ETHGlobal, the Ethereum-focused events firm, held its latest hackathon following Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand over the weekend. The conference reports that 713 projects were submitted to the judges, a wide range of crypto experts such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Jesse Pollak, creator and head of Base, and many others.
The ten finalists selected by the judges are notable for targeting growing sectors in crypto, from memecoins to AI agents to DAO tools. The projects competed for their share of a $750,000 prize pool, the largest in ETHGlobal's history.
"I'm a judge at ETHGlobal and there are two distinct trends I'm seeing in the hundreds of projects I'm looking at — Tokenization and AI Agents," Will Binns, a Base core developer, wrote on X.
One core area of focus for the winning projects was gaming, which nabbed 4 of the top 10 slots. While one winner, Metaloot, is a launchpad built to connect games to Flow, the others are games themselves. LootGO features "walk-to-earn memecoin hunts," BubbleWars is a game designed for Telegram that leverages referrals on Ethereum, and Dark Factory "combines the exploration of Dark Forest with the automation of Factorio."
Another area of focus: DAO tools. MiniDAO is a tool that enables DAOs inside of Telegram, with a bot holding a wallet controlled by the group members. DAOGenie leverages AI agents to "make purchases, send donations, handle communications, and execute other tasks automatically" based on the DAO's votes. Also leveraging AI agents is another finalist, Industry.ai, where four specialized AI agents team up to handle complex blockchain operations.
The remaining few projects span the gamut from infrastructure to DeSci. Zubernetes provides "a distributed system for orchestrating secure containerized workloads with ZK-proof verification." ETHPark-QR allows users in Thailand to settle QR code parking tickets, even without a local Thai bank account. And finally, Cat in a Box provides a platform for users to share private data securely and participate in decentralized science experiments, known as DeSci.
ETHGlobal's next hackathon will take place in April 2025 in Taipei, alongside ETHTaipei, the firm announced.
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