Global messaging app Telegram announced a coding competition for building smart contracts for the Telegram Open Network (TON) Blockchain.

5 types of smart contracts

The contest includes three parts with a prize fund for all included tasks ranging from $200,000 to $400,000, according to an announcement posted on the Telegram Contests channel on Sept. 24. The contest will end on Oct. 15.

The primary part of the competition is the task to build one or more smart contracts, using the tools provided in the TON Blockchain distribution, as described in the attached TON Contest document.

The two other optional tasks include improvements suggestions for TON Virtual Machine and FunC and TON Blockchain bug bounty contest, the company said.

According to the competition’s details, Telegram expects smart contract developers to implement at least one of the five smart contracts, including multi-signature wallet, two types of simple TON DNS Resolver smart contracts, a synchronous two-party payment channel, and an asynchronous two-party payment channel.

Larger prize for exploiting a bug

Meanwhile, participants of TON Blockchain bug bounty contest should submit a description and a suggested scenario for its exploit, Telegram explained.

If the developers manage to actually exploit this bug in the TON Blockchain by stealing some funds from the wallet of another person, they will be awarded a larger prize of up to $200,000 in addition to the $200,000 prize fund distributed among smart contract developers.

The contest announcement comes amid the expected launch of Telegram’s digital token, Gram, in October, as previously reported. Meanwhile, Telegram officially released the TON testnet explorer and node software on Sept. 6.