Official Rules and Terms of Participation — IOOVC 2026

1. Who runs the IOOVC, and answers for it

The International Olympics of Vibe Coding (IOOVC), 1st edition (2026), is organized and run by:

Confeitaria de Softwares Cupello LTDA · Brazilian company registry (CNPJ) 43.849.653/0001-52 · Rua Professor Gabizo, 42 — Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro/RJ, 20271-060, Brazil · contact@ioovc.org

The address above is the official channel for support, refund requests, disputes and privacy requests. Every message from the organization comes from an `@ioovc.org` address.

The IOOVC is run by a Brazilian company and is the international sibling of the OBVC (obvc.com.br), which is the Brazilian edition of the same competition.

2. What the IOOVC is

The IOOVC is a competition of software projects built with the help of artificial intelligence (*vibe coding*), in which entries are ranked solely on the merit of the judging committee's assessment, under the criteria and weights of section 6.

There is no draw, lottery, chance or randomness in the ranking or in the award of prizes. The IOOVC is not a sweepstakes, a lottery or a game of chance. Entry is paid because it funds the prize pool and the running of the competition, not because it buys a chance.

The edition has two independent competitions — the University category and the Open category — each with its own count of valid entries, its own podium and its own prize ladder.

3. Who may take part

• The IOOVC is open worldwide, to people of any nationality and any country of residence. Brazilians and residents of Brazil may enter either the IOOVC or the Brazilian edition, OBVC, but the same project may not be entered in both.
• Minimum age: 18 years completed on the date of registration. The 1st edition does not accept minors in any category, and therefore has no legal-guardian flow. The date of birth is provided in the logged-in area and is a condition for the project to be judged.
• Entry is individual. A project built by more than one person competes through the entry of a single participant, who answers for the project before the organization, declares that the other people involved have agreed to it, and is the one who receives the prize — any split within the group is made by them, outside the IOOVC.
• The same person may enter several different projects, paying one entry fee for each. There is no cap on entries per person. The same project may not be entered twice.
• Members of the judging committee, the organization and their immediate family may not compete.
• Where local law forbids paid-entry competitions or the participation of residents of a given territory, it is the participant's responsibility to comply with it; the organization may cancel an entry, with a full refund, when it learns of such a restriction.

4. Entry and payment

• University category — US$ 30.00: requires proof of enrollment (institution name, year/term and an enrollment document), uploaded in the logged-in area. None of it is required to pay, but all of it is required for the project to be judged.
• Open category — US$ 60.00: no academic proof required.
• What counts as proof of enrollment: an enrollment statement, a student-portal extract, a transcript or a student ID — in the participant's name, legible, showing active enrollment in 2026 at a higher-education institution. Undergraduate, graduate, technical and distance programs all count. The organization reviews it and approves or rejects it with a reason; if rejected, the participant may correct and resubmit until the submission deadline.
• Prices are quoted in US dollars and charged in Brazilian reais (BRL) by our payment processor, at the conversion rate shown at checkout: the acquiring account is Brazilian and settles in BRL. Your card issuer may apply its own exchange rate and an international transaction fee, which the organization neither receives nor controls.
• Payment is processed by Stripe. The IOOVC never receives or stores card numbers.
• Coupons (affiliate, partner university or campaign) are applied at checkout, do not stack, and do not apply retroactively to an entry already paid.
• An entry becomes valid at the moment Stripe confirms payment. Only from then does it count towards the Prize Ladder (section 9) and give the right to be judged.
• A declined or abandoned payment leaves the entry pending: it counts for nothing and can be resumed while registration is open.
• A refund ends the entry: the project leaves the competition from that moment. See section 13.
• A chargeback cancels the entry and removes the project from the competition, without prejudice to the measures available to the organization where the dispute is abusive.
• A duplicate entry of the same project is cancelled and the duplicate refunded; an entry obtained by fraud is cancelled without refund, under section 8.

5. Submitting the project

Access to the logged-in area is by one-time code (OTP) sent to the registered e-mail. That is where the participant fills in personal details, project details and, in the University category, the academic record.

The project fields are:

• Project name — required, public.
• Public project URL — required, public. The project must be online and reachable throughout the judging period.
• Project description — required, public. This is where the participant explains the idea and the value proposition. Do not put passwords here: they have their own fields.
• Test username and password and private judging instructions — visible only to the committee, if the project requires a login. See section 7.
• Video URL (YouTube) — optional.

The project interface must work in English (other languages may be offered alongside it).

