Open Materials Challenge: Bring One Composition, We Score It

A solid-state battery replaces the liquid electrolyte of a lithium-ion cell with a solid. It does not catch fire, it lasts longer, and it can hold more. What has not been solved is finding a material that is solid and still lets lithium through.

Such a material has to do four things at once:

• give lithium a path to move along
• block electrons, or the cell simply shorts
• hold up at the charging voltage
• survive contact with the lithium-metal anode without decomposing

Plenty of materials manage three. Very few manage all four. Sulfides conduct beautifully and then react with lithium metal. Garnets sit calmly against lithium metal and are hard to process. Every family in use today is a trade, and the trade is the open problem.

What this is

Open Materials Challenge is a public leaderboard where anyone submits one composition — for example Li3YCl6 — and it gets scored computationally and placed on the board. Season 1 runs 2026-08-21 to 11-30. There is no prize.

You do not need a lab, a cluster, or a materials background. You need a composition and a reason for it. If you use a model to propose candidates, the site carries prompts you can paste straight in.

What gets scored

Axis	Points	What it asks
Oxidation stability	40	does it resist decomposing as the voltage rises
Lithium-metal stability	35	does it survive contact with the anode
Use novelty	25	higher if it has not been reported as an electrolyte
Lithium pathway	entry condition	a percolating path for lithium must exist

Two things worth stating plainly.

Ionic conductivity is not a scored axis this season. The challenge measures electrochemical robustness given a lithium path. A highly conductive family still scores low if its window is narrow or it reacts with lithium metal — those two are precisely the problem this season puts to you.

Use novelty is not composition novelty. A compound can be perfectly well known and still be untouched as an electrolyte. That gap is the target. A well-worked electrolyte family is not.

Every value on the board is a computational estimate. None of it implies anything about real performance or safety.

The board carries reference materials

Seven electrolytes in actual use sit on the leaderboard — LGPS, argyrodite, LLZO, LATP and others. They are scored but hold no rank. They are there so that a number means something: you can see where materials people already build with happen to land, and read your own candidate against them rather than against an abstract scale.

They also make the scoring honest about itself. The sulfides score low. That is not a defect in the board; it is the reason the field is still looking.

Your composition stays yours

Compositions are private by default. Nothing is disclosed unless you choose to publish it, and every entry is recorded with its timestamp. If a third party asks to discuss a particular entry, we pass the request along — never the submitter's identity, unless they agree to it.

This is a record, not a filing. It is not a patent and carries no guaranteed legal effect. Talk to a professional before you file.

Sister challenge

The same idea, for medicine: Open Discovery Challenge scores AI-designed molecules against neglected diseases — malaria, tuberculosis, Chagas disease. It has been running since summer and has taken several thousand entries.

Batteries and medicines are not the same problem. But both are places where a great deal of search space sits unexamined, and where one person with a good idea and a model can now look at a corner of it.

Open Materials Challenge — Season 1: Solid-State Battery Electrolytes
https://huggingface.co/spaces/FINAL-Bench/open-materials-challenge