Blog

Ride with RISE: Testnet Competition

By Sam Battenally

Sam Battenally

05 Feb 2025 • 5 min read

TLDR:

We’ve designed an open builder competition to give every high-quality builder the chance to show the market their potential.
The ‘Ride with RISE’ builder competition is going live very soon, so registrations are now open!

The RISE team earned their chops building dApps. We know the challenges builders face because we’ve been in the trenches ourselves. Building is hard. The trenches are wild.

We want to help. We understand how painful it can be to work with foundations firsthand, which is why we’re determined to do better. This shapes everything we do, from product design and builder support to go-to-market and tokenomics - RISE is built by builders, for builders.

So, how do we support builders?

The opportunity

The EVM is the best environment for rapid prototyping, hands down. If you want to build fast, test fast and experiment; the tooling libraries, support and devs are unmatched. However, the industry has underdelivered on performant EVMs. Low latency, high throughput EVM chains simply don’t exist today, nothing like what we have on the horizon.

This changes with RISE, an EVM chain bringing you over 1 Gigagas per second throughput and sub-100ms latency. The potential for low-latency dApps, with the capacity to scale, is massive, and it is now possible.

There’s a wealth of opportunities opening up:

Onchain CLOBs & money legos alone could reshape global finance.
RWAs & payments need fast and reliable infrastructure to scale.
DePIN & onchain social graphs are waiting for the right execution layer.

So many bright ideas which were ahead of their time are now possible with RISE.

I cook, you cook, we cook

To better understand our thinking, here are some values which influence our decisions:

No cabals. Blockchains are transparent and open. The builders’ social layer should inherit these traits. We’ve been building in the open. pevm is open, our contributions to reth are all open, and our stack will soon be open and available to anyone. We believe the builder layer should also be open and accessible.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. The next wave of dApps won’t be ready overnight. We have to give the dreamers time to turn their ideas into novel products.
Quality over quantity. Attract the right builders.. The quality of the projects on RISE is far more important than the number of projects.
Boycott grant farming. There’s a sound business model right now in hopping from chain to chain farming grants. If that’s you, more power to you, but you won't find the same success on RISE.

Though the team sees enormous potential for specific use cases on RISE, we’re not here to put guardrails on innovation.

There are two ways we could approach this:

Curate and handpick teams that we think have the most potential.
Open the doors wide and let builders ship and iterate on the open market.

We chose the second.

Instead of playing kingmaker, we’re letting the market decide. That’s the core idea behind ‘Ride with RISE’.We will give builders the best infrastructure available, offer our expertise and support, and let killer dapps rise from the trenches in a fair competition.

The best projects that come out of this competition will benefit from much more support. Consider the builders' competition as a pathway to more. Successful projects will not only receive $RISE token allocation, but will also be considered for:

RISE’s incubation program
Direct investment from the RISE ecosystem fund
High-touch support with Product, GTM, legal and marketing
TVL bootstrapping support & incentives

And much more.

If you’re a builder, this is your shot to test the limits of what’s possible. Bring your ideas, your experiments, your moonshots. We cook the low-latency, high-throughput EVM. You cook the future.

The Ride with RISE Builder Competition

We’re excited to introduce ‘Ride with RISE’, where up to 100 million $RISE tokens are up for grabs over multiple seasons in an open builder competition!

‘RISE with RISE’ Season 1 welcomes the best builders in the space to build on RISE’s high capacity, low latency testnet. This competition is all about innovating and pushing the testnet to its limits in preparation for mainnet. Give it your best shot, try and break it as we continue to iterate!

3 Prize Categories

Each category will have 5-10 winning projects. A single project can win multiple awards. The season will run for 6-8 weeks. A concrete timeline will be released in the coming weeks.

We are welcoming builders to get a head start and deploy in time for day 1 of the competition!

👉 Register here!

FAQs

How do you get involved?

The private testnet is live now and ready for you to start cooking! To get access, you will need to register via the registration link. Following registration, you will get access to the Developer Discord server where the RISE team will provide you with the testnet resources.

Support

Participating teams will have direct access to the RISE devrel team. We’re here to help! There is a support channel on the Developer Discord that I encourage you to use, otherwise just hit us up!

The Testnet

As a team we believe in substance over speculation, and iterating fast. So you could say the testnet is undercooked. We will need more time in the oven to reach <10ms latency and 100k TPS, but it’s ready for building. Our latest benchmarks demonstrate 2 Gigagas/s and 50k+ TPS.

As dApp builders, we know how important tooling and infrastructure is. You’ll be glad to know we have onboarded high-quality RPC and indexing providers, and more infra is being added each week.

Looking for app ideas?

Find some high-level ideas here: https://docs.riselabs.xyz/build-on-rise/dapp-ideas.html

Or chat with the RISE team for more inspiration!

Eligibility Criteria

Registration

All participants need to register for the competition. By registering you will have a direct line to the RISE labs team who is here to support you.

Legal Criteria

Prize winners will be required to complete a KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) verification process to receive their payout.

To qualify for a prize:

You must be of legal age and have the legal capacity to participate in this competition based on the laws of your jurisdiction.
You must not reside in, be a citizen of, or act on behalf of the Crimea, Donetsk, or Luhansk regions of Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or any other country subject to embargoes or sanctions imposed by the United States, the United Kingdom, or the European Union.
You must not appear on any sanctions lists or similar restrictions maintained by the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, or the United Nations.

RISE reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to restrict or deny your eligibility for a prize if your participation is prohibited by any applicable domestic or international law, regulation, statute, rule, order, directive, code, decree, guideline, or requirement.