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AI+Blockchain: Just a buzzword? Find out in World’s Largest Hackathon
Recorded: June 18, 2025 Duration: 1:00:48Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion centers around the world's largest hackathon, emphasizing the integration of AI and blockchain, significant fundraising opportunities with over a million dollars in prizes, and the strategic partnership between Algorand and Bolt. The focus on attracting Web2 developers and improving user experience highlights key trends and growth opportunities in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Hello everybody and welcome to today's X-Space, AI plus blockchain, just a buzzword, find
out in world's largest hackathon with Bolt.nu.
We'll be diving into ai and blockchain and the synergy
between the two and the current state of it as well as exploring what's going on with our
involvement as the only blockchain in the world's largest hackathon i'm going to hand over to
today's host silent rhetoric and mark v hello hello How's everybody doing?
So we are in the world's largest hackathon, and this is pretty exciting.
So we're going to talk today about what does this mean?
Like, who are we? Who's both? What are we doing here?
And hopefully we can inspire, as there are two more weeks of hacking more people to participate in this unique opportunity to build things on our end with ai
so mark why don't you introduce yourself to get a story hey brian uh hi guys i'm mark and
Hey, Brian. Hi, guys. I'm Mark. And I lead the strategy and marketing for the foundation and super happy to be here to talk about our participation in this hackathon. And we'll dive into a lot more details in a minute.
Thanks very much. Can we bring Asla up on the stage as well?
And in the meantime, so I'm Brian Whippo, and I lead the Deverell team here at the Foundation,
and just love teaching people how to build stuff with Algorand. And this year, more than ever,
teaching people how to build stuff with Algorand with AI. All right, we got As us up on the stage now.
Introduce yourself.
Yeah.
Hi, everyone.
I am Devril Advocate at Algorand, and I'm working on different things and helping people to get to Bolt Hackathon and create different projects.
create different projects.
So happy to help.
So happy to help.
And if you have any questions, please
feel free to join on Discord and ask us questions.
Yeah, good stuff.
So let's talk about this Bolt hackathon.
What is this event, the world's largest hackathon?
So Bolt, first of all, is an AI-powered, no-code slash low-code development platform
that lets people use LLMs to prompt an app into existence. And Mark, help me with the history
here, but I think there was like a moment on twitter when the idea of trying to organize the the
world's largest hackathon came up and eric the ceo of bolt was like let's do this yeah so yeah so
actually it started with jerry uh from lofty who uh sent me a message and said hey there's this
thing going on uh with bolt they're trying trying to create the world's largest hackathon.
This would be cool if Algorithm could be part of it.
And we all thought it was a very cool idea,
especially because as Algorithm, our focus has always,
has been for the past two years to kind of attract Oweb2 developers.
So we figured this would actually be a great match uh for us so i reached out to eric who's the ceo of bolt and said hey
we'd be happy to participate and sponsor if you'll have us and he replied yes that's a great idea
let's do it and so that's how we became the exclusive blockchain sponsor of the bolt hackathon and we have a an exclusive as you know
chain channel we have Brian as a judge in the hackathon and so that's how it got started
amazing so I think the threshold that everyone was going for is 100,000 hackers to make it the world's largest hackathon.
And I want to say we're there.
The website, by the way, hackathon.dev is where you go to sign up and get information about the hackathon.
And it indicates there's already over 100,000 people registered.
So this is a big deal.
This is a big event.
big event and it's amazing to be able to participate in it as the the sole blockchain
partner here and and see what we can prompt into existence and it's kind of cool right like i'm one
of the hundred and two thousand so i signed up for it last last week or so and i started experimenting
with it and playing around with it and it's actually quite amazing what you can do
without writing a single line of code um it's it's it's quite amazing
do you want to talk a little bit about the prize pool because this is notable
yes so there's uh there's over a million dollars worth of prizes a number of different categories
um but in total there's over a million dollars worth of prizes a number of different categories but in total there's over a million dollars worth
of prizes specifically within the blockchain category the main prize is a 25 000 top price
that the foundation is providing but there's more prices in that as well we're also looking into
whether we can actually create more prizes than just the one top price within the blockchain
category we're talking to the ball team about that because we've heard some people say like hey you know we
should have a little bit more kind of different types of prizes within the blockchain category so
so we're working on that and we're seeing what we can do there but for now there's a 25 000 top
price within the blockchain category and then more prizes across all other cities and across the entire hackathon.
That's amazing. That is like a real money prize.
I hope that folks feel motivated by the size of that purse to throw their hat into the ring and see what they can build.
