01 Story

What if learning a new tech stack felt less like homework and more like survival?
KCANE is a coding competition inspired by Squid Game and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, brought to you by a team of expert coders.

Here's how it works:

• Every participant receives a virtual bomb.
• You have 1 hour to defuse it by solving coding challenges.
• First developer to succeed wins $1,000.
• Everyone else who defuses within 1 hour splits a $4,000 prize pool.
• Everyone else explodes! 💥

Each KCANE challenge is themed around a tech stack (AWS, Solana, Next.js, etc.). The official documentation acts as your bomb defusal manual. It's both high-stakes and high-learning.

KCANE is built to make learning new tech stack fun. It's multiplayer, rewarding, fast-paced, and has explosions.

And best of all: no setup is necessary for participants besides cloning the competition repository. Optionally, competitors can install a companion extension in Visual Studio Code for additional tools.

02 What We Need

For Round 1 on Fundl, we're raising $5,000 to set up a prize pool for the MVP:

• Core game mechanics (bomb timer, submission flow, leaderboard).
• Integration of prize pool payouts.
• First challenge featuring AWS as the bomb defusal stack.

This MVP will let us run our first real KCANE competition with over 50 developers participating and $5,000 in prizes.

03 Risks

Considering that the whole project is fully digital, and the team is highly experienced in building technical products, the risks are minimal.

Biggest risks include:

• Technical challenge design: striking the right balance between fun and fairness.
• Adoption risk: attracting enough developers to make the game exciting.

We mitigate these by starting small (AWS challenge only) and building community feedback into each iteration.

04 Future Plans

This is just the start. After the MVP launch, we plan to:

• Raise a $50,000 round on Fundl.
• Add more bomb themes: Next.js, AI APIs, Solana, and beyond.
• Introduce team vs team modes for hackathon-style competitions.
• Scale prize pools and sponsorships (AWS, GitHub, and others).
• Build a library of KCANE challenges as a new form of interactive developer education.

If we raise a 2nd round ($50,000 planned), we'll immediately pay out early supporters x2 (estimated to $10,000 back to people that have supported us in the 1st round).

We'll approach Vercel, OpenAI, AWS, and other tech giants in an effort to secure free credits to winners of our competitions. For example, free AWS credits for top 3 winners of the AWS competition.

05 About

KCANE is a Capture The Flag developer competition where you “defuse bombs” by solving coding challenges.

• $1,000 to the fastest defuser.
• $4,000 shared among everyone else who survives.
• Each challenge teaches a tech stack using its official docs as your defusal manual.
• First round: Raising $5,000 to launch MVP.
• Future goal: Raise $50,000 to scale into a global dev competition platform.

Think Squid Game meets coding bootcamp - fun, high-stakes, and educational.