Rules & Regulations

1. Eligibility

• Participation is open to any student currently enrolled in a Danish higher education programme — including universities, business academies, and professionsbachelor programmes — as well as international students studying in Denmark.
• Recent graduates who completed their degree within the last 18 months are also eligible.
• Participants must be 18 years of age or older.
• Organizers, volunteers, judges, mentors, and sponsors may not compete as hackers. This applies regardless of their student status.
• RoyalHacks reserves the right to verify eligibility and to remove participants who do not meet these criteria.

2. Teams

• Teams may consist of 1 to 4 participants.
• All team members must be individually registered for the event.
• Solo participation is permitted and not penalized in any way.
• Teams may be formed before or during the event. Participants who register without a team will have the opportunity to find teammates through our pre-event Discord server and team-forming activities at kickoff.
• Once hacking begins, team composition is fixed. Switching teams after the hacking period starts requires organizer approval.
• All team members must actively contribute to the project. Ghost members — those who register as part of a team but do not participate — are not permitted.

3. The Hacking Period

• The hacking period begins at the official kickoff on Saturday and ends at the submission deadline on Sunday. Exact times will be communicated before the event.
• All original work on your project must be completed during the hacking period.
• Teams may discuss ideas, sketch concepts, and plan their approach before the event. Writing code, designing interfaces, or building any part of the project before the hacking period begins is not permitted.
• Teams may work on an idea they have thought about before the event, as long as no prior work — code, designs, or other project materials — is reused.
• Teams must stop adding new features once the submission deadline has passed. Minor bug fixes discovered during the demo may be addressed at organizer discretion.

4. Permitted Tools and Resources

• Teams are encouraged to use open-source libraries, frameworks, and third-party APIs. All external resources must be credited in the project submission.
• All RoyalHacks participants receive free access to Lovable during the event. Use of Lovable and other AI-assisted development tools — including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, and similar — is permitted and encouraged.
• Teams must disclose which AI tools they used in their Devpost submission. This is not a penalty — it is a transparency requirement in the spirit of the event.
• Working on a project before the event and open-sourcing it solely for the purpose of reusing it during the event is against the spirit of these rules and is not permitted.
• Hardware projects are not supported at RoyalHacks 2026. All projects must be software-based.

5. Submission

All projects must be submitted via Devpost by the submission deadline on Sunday. The deadline is firm — late submissions will not be accepted. Each submission must include:

• A project title and description
• A link to a live, deployed version of the project (or a working demo)
• A link to a public GitHub repository containing the project code
• A list of all team members
• A list of which tracks the project is entering
• A disclosure of any AI tools used during the build

Projects submitted without a public repository or a working demo may be ineligible for prizes at organizer discretion. Your GitHub repository must remain public after the event. Projects whose repositories are made private after submission may be disqualified from prize consideration.

6. Tracks and Judging

• RoyalHacks features multiple challenge tracks, each with its own brief, judging criteria, and prizes. Tracks are announced at the official kickoff on Saturday morning.
• Teams may enter as many tracks as they like with the same project, as long as the project meets the criteria for each track entered.
• Track selection is made at the time of Devpost submission — not at the start of the event. Teams are free to change their track selection up until the submission deadline.
• Projects are judged by a panel selected by RoyalHacks. Judges evaluate projects based on the criteria for each track, which may include originality, usefulness, design, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and overall execution.
• Technical depth alone is not a judging criterion. Projects that demonstrate strong thinking, creative problem-solving, and meaningful impact will be rewarded regardless of the complexity of the code.
• Judges' decisions are final.

7. Intellectual Property

• Participants retain full ownership of the intellectual property they create at RoyalHacks. RoyalHacks does not claim any rights over your project.
• By submitting a project, participants grant RoyalHacks a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to reference, display, and promote the project for non-commercial purposes — including on the RoyalHacks website, social media, press materials, and in communications with partners and sponsors.
• Sponsors offering track prizes may have separate terms attached to those prizes. Any such terms will be clearly communicated before the event and participation in sponsor tracks is voluntary.

8. Disqualification

Teams may be disqualified at the organizers' discretion for reasons including but not limited to:

• Submitting code or project materials created before the hacking period
• Violating the RoyalHacks Code of Conduct
• Misrepresenting team composition or eligibility
• Failing to submit a working project or public repository by the deadline
• Any other behavior that violates the spirit of these rules

9. Organizer Rights

• RoyalHacks reserves the right to amend these rules at any time. Significant changes will be communicated to all registered participants.
• RoyalHacks reserves the right to cancel, postpone, or modify the event in the event of circumstances beyond our control.
• In the event of a dispute, the organizers' interpretation of these rules is final.

10. Code of Conduct

These rules govern competition. The RoyalHacks Code of Conduct governs behavior and community standards. Both apply to all participants throughout the event. A violation of either may result in removal from the event.