Proof of work beats a CV

The single field that decides most membership applications is proof of work. Not the CV, not where you studied, not how long you have been in crypto.

We wrote this because the gap between a rejected application and an accepted one is usually not talent. It is evidence.

What we click

When your application arrives, someone opens your links. In order:

1. The thing itself. A deployed app, a program on mainnet, a repo with commits over time.
2. Whether it works. We click it. On a phone. If it is broken, that is the review.
3. Whether you finished anything. Ten abandoned repos read worse than one small finished thing.
4. What is actually yours. Fork with three commits, or the whole thing? Say which. We check either way, and saying it first earns more than it costs.

Links beat adjectives

Compare:

"Experienced full-stack developer passionate about Web3 with strong knowledge of Rust and blockchain architecture."

"github.com/me/escrow — Anchor escrow program, deployed on devnet, 40 tests. Built it to understand PDAs. Writeup of what I got wrong: [link]"

The second tells us more in one line and is verifiable. The first is unverifiable in either direction, which makes it worthless as evidence.

If you have nothing yet

Plenty of members joined with no track record. They built one, and it took weeks rather than years.

Weekend one. Follow a Solana tutorial end to end. Deploy to devnet. Write 300 words about what confused you. That writeup is proof of work — it shows you can learn in public and communicate.

Weekend two. Take the thing you built and change it into something you would use. Even trivially. Deploy it again.

Weekend three. Do a bounty. Even if you do not win, the submission is a public artefact with a deadline attached, which is exactly what we are trying to assess.

Weekend four. Write up what you learned and post it. Tag us.

Four weekends and you have a repo, a deployment, a bounty submission and two pieces of writing. That is a stronger application than most people with three years of experience send us, because it is all clickable.

Non-engineers

The same rule holds, the artefact just changes:

• Designers — a Figma file of a real Solana product redesigned, with your reasoning written next to it
• Writers — three pieces explaining something hard, clearly
• Community — an event you ran, with the attendance number and what you would change
• Research — one thesis on a protocol with the numbers behind it

The pattern is always: made a thing, shipped it publicly, said what you learned.

What actually disqualifies people

Not inexperience. These:

• Links that 404
• Claiming work that is not yours
• "I'll show you once I'm accepted"
• Nothing built, but strong opinions about what should be built

The shortcut nobody uses

Come to an event first. Post in the forum. Do a bounty. By the time you apply we have already watched you work, and the application becomes a formality.

That is the entire advantage of a chapter over a form on the internet, and it is available to anyone who shows up.

Resources

• Solana developer docs
• Blueshift — structured Solana learning
• Greed Academy — free, Spanish-friendly
• Superteam Earn

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Apply to be a member when you have something to link to.