Yeah, and to me, what's interesting too, as I mentioned,
we are really focusing a lot of the effort to bring in new developers into your dragon ecosystem and specifically web2 developers
because if you think about the blockchain industry as a whole um you you notice that there's not a
huge amount of influx of new developers into the blockchain industry um
and so we feel as algorithm that with algokid and the native python support and typescript and also
all of the avm features like instant finality and no forking that we are we have the best kind
of value proposition to attract new developers into crypto and choose algorithm as
their first step their first entry into the crypto industry and so um and so we so i think that from
that perspective like the bolt hackathon is super interesting because we are not targeting a web3
audience here we're targeting a web2 audience and so and so making it easy for them to kind of
look at web 3 and come up with interesting compelling applications for web 3 and then
and then ease them into this in in the best possible way so i think strategically i think
it's a very very interesting approach and we'll see how it works but it's definitely something
we'd want to do more of it's like partnering with other companies partnering with organizers in the web2 space and
be the blockchain kind of partner and and use this as a way to attract web2 audience into web3
yeah that's super exciting and i would add to that as well. If you're already an Algorand builder, this is an incredible opportunity to use some cutting-edge tools to build compelling apps, beautiful interfaces, and maybe even take the lead on demonstrating what can be built with Algorand.
I think that's a good, Brian, I think that's a very good point because I also, I think we have very strong kind of algorithm skill set amongst our developers.
But I think that most of the developers are stronger in building kind of the backends and the smart contracts and maybe not so much in terms of user experience. Whereas if you think about this bold hackathon, you have lots of lots and lots of people
that have user experience that have no idea
how to build on a blockchain.
So I also think there's an opportunity here
to kind of team up and have some of our agron
developers team up with maybe more UI-driven user experience
app developers in the web2 space
and see what can happen if you put those
two resources together by our powers combined we can do amazing things yeah team formation is so
important we've seen people raising their hand in discord both ours and the bolt discord to team up
to team up and see what they can build together.
and see what they can build together it's really exciting to see
It's really exciting to see.
So let's talk a little bit about what Bolt is
and what does this look like in practice?
This is really pioneering stuff
to be able to use generative AI and LLMs
to just sort of manifest an app.
And these technologies have existed for essentially a matter of months.
And Bolt is bringing this to the masses in a big way.
So I want to go to Asta, who has done a bunch of work to get people started
building on Bolt with Algran.
So talk to us about what is the beginning of that journey look like?
What can people expect when they throw their hat in the ring?
And you can talk a little bit about what we've provided as a jumping off point for
developers or non-developers to get started building.
Yeah, sure. So I think the journey like starting a month
when we were like that, okay,
once people start building on it,
we don't want them to start from scratch.
We want that, okay, that you have like a base template
wherein you can see that, okay,
which versions or which particular tools
or frameworks will help me.
So we created like basic template, which has, for example,
if you want to connect your wallet, you don't have to code all of that out.
And the basic template that we've created,
we have created all using like Bolt's prompts.
So it's not that we have also coded it out.
We have used bold for that and it creates,
it has a lot of things.
For example, it has all the resources.
So that you don't have to go here and there
just looking for the actual stuff.
If for example, it also tells you that,
hey, you can use these prompts after you have,
for example, generated that in your workspace. Now, if you want to create on top of that,
how you can do that is you can either like copy a few of the prompt examples, or you can just take,
for example, a reference from them, and then you can add your own prompts and you can create
multiple things. Also, it gives you a lot of benefits. For example, if you want like an
online ID, you have stacklets for that. If you want to also connect your GitHub and you want that,
okay, I want to version control it. You can do that by connecting to GitHub because Bolt gives us that option.
You can also have like download it in your local and create on top of that.
So this template basically gives you an overview or like as a starter that,
okay, this is something that you can build on top of that.
And also, for example, which all libraries, which all versions you would need so that you don't have to use,
for example, an outdated version.
Amazing.
So I put a link in the comments on the space to our starter template.
And it's basically a GitHub repo that the DevRel team put
together and Bolt lets you effectively import a starting template from GitHub.
So if you take a look at that link, you can see it in the URL there and that has
sort of a bootstrapped app and it's got our wallet integration built in, a bunch
of guidance. So check that link out in the comments and try your hand jumping off from our trampoline.
One other thing I want to talk about is on the topic of getting started,
this is open to both developers and non-developers.
We want to make sure that people feel supported.
So I want to extend an invitation again to our Discord server.
So discord.gg slash algorand.
We have a special channel set up in Discord,
and people are chatting about what they're doing
and how many tokens they've got left
and asking questions and asking for guidance and so forth.
So there's some good chatter happening in there.