The project can be edited freely until November 1, 2026, at 11:59:59 p.m. Brasília time (America/Sao_Paulo, UTC−3). At that instant the fields are locked by the system and the last saved version is the one judged; after it there is no editing, not even by the organization. The project URL, however, must keep working until the results are published.

6. Judging

Judging is done by the official IOOVC committee, whose members are listed on the home page. For each project the committee deliberates and records one consolidated score per criterion, from 0 to 100, with up to two decimal places, together with a written assessment.

Final score = (4×C1 + 3×C2 + 2×C3 + 1×C4) / 10

• C1 (weight 4) — Idea: value proposition, competitive edge and originality.
• C2 (weight 3) — Clarity: how clearly the idea, the value proposition and the differentiators come across.
• C3 (weight 2) — Execution: what was promised works, with UI/UX, flow and usability.
• C4 (weight 1) — Finish: bugs, instability, accessibility and security flaws.

The resulting score is rounded to two decimal places (half up) and is what orders the ranking within the category. Criteria, weights and formula do not change during the edition.

Conflict of interest. A judge must declare themselves barred from assessing a project when they have a close personal or family relationship with the participant, have worked with them, or have mentored, invested in, supplied or otherwise hold an interest in the project. The bar is recorded with its reason, that project passes to the remaining committee members, and the record stays in the platform's audit trail. The committee treats everything it is given as confidential, test credentials above all.

A project that cannot actually be tested — offline, no valid credentials, broken access — is judged on whatever is available, and the impossibility of testing weighs on C3 and C4. The organization is not required to ask for a fix or to judge again.

7. Test credentials and sensitive data

If the project requires a login, the participant provides a test username and password in dedicated fields of the logged-in area, separate from the public description. These credentials are visible only to the committee and to authorized administration, never appear on a public page, and access to them is recorded in the audit trail.

The participant undertakes to:

• create credentials exclusively for the IOOVC, to be revoked after judging;
• never reuse a personal password or a password from another service;
• grant no more access than judging requires;
• populate the environment with fictional data, with no real personal data of clients or users.

Test credentials are deleted from the platform within 90 days of the results being published. Participants are advised to revoke them in their own systems as well.

8. Fraud, plagiarism and disqualification

The following lead to disqualification, with no refund of the entry fee:

• plagiarism, or wholesale or substantial copying of someone else's project;
• infringement of a third party's intellectual property;
• falsity in a document, a declaration or an enrollment record;
• identity fraud, or multiple accounts used to get around a rule of these Rules;
• tampering with the submitted application, attempts to mislead the committee, or features simulated as if they were real;
• deliberately taking the project offline during judging;
• false credentials, or a project made untestable by the participant's own act;
• unlawful content, or content that infringes third-party rights;
• fraudulent payment or abusive chargeback;
• breach of any other rule of this competition.

Use of AI. The IOOVC is a vibe coding competition: the use of generative AI is free, expected, at any stage, and does not have to be declared. Templates, boilerplates, third-party libraries and projects started before the olympiad are equally allowed — including ones already published or earning money, and ones entered in other competitions. What is required is that the participant hold the rights to what they submit and answer for it.

Right to reply. Before disqualifying anyone, the organization writes to the participant setting out the reason and allows 7 calendar days for a response. The final decision is the organization's, is recorded with its reason in the audit trail, and is communicated by e-mail. Disqualification removes the project from the ranking; it does not remove the entry from the Prize Ladder count.

9. The Prize Ladder, and what a valid entry is

The prize amounts of each competition are set by the rung of the Prize Ladder matching the number of valid entries in that competition.

A valid entry is an entry whose payment was approved and which was neither refunded nor cancelled at the instant registration closed, on October 31, 2026, at 11:59:59 p.m. Brasília time (America/Sao_Paulo, UTC−3).

• The count is automatic and per competition: University and Open have separate, independent rungs.
• The rung is frozen at that instant, and the total is recorded on the platform with date and time, as an auditable record.
• A chargeback, refund or disqualification after the freeze does not lower the rung or the amounts already determined. A published rung never goes down.
• A University entry without valid proof still counts (it was paid), but the corresponding project is not judged.
• The number of valid entries is published together with the results.

9.1 Open competition

9.2 University competition

On each rung, the University amounts are exactly half of the Open ones.

9.3 Mentions

From the 1,000-valid-entry rung upwards, mentions are awarded beyond the podium — US$ 200 per recipient in the Open competition and US$ 100 in the University competition — from 4th place through the cut-off shown in the "Mentions" column of the rung in force (at most 500th place, on the 10,000-or-more rung).

