ETHGlobal held its latest hackathon after Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand last weekend, with 713 projects submitting applications. The judges included many crypto experts, such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, and Base founder and head Jesse Pollak. The ten finalists selected by the judges focus on growing areas in the crypto space, including Meme coins, AI agents, DAO tools, etc. This hackathon offers a $750,000 prize pool, the largest prize pool in the history of ETHGlobal. "I'm a judge for ETHGlobal, and I see two distinct trends in the hundreds of projects I follow - tokenization and AI agents," wrote Base core developer Will Binns on X. A core focus area for the winning projects is gaming, which accounts for 4 of the top 10. One of the winners, Metaloot, is a Launchpad that aims to connect games to Flow, and other winners are games in their own right, such as LootGO, which features “walking to earn Memecoin hunting,” BubbleWars, a game designed for Telegram that leverages referrals on Ethereum, and Dark Factory, which “combines the exploration of Dark Forest with the automation of Factorio.” Another area of focus is DAO tools, with MiniDAO, a tool to enable DAOs inside Telegram, where bots hold wallets controlled by group members, and DAOGenie, which leverages AI agents to “automatically make purchases, send donations, process communications, and perform other tasks” based on DAO votes. Another winner, Industry.ai, also leverages AI agents, where four specialized AI agents collaborate to handle complex blockchain operations. The remaining projects cover a wide range of areas from infrastructure to DeSci, with Zubernetes providing "a distributed system for orchestrating secure containerized workloads with ZK-proof verification"; ETHPark-QR allows Thai users to pay QR code parking tickets even without a local Thai bank account; and finally, Cat in a Box provides users with a platform to securely share private data and participate in decentralized scientific experiments called DeSci.ETHGlobal’s next hackathon will be held in Taipei in April 2025, together with ETHTaipei. (The Block)