And Asda and others have been helping to guide people
and say, well, you might struggle with this bit,
maybe go about it this way.
So we invite you to come on in
and tell us what you're building.
If you're looking for teammates,
it's a great forum to connect with other folks
and ask for help if the LLM doesn't always
give you working code, which we appreciate.
Sometimes things need a little finagling,
a little finesse to get them to work.
So we're happy to help folks out there.
We also, Brian, we also have a bonus pack available, right?
To kind of help developers with like some nodely connectivity.
Yeah.
So when you sign off this hackathon,
there is a whole pack of coupon codes essentially
to give you credits for Bolt.
So you'll get like a Bolt Pro subscription, which raises the number of AI tokens you can use to
build stuff. And then there's a whole array of free things, free services, you know, free months
of things. And we are just one of the sponsors in this hackathon.
And so you won't just get Nodely stuff, you'll get all kinds of stuff. But the Nodely offering
that Pavel, our best bud at Nodely, has very generously donated to this event is two free
months of his unlimited tier. So it's like the highest level of
the API services that Node.ly offers.
And it's worth over $500,
which is super, super generous of him.
And all you have to do is take
the coupon code you'll get at signup,
put that into, there'll be a link,
and you can put that into Node.ly,
basically just go through the checkout process.
And this coupon code will reduce the price to zero.
And then you'll get two months, which actually goes beyond the hackathon period,
to do whatever you can do to his nodes.
And there'll be no limits on the API calls that you can make against his network.
So he has basically taken the ceiling off of what you can build using the Algorand network
and all of its capabilities because you won't be rate limited you'll have access
to his whole offering which it's actually by the way goes above and
beyond normal node capabilities like he has proprietary indexing capabilities
you can query data in interesting ways. So he goes above and beyond and has offered that to all hackathon participants for two months for free.
So thank you.
Thank you, Dudley.
Thank you, Arthur.
And he had, didn't he say he had like 1,300 kind of people sign up already for it?
Yes.
Something like that, right?
I'm not sure what the latest numbers were, but it was substantial.
Yeah, we're in the thousands now,
which is really incredible.
And, you know, I always think of hackathons
as one of these things where people,
they go into like stealth mode
and they get very quiet because it's competitive.
They don't want anyone to know what they're building
and what they're building
and they become very secretive.
But we know from the API data
that there are literally
thousands of people signing up and sending API requests
to his network.
And so we have these sort of data breadcrumbs
that let us know there's a bunch of people getting involved.
So while some people have been vocal and open in Discord
about what they're up to, there's also
the silent secretive bunch
who are just building quietly in the background.
So I'm very, very excited to see what comes out
in the submissions at the end of the month.
Also, to add on, I think few people are facing issue
when they are adding the coupon code.
So if anyone is there and they are not able to get access or they want some help,
please do reach out to us on Discord and we'll be happy to help over there regarding the access.
Yeah.
The Bolt team has also been amazing.
There's been people who ran into issues here or there with coupon codes or whatever,
and their team has been incredibly responsive.
So I just want to give a huge shout out to the Bolt team.
They're not a huge team.
Eric is in there.
His team staff is in there.
They are really rallying around this,
and I think they've made for a really unique hackathon experience
that they're deeply invested in.
But wait, there's more so something we haven't really talked about much but if you have signed
up and kept an eye on your email or twitter there is an opportunity to make a video about your
hackathon experience and the pulp team have retained some serious filmmakers
to make a documentary about this whole process.
So even if you don't necessarily win,
there's sort of an opportunity for your 15 minutes of fame
if you made a particularly interesting video
about your efforts.
You could be included in this documentary.
So there's really something special happening here and um and also i want to mention that the if when you go to hackathon.dev
there is a whole bunch of information there when you get to the site there's a scrolling banner
at the top it's kind it's like kind of subtle but there's a whole set of meetups around the world in dozens of cities.
There's some virtual ones as well.
But if you live in a medium or large city anywhere in the world, check the site and it will default to events near your location.
If there's something near you, come out, meet other hackers, and join the community because there's an incredible number of in real life IRL meetups going on around the world.
So do we want to talk a little bit about beyond the hackathon and what people might be able to achieve after building an MVP in the hackathon?
for you as like a hackathon participant.
Can I actually create my entire app,
including like smart contracts
without writing a single line of code?
Or am I going to have to download Algo Kits
and get into the Algo Kits kind of code development
in order to create a smart contract?
Excellent question.
Thank you for taking us there.
So there's a bit of nuance here.
It is possible to generate a whole app,
including Algorand bits and smart contract code and so forth.
However, it may be a bit tricky.
We appreciate that LLMs are not perfect.