9.4 Projected amounts

The official amounts are exclusively those in the tables above, determined by the rung in force when registration closes. Any projected figure shown on ioovc.org before that moment is purely illustrative, is always labelled as a simulation, and is not a promise of value.

10. Tie-breaking

Where final scores tie, the ranking is decided by the higher score in, in this order:

1. C1 — Idea;
2. C2 — Clarity;
3. C3 — Execution;
4. C4 — Finish.

If the tie survives all four criteria, the committee runs a specific tie-break assessment between the tied projects and records the decision, with reasons, in the minutes. No awarded position is published as a tie.

11. Prizes and payment

• Results and scores are published on December 25, 2026, at ioovc.org.
• Amounts announced are gross. Any tax on the prize, including income tax in the winner's country, is the winner's responsibility, save for a withholding that the law imposes on the payer — in which case the amount is paid net of that mandatory withholding.
• To be paid, the winner provides, on request, the details needed for payment and bookkeeping: full name, tax identification number in their country, and bank details in their own name. No payment is made to a third party.
• Prizes are paid by January 25, 2027, in US dollars or the equivalent, by international bank transfer or another method agreed with the winner, against a receipt. The organization bears the cost of the transfer it sends; fees charged by intermediary or receiving banks are outside its control. For a group project, payment is made to the participant who holds the entry.
• A winner who does not provide the required details within 90 days of the results being published, after two attempts to reach the registered e-mail, forfeits the prize, which is not redistributed.

12. Intellectual property

The project stays the participant's. The IOOVC acquires no ownership, claims no co-authorship and asks for no assignment of rights over the code, the brand or the content entered.

The participant grants the organization two licences only, both free of charge:

• Judging licence — to access, use and test the project, for as long as judging requires, by anyone the organization authorizes.
• Publicity licence (awarded projects only) — to display and publicize, in any medium and territory, for 2 years from the publication of the results: the project name, the participant's name and likeness, the project logo, screenshots, screen recordings of the application and the submitted video. Publicity always credits the author.

Source code is never published by the organization, under any circumstances. Projects that are not awarded are not publicized: they only enter the public entry count. After the 2 years, an awarded participant may ask by e-mail for the publicity material to be taken down; the historical record of the edition (name, placement and score) is kept, for the integrity of the result.

By entering, the participant declares that they own or are authorized to use:

• the code, their own or a third party's, under a compatible licence;
• the images, audio, fonts, brands and datasets used;
• the APIs, libraries and third-party resources;
• work done as a group, with the agreement of the other people;
• content belonging to a company, client or employer — entering someone else's project without authorization is grounds for disqualification.

13. Cancellation, withdrawal and refund

The full rule is on the Cancellation and Refund page. In short: a participant may cancel the entry and get the money back, from their own logged-in area, within 7 calendar days of payment. After that, requests go to the official e-mail address and are considered case by case, without prejudice to the rights local law grants the participant — in particular where the service fails and where the organization cancels the edition (section 15).

14. Disputes and clerical error

Results are published with the score of each criterion and the committee's assessment. There is no appeal on the merits of the assessment: the score set by the committee is final.

A request to correct a clerical error is accepted, however — an arithmetic or typing error in a score, a misidentified project, a wrong category, a misapplied tie-break. It is sent to contact@ioovc.org within 7 calendar days of publication, describing the error. The organization replies within 15 calendar days, records the request and the decision, and corrects the result if the error is confirmed. That decision is final.

15. Changing, postponing or cancelling the edition

The organization may postpone dates or amend these Rules for good reason — force majeure, a prolonged platform outage, a decision by an authority, or any event that prevents the competition from running normally.

• Every change is published on this page with a new version and a new date, and communicated by e-mail to everyone already entered.
• A change does not apply retroactively to the detriment of someone already entered: anyone who disagrees with a material change made after their entry may request a full refund, even outside the 7-day window.
• If the organization cancels the edition, every paid entry is refunded in full and no prize is owed.

16. Personal data

How the competition handles personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy, and the use of cookies in the Cookie Policy. Acceptance of these Rules and of the Privacy Policy is recorded at registration, with date, time and the version of each document then in force.

17. Final provisions

• These Rules stay publicly available after the edition closes, with their version history.
• Anything not covered here is decided by the organization, in writing, in line with the principles of these Rules.
• The English text is the official version. The Spanish and Portuguese translations are provided for convenience only; if they diverge, the English text governs.
• Brazilian law applies, the organization being established in Brazil. The courts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are the agreed forum, without prejudice to any mandatory right a consumer has to sue, or be sued, in the courts of their own country of residence.

Version 1.0 · effective September 16, 2026.