen it.
Generating your idea straight from an AI is strongly discouraged — judges can smell a generated pitch, and a borrowed thesis has no conviction behind it. Instead:
Your niche, AI's leverage. Originality is the edge we score for.
A sharp, unique idea executed well beats a broad idea half-built.