Sometimes they hallucinate.
And Algorand is a fairly emerging technology.
And a lot of the contract libraries, languages, and other tools that we use are new to the
internet and new to the training data that LLMs are trained on.
So it is entirely possible that you will run into some issues.
Don't hesitate to ask for help.
Don't hesitate to ask for help.
One thing to note in particular is that the rules of the Bolt
Hackathon will already use Bolt to build this app.
And it needs to run in the Bolt environment,
so this browser-based IDE, this development environment.
And one thing that will not run there is AlgoKit localnet.
So this is the local sandbox network
that you get as one of the features of AlgoKit.
But it requires running in Docker containers
and all this kind of stuff.
And so that's not going to work in the browser natively.
So if you are doing something a little bit more elaborate,
you're going to want to eject out and do some of the development using AlgoKit,
algokit.io, to sort of find the happy path for smart contract development.
But that said, there are lots of things you can build that don't necessarily require that.
You can use the Algorand standard asset tokenization capabilities and transaction capabilities
without getting into smart contract development.
And you are highly likely to be able to use Bolt to prompt that code.
And I know that Asda has been working with people to help them through this process.
If you have any other tips to help builders out.
Please.
Yeah, I would like to add on that definitely, like,
we can generate at least, like, some amount of contract support,
but that might not be the correct one.
So I would highly, like, advise people to double check on their own
and also if possible because right now it's not possible to have Algorit on Bolt's terminal
because like all of these tools do have like their own limitations. But if, for example, you have written your own code in terms of the contracts,
you can also use Bolt to, for example, interact with the blockchain.
So Bolt will help you over there as well.
And in terms of front-end, it definitely is doing really good.
definitely is doing really good.
Awesome.
Awesome.
So up to this point, we have been talking about using a lot
AI and LLMs to essentially generate code and build stuff,
front ends, algorithm connectivity and so forth.
And this is one of the frontiers of the intersection
between AI and crypto, the ability to accelerate software development and empower builders that may not have deep about the possibilities of enabling AI and AI-powered agents with blockchain.
So what sorts of things are you excited about on this frontier that might inspire people who are building this hackathon?
Yeah, so this is, of course, this is a big, big topic. And we can kind of like talk a little bit about that.
So I think there is a really big opportunity
around the whole kind of field of agentic commerce.
You can see this happening with LLM.
They're all moving towards kind of an agentic structure, right?
The next step in this is going to be where agents can talk to each other
and negotiate and agree on things together.
And so you start seeing the standards being developed already.
You see, for instance, Google has come up with a new proposed standard around agent-to-agent
communications, which would allow two agents that
are built on completely separate technology stacks
or using separate foundational models
to engage with each other, find out
what the respective skills are of the agents,
and come to some sort of an agreement
so you can see that happening you start seeing you start seeing this kind of world moving into
this kind of agentic world so then the next question becomes if you have these agents talking
to each other and and and subcontracting services from one to the other you can imagine for instance
a you know travel planner talking to a hotel booking
agent for instance and coming to an agreement of like you know what hotel is needed as part of a
broader trip right like then the next question becomes okay these agents can talk to each other
and agree on things but then they have to pay each other right and how is that payment going to happen
and so my hypothesis here is that payment you're not going to give an agent access to a bank account.
And you're not going to use a traditional banking system or even a credit card system where, you know, settlement takes three days, right?
And there's significant fees associated with that.
And so that kind of system is not going to work in this new agentic world because agents will need to be able to handle transactions at scale.
They'll have to settle instantly and they'll have to happen, you know, and you'll be able to support micropayment transactions.
And so for this type of new world of agentic, I think blockchain will be a critical kind of rail
to enable this.
And so I'm very excited about that future.
And I'm very excited specifically about the role
that Algorand can play into this future
because of the unique characteristics
of the Algorand blockchain,
such as support for instant finality,
scalability, the block times and stuff like that.
These are all kind of made for kind of payment use cases. And so think that's where the world is going and i think i'm pretty bullish that
algorithm could play a big role in there that's super exciting i i agree that blockchain is the
perfect fit for ai agents to pay for stuff and the instant finality enables these agents to
fleet whatever it is that they're doing and know that they've been paid and that is not something
that all blockchains can do. Al Grand is pretty unique in that capability. So if I was building
an AI agent with a budget that was going out and running errands for me, and I would not want to worry that the transactions
might not settle and so forth.
The instant finality is an incredible feature of Algorand.
As though, what are you excited about
in the realm of AI and blockchain?
I think the most interesting thing I feel
in terms of AI in blockchain would be, for example, right now, there's a lot of manual auditing, for example, in smart contracts that happen.
