BreakTheCode.tech may have just held the world’s largest developer competition

Okay so don’t quote me on this one but I was pretty impressed when I saw that Radix, operators of .TECH, held a competition aptly called “Break The Code” that ended up bringing over 100,000 developers together to compete for some pretty awesome prizes. I did some searching and couldn’t find any bigger competitions like this one for developers so I think it very likely could be the biggest of its kind.

As many of you know, .TECH has been on my radar for some time now and I’ve written about them in the past including an interview with their CEO Sandeep Ramchandani which I highly recommend giving a read. What I’ve always appreciated about .TECH, which you’ll likely see in the interview with Sandeep, is their commitment to innovation and connecting with the community.

Break the code is a pretty incredible example of this kind of engagement and it’s clear it resonated with developers around the world.

Break the Code

So what was the idea behind Break The Code? Here’s a rundown of the competition and the results:

BreakTheCode.Tech invited participants to solve puzzles, ciphers, and trivia to compete for prizes worth $15,000. As a marketing campaign timed with Black Friday & Cyber Monday, it was a significant departure from the usual sales promos around this season.

The game consisted of six unique game rooms themed after a type of puzzle or cipher. Participants who completed at least one game room received a Namecheap coupon worth 90% off to buy a .Tech domain. Speaking about supporting the campaign, Graham Wood, Namecheap Director of Brand & Product Marketing, said, “Radix’s BreakTheCode.Tech initiative broke the rules to help expand Internet access to more potential online innovators while increasing the .Tech Domains’ appeal, visibility, and audience. BreakTheCode.Tech also offered Namecheap another unique and meaningful way to support more aspiring digital creators and future entrepreneurs — something we’ve been doing for more than two decades!”

In total, 19 winners were chosen across game rooms with the ultimate winner walking away with an Alienware custom PC worth $5000. Speaking about winning the first three-game rooms, Nick Hansen said, “I was instantly hooked on BreakTheCode.Tech. At my core, I’m a problem solver, so having the chance to win an iPad Pro (or many other prizes!) added to the intrigue.” Nick is the CEO of Luxor Technologies (www.luxor.tech), a Seattle-based mining firm that operates multiple hash rate-based products.(Source – Radix)

If you made it through some of the initial challenges you’d end up at a screen that looks like this:

Don’t worry if you don’t understand how to solve the conundrum above, as you already know, nineteen people won with the grand prize winner walking away with a $5,000 gaming PC 🤩🤩🤩

Participants were able to put themselves into game rooms based on difficulty level which I thought was a really creative way to get people involved given the varying skill levels.

Suman Das, the Brand Director of .TECH shared some of his thoughts about why this contest turned out to be such a hit.

“Given that 2020 has been a difficult year for all, we wanted to give the tech community a break from it. The idea was to build something fun, engaging, and exciting for them in the holiday season. Thus, the idea of  BreakTheCode.Tech germinated. We kicked off the game on 18th November and were thrilled to see the amount of interest and excitement it garnered from all over the world within just a couple of days. The momentum continued till 2nd December when we closed the game.”(Source – Suman Das)

Congrats to .TECH and to all the developers who participated in the competition, it’s pretty clear this kind was a good challenge for everyone involved and I’ve got serious gaming PC jealousy for whoever won that badass $5k gaming PC from Alienware 👽

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton