Mini Apps Competition: Cycle #1 Winner Announcement!
The Nimiq Community Council has finished scoring all 62 Cycle 1 submissions. Meet the three winning Mini Apps and the builders behind them.
Cycle 1 of the Nimiq Mini Apps Competition is in the books.
The cycle ran from July 6 to July 31. Builders from around the world shipped Mini Apps, lightweight web apps that run inside Nimiq Pay, and submitted them for review and scoring.
Every submission was scored by the Nimiq Community Council across four categories.
You can refer to the Competition Scoring here.
In total there were 62 Mini Apps submitted in Competition Cycle #1.
Scoring is complete and the results are final.
🥁 Drumroll please…
1st Place: Nimiq Space by @Harlski, $10,000
Nimiq Space is an open multiplayer world for the Nimiq community, a shared isometric map where wallet-signed players can see who is online right now, build together, and leave something behind. The Pixel room is a persistent 500x500 collaborative floor where painted tiles stay for the next visitor. The Play Field runs seasonal soccer with kickoff countdowns and spectators, and anything you build with blocks, gates, signposts, or teleporters syncs live for everyone in the room.
2nd Place: NimJump by @emrealt34, $5,000
NimJump is a Godot-built arcade game with tap or gyro controls, daily and weekly leaderboards, login streaks, and quests. Most of the build went into a minimal client-authority architecture: deterministic map generation plus server-side replay verification, so the server decides what actually happened rather than trusting what the client reports. Offline play is preserved through server-issued signed seed batches, which stops players from fishing for a favorable seed.
3rd Place: NimQuest by @mystiquemide, $2,000
NimQuest is a learn-and-prove Mini App. You read a short sourced lesson, take a quiz that is graded on the server so the answer key never ships in the browser bundle, and only then reach the wallet step. Nimiq Pay signs a one-time, wallet-bound, five-minute message, the signature is verified server-side, and the verified completion joins a masked-wallet leaderboard. No NIM moves at any point.
Winners retain full ownership of their work. Prizes are paid in three equal monthly instalments, with full details in the competition rules. All winners will be contacted directly to arrange payout.
The bigger picture
This competition is not really about a leaderboard. It is about what happens when a payment protocol becomes something people actually use every day.
Every Mini App built on the framework is a new reason to open Nimiq Pay. A game, a tool, a shop, a tip jar, a ticket. Each one puts the Nimiq protocol in front of someone who was not looking for a blockchain, and each one gives an existing user a reason to come back. That is how adoption compounds. Not through one big launch, but through hundreds of small, useful things people reach for without thinking about the rails underneath.
The Mini Apps Framework exists to make that easy. Builders bring the idea, the design, and the hosting. The framework handles wallets, transactions, and payments. What comes out the other side is a real product with a real distribution channel to a real user base.
Cycle 1 proved the model works. Now we scale it.
Thank you
Cycle 1 would not have worked without the people who built for it. To everyone who submitted a Mini App, thank you. You shipped something real in four weeks, and the standard you set made the Council's job a hard one.
Every app built during Cycle 1 belongs to its builder under the MIT License. You can keep developing it, list it anywhere, or take it in a new direction entirely. Nothing about the competition changes that.
Cycle #2 begins Aug 24
Cycle #2 runs from August 24 to September 18, with the same $17,000 prize pool and a few upgrades we think builders are going to like.
Sip & Ship Events are on August 26, September 2, September 9, and September 16 at 11:00 AM ET (15:00 UTC). Submissions close September 18 at 23:59 UTC.
A reminder on eligibility, since the rules on this are clear. A Mini App that won a prize cannot be resubmitted in a future cycle. A Mini App that did not win can be resubmitted, improved and refined, as many times as you like. You are also free to submit an entirely new Mini App in any future cycle, and that applies to past winners too. Winning Cycle 1 does not take you out of the running for Cycle 2.
Registration is open now at miniappscompetition.com.
We are more excited about this competition than we were on day one, and we were pretty excited on day one. Congratulations to the Cycle 1 winners. We will see the rest of you in Cycle 2.