I feel that a lot of that, for example, there is still, for example, there is manual errors that can happen while auditing.
For example, there is manual errors that can happen while auditing.
So I feel that AI is a very good use case over there.
If, for example, we have Algorand Python or Algorand TypeScript as our languages,
we can have AI-based auditing tools which will help us to get the audits done.
And that will also lessen the number of leaks or exploits that
happen on blockchain. Because I feel that one of the reasons why blockchain is gets, I think,
a little bit of negative limelight is because of the exploits that people are not generally aware
of. And there are hackers that come come in for example steal their money and
do all sorts of sorts of things so i feel ai can definitely help over here
Then we also have, for example, all the DAOs and, as Mark mentioned, about agent tech AIs
and stuff.
Those are also, I think, really good cases when it comes to DeFi applications.
What a time to be built at the intersection of these two disruptive technologies.
There are so many opportunities out there right now to create something on the top of this wave
and get a ton of people's attention in this hackathon because the winners are going to get recognition among a huge huge group across the
industry so that's yeah thank you for sharing what you're excited about and brian talking about
recognition one of the things that we didn't talk about is um we are really looking closely at the
projects that are coming out of this hackathon, and specifically projects that have the ability
to touch a retail audience.
As I mentioned in the past,
we are planning a big new marketing campaign,
the phase two, if you want, of canablockchaindothat.com
that is specifically geared towards attracting retail users
to Algorand.
And so it's going to be be that campaign is going to kick off
in September.
And it's going to have weekly prizes.
And I can't go into details because we're still
working out the details.
But we'll have weekly prizes and weekly challenges
that people can do.
And what we're planning on doing is we're planning
on featuring the best app that we can see coming out of this hackathon or some of the future hackathons and see if we can actually basically promote that app and get you tens of thousands of users as part of our big marketing campaign.
So that's another incentive, another reason for you to think about
creating the coolest possible retail-focused apps.
That's incredible.
What a great opportunity for folks to be put in the spotlight
and get things that are going to continue to add value for them.
Can't wait to hear what's going to happen on that front.
We would love for the things that people
build to get in front of a million eyes.
That would be so, so exciting.
So Mark, what do you think would differentiate the apps most likely to win this hackathon?
What do you think is that X factor?
That's a difficult question. I think what I'm excited about is seeing what traditional kind of Web2 developers can actually do when they integrate a blockchain into their apps. because i think like a lot of like the traditional like if you if you talk about i mean if you talk
to a lot of like web3 developers right the types of apps and the types of ideas they come up with
tend to be very um defy oriented and there's nothing wrong with defy of course i love defy
um but i also think that getting some fresh blood in from the web2 world of people that think about
apps in a completely different way.
What if we give them this kind of new platform, this blockchain platform?
What are some of the things that they could build?
We could see some super innovative things that we hadn't thought about ourselves that could come in and that could basically surprise us all.
is all and so and i'm super excited about seeing what comes out of this and if there's new ideas
And so I'm super excited about seeing what comes out of this.
coming out of this that that that are coming from a web 2 world and are not necessarily web 3 centric
that'd be kind of curious to see what happens yeah the the number of people participating here
and coming from in the far corners of the industry should be a huge injection of ideas and inspiration.
I'm really excited to see what people come up with.
Yeah, and also, to do my earlier point, I think this is also an opportunity to really
uplift user experience.
Because, and I think that's not a criticism particularly of, like, you know, our Algorand
developers, but I think it's a general problem within crypto that most of the apps have really been built
kind of from a technology first point forward
and that user experience has never been a strength of like crypto.
I think that's fair to say.
And so having, coming from the other side
and coming from a world where user experience is everything,
like if you can figure out a way to kind of marry these two
and have deep technical knowledge that our developers have
and you marry it with the great user experience that Web 2
developers are used to building,
I think we could see some magical projects come out of that.
Yeah, it's so, so important.
I mean, the Bolt team asked me what I was interested in as a judge of this hackathon, I said something very similar. User experience is paramount. And the ability to use AI tools to work on UI and UX and create beautiful sites and components and smooth experiences like this is a lever
right this gives people an enormous amount of leverage to go you know beyond their their normal
skill set for creating user interfaces and and smooth journeys so it'll be incredible to see
what people can create yeah and i remember like i it like I see Leo is in the call here.
I remember like he and I chatting about this project
that he had around, I think it was the Hot Potato project
that he had.
And he built kind of the back end and all the smart contracts,
but said like, hey, I'm not the UI designer.
Well, you know, I, as I said, I'm done for the hackathon myself
last week, and I created this app. It was not a hot potato app. I created this different app and I'm not a UI designer either, but all over this and is building kind of the best possible
like hot potato app that you could possibly imagine
because UI is no longer an issue.
You can just get it done with five prompts, so to speak.
It's almost magical what you can do at Generative AI
as a backend developer, a blockchain developer,
or we're not a developer at all.
I've been playing with Bolt and giving it sort of like single prompts
to see if I could one-shot something into the editor
and the extent of what can be generated.
I mean, entire UIs with just a prompt,
obviously you'll need to refine this to turn it into a working application.
But the creative output of this tool is unreal.
Asla, what are you most excited to see
in the submissions at the end of the month?
What are you hoping will be in the bunch?
hoping will be in the bunch.
I would say that, like, the beauty of Bolt is that, like you guys said,
that we don't really require someone to have the knowledge of how to do it.
So I think I would be really interested in seeing what people build
in terms of if they are
able to solve any, for example, real world problem and at the same time have like a seamless
way of doing it.
I feel that right now in blockchain, one of the hurdles that many people face is that
it's really complex for a user to understand
and to go through any specific flow
if they want to go through an application.
So it will be really interesting to see
if people are able to bridge that kind of gap.
Good stuff.
So we've got about two weeks left in June
for people to build their best shot in this hackathon.
What comes next?
What is beyond the hackathon?
So maybe I can talk a little bit about that.
So we have an incredibly full schedule of developer- um events um lined up and it is a combination of like
participating at conferences i think the we are developer conference uh in berlin is coming up
very quickly and i know that brian and the team are going to be there in full force um to talk
about uh to talk about Algorand
and the ways you can actually use the Algorand blockchain,
specifically in the context of payments.
So I think that's going to be exciting.
We have more masterclasses coming up.
This is a new thing that we started.
These masterclasses that are organized by our ecosystem
team are really designed to bring new
people into the ecosystem that don't have significant amount of coding experience and so
and so these masterclasses basically start from scratch they start from the very early beginning
about like why would you ever want a blockchain and what is a blockchain good for and then we'll
teach you kind of like how you set
step into a blockchain project and how can you organize yourself and what can you do and stuff
like that so the masterclasses have been very successful we've had over uh i think a thousand
participants in the last time we did them and so we're going to redo them and continue to do them
over over the summer we also have all the alg algokit workshops that brian and the devrel
team have been running um and they will continue also in july in july and and august um and then
the last thing i want to mention is um this hackathon is um one of many um so i think i
mentioned this in the previous call we've changed our strategy with regards to how we kind of think about hackathons.
And rather than trying to kind of own a hackathon from start to finish, we believe it's much better to kind of partner to get more fresh blood into our ecosystem.
And so the Bolt hackathon is one example of us doing that.
We're also working with EZA.
We announced this partnership a while back.
So we're working with EZA to run two new hackathons, one
in London, one in Boston, which is coming up
in the next couple of months.
We're also partnering with RiseIn to onboard new developers and run hackathons in the countries where
Rise in is very strong, particularly India, Turkey and Pakistan where there's
very significant and big developer communities that we want to attract to
Algrant. So these are coming up as well. So we have a full schedule of
events to get developers onboarded.
And of course, we all want to drive them and convince them and encourage them to submit their repos to electric capital, because that is the metric that is being used across the industry to show developer momentum.
And so electric capital is critical for us.
We want to get that number higher.
And so make sure that, you know, also the bold kind of like projects,
every project should be submitted.
The repo should be submitted to electric capital
so it can be counted in our active developer numbers.
Wow, so much going on.
I put the link to the Web3 masterclasses in the comments.
This is an incredible opportunity
to go from zero with an idea into a reality and having a concierge experience of building that
out and turning it into a business and leveraging all this incredible technology and community and so forth.
Wow, there's so much going on this summer.
I'm looking forward to seeing folks in the Albuquerque event in Cannes, France,
in just over a week, and in Berlin.
Like I said, we are developers among many thousands of software developers at their World Congress.
All right.
Should we just to add on?
Just to add on, we also have AlgoKit workshop next week.
So if anyone feels that they would learn,
they would love to learn more, even during the hackathon, and they are stuck somewhere.
Like you should definitely join that as well. It's on next Tuesday.
Amazing opportunity to go from zero to deploying a smart contract in one sitting. So hope to see
you on the workshop next week. This is a TypeScript workshop workshop so it dovetails really nicely with the old hackathon.
Dan Reinhard, Is it time for questions, should we take some questions from the.
Dan Reinhard, who's got questions?
Give it a sec in case anybody is shy.
We can pull you up on the stage.
Anyone has a project to share they're working on?
That would be cool too.
We've got a quiet bunch today. Don't be shy. We know you're working on stuff. I know people in the audience are building stuff.
They want to keep it a secret and they want to tip their hand.
All right, I think we have one.
All right, I think we have one.
Mikkel, are you able to pull Ben Suleman up on stage?
Hey, can you guys hear me?
Yeah.
Right on. Hey, I thought I would just say hi.
I didn't want to turn down the opportunity to say hello and say how excited I am to be building on Algorand in this hackathon.
And it's just such an incredible moment of, to me, revolution with so many different things happening and converging with AI and crypto.
And to me, seeing Algorand poised to take over potentially and dominate in this space.
And I've had a, I'll just, I'll try to be brief here.
I've had a, since 2012, I've been a designer, you know
for most of that time.
And I've had this vision for developing a radically
different type of calendar app.
And so I'm finally excited to be empowered to build it on my own with Bolt.
So I've got a couple of personas that I'm targeting, one of which is homeschooling parents.
But we have this brand called Be Here.
And to me, it's always been about a call to presence and being more present, whether it's
with your kids or with your work.
So anyways, that's a little bit about what I'm doing.
And I'm really excited to integrate a proof of presence feature.
And that's kind of going to be my primary algorithm use case for starters.
What does that mean?
I want to kind of, I think it's going to be really powerful
to be able to prove, you know prove presence in a sort of public way.
And I think this is a, for me, it's a neat kind of counterintuitive way to use a blockchain on a public ledger is to kind of like prove momentum for a movement.
And to kind of show what kind of intentionality people are bringing to their days and how they're using their time without sharing private data.
So that's kind of, does that make sense?
I'm intrigued.
I would love to kind of validate that.
I think most people who aren't using Web3 aren't thinking about this at all.
So I'm excited to kind of use this Web 2.5, you know, algorithm in the background onboarding with the option for them to,
you know, add their, their self custody wallet. So yeah,
I think there's all kinds of incentives we can bring in with NFTs and rewards
down the road. Once we get people on chain.
Cool. I am super fascinated. Thank you for sharing.
I will also just add that you mentioned that you are a designer, and I think the original hackathon website that they are using for hackathon.dev was also created by a designer that was able to use Bolt to bring that site into existence. And it's just an incredible testament to how these technology tools basically just add new skills
into your skill set.
And if you ever doubted that you could do something like this,
now is the time to try your hand,
because you might surprise yourself.
I really couldn't resist.
I think it was May 28th.
My wife is also my business partner,
and we were talking, and we came to some new clarity.
And then I realized this Bolt hackathon,
Al Grand was the blockchain sponsor.
I've been in this Al Grand space since 2021,
getting poorer as the token price fell.
But I'm still like thinking
that we are going to have a breakout
and that I really want to kind of step up and build
what I think is one of the most powerful use cases
for a public blockchain.
So yeah, it's like super empowering moment
and I could not resist.
Thank you for stepping up and coming up on stage
and telling us what you're up to.
Thank you guys for the opportunity.
Appreciate it.
I think we also have Daniel Mark Harrison.
Thank you for bringing me up.
Interesting, interesting spaces.
Nice to meet you.
I was brought here by a member of the Algorand community
who said you've got to check this out.
So, Mike, I've got a couple of questions about this hackathon and the specifics about it,
because maybe there's a fit and we can see if there is. So thanks for inviting me up.
So first of all, with the hackathon itself, let's say we have a...
What are the requirements, the technical requirements
for entering the hackathon?
That there's a technology that's built
on the Algorand blockchain, presumably being number one.
What are the other specific requirements, the main ones?
Good question.
So when you sign up for the hackathon through the process,
starting at hackathon.dev and you go through the registration process,
there is a set of rules.
I briefly touched on this earlier insofar as the app that you built has to
be substantially built with Bolt and be able to run in the Bolt environment.
They appreciate that you probably need to eject out
and manually develop some things here and there.
But largely speaking, read those rules,
make sure that you're building something with Bolt that runs in Bolt.
And then for the Algorand Blockchain Challenge,
we want to see people that are using the chain.
So I'll elaborate on that a little bit.
Somebody asked me, do I need to be on mainnet,
can it be on testnet?
Testnet would be fine, mainnet would be amazing.
But we are going to be looking for apps that actually work and use
our chain and generate transactions on the chain.
So there's a lot of different ways that you can go about doing that.
It doesn't necessarily have to involve smart contract.
You can do a lot on Algorand with our ASAs
and other primitives.
If it involves a smart contract, amazing,
but we wanna see it working.
And the starter template that we've got
already has that Algorand wallet integration built in.
So you're sort of already connected to the network
and it's just a matter of having your
app send, you know, whatever that transaction is, or maybe it reads data from the chain.
But that's definitely something key we're going to be looking for in the Algorand blockchain
challenge category. What's your other question? Okay, so like a data analysis tool that's built
on Algorand would be an interesting type of tool that would potentially
catch the judge's eyes, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It'll be pretty easy for us to tell if you're really interacting with the chain or not,
quite frankly.
Sure.
Or whether you're just using it to get into the hackathon.
I understand.
And what are, in terms of, this is interesting,
in terms of data information, see my background is all media. So we really want to converge
blockchain and media is really the goal of myself and the team of people I'm working with.
And I'm here with the developer. So you can get quite, it just so happens that I'm sitting here
having a coffee with my developer. So you can get quite technical if you want. What are the, are there any specific
areas of need or interest that you think aren't being tackled that the algorithm would be kind
of ideal for? Is there anything that jumps out in your mind?
That's a great question. I think some of the things that Mark talked about when he
elaborated on the opportunity to empower AI agents to pay for things, this is uncharted territory.
This is an incredible frontier. And there's a lot of big businesses right now
already looking into how to equip their AI agents with the ability to go shopping, right?
This is an, it's essentially a whole nother segment of the economy that could open up.
So, you know, from a startup perspective, if you think about the total addressable market,
right? I mean, it could be everything. You could have an AI agent that goes off and, you know, from a startup perspective, if you think about the total addressable market, right?
I mean, it could be everything. You could have an AI agent that goes off and books you a vacation, gets your hotel, cars, flights, things like this.
Or it could be doing technical things and making micropayments to software services so that it can perform business functions for you.
There's basically no limit to this. So I think that's
the single largest opportunity on the table right now at this moment in the middle of 2025.
And Algorand is uniquely positioned to power those payments because of instant finality and
other capabilities that we have as, in my opinion, the first class blockchain.
The other thing I would look at is like the integration of AI and our DeFi ecosystem.
We have very strong DeFi players such as Folks Finance and TinyMan.
Like what if you basically built like an AI component on top of that to kind of automate
trading or like or like
do specific kind of actions in automated fashion we also have a whole layer of MCP servers that
are basically built on top of algorithm that is that are built by go plausible and if you haven't
checked that out you should check it out because that will make it easy for kind of an AI agent
to interact with the algorithm blockchain using MCP and so that's not an area where I think there's a lot of potential.
I will put the link to the Algorand MCP server in the comments because that's a super powerful tool.
And when you're using LLM to build, you can also have it interact with the MCP server to interface with Algorand as an LLM,
as an AI model and sidestep all the normal integration effort
that would be required to interact with the chain.
Yeah, that's really helpful because my developer is just saying to me,
my brain is going crazy distances.
Okay, because there's like so many things.
He developed an interesting prototype that we...
It basically takes over the role of consulting firms and professional analysts.
So, it'll take any kind of company or cryptocurrency or asset.
I mean, you know, we have to filter it out so it's achievable initially,
but it'll basically take them and produce very professional reports,
just like very similar to how you'll get reports,
say from McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or what have you.
And so if we were going to build something like this
on our using algorithm with a payment function using
algorithm, would it be something that's interesting?
Yeah, I'm interested.
OK, that's great.
Thank you very much.
This has been very helpful.
Just I'm sorry if it seemed like a lot of questions.
But this has been very clarifying.
Thank you for your questions.
Appreciate it coming up on stage.
Yes.
So we are coming up on the hour.
Thanks everybody for your time.
It's a really exciting opportunity to build with cutting edge tools,
show what you can do with Bold and Algorand,
empowering blockchain capabilities this is
this is a don't miss opportunity if you're on the sidelines get off the sidelines right this is not a
this is not a moment to be a wallflower you should be in the middle of the dance floor here because
we've got big inspiring to see what you can create as a creative person with these tools.
So get in there.
Just to recap, if you want to sign up, hackathon.dev.
That's the entry point.
Go through the process.
You'll get tons of free stuff, including Node.ly credits, and you'll be off to the races.
If you want to find a teammate, want to get help,
join our Discord server.
Oh, and I think as we were wrapping up, like we lost Brian.
So let me wrap up for him.
As Brian said, we're coming to the end of the X phase.
So thank you all for participating.
I think, as he says, the barriers have never
been lower to start developing and building a Web3 app.
So if you haven't signed up yet, go do it.
Sign up and see what magic you can create.
So thanks, you all, for joining.
And we'll have other X spaces coming up soon.
Thank you so much, everyone.
