Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody. My name is Kartik, one of the co-founders of ETHGlobal, and I'm super excited to welcome all of you to Open Agents. This is our second async hackathon of the year, and you're all watching this on ethglobal.tv. This is the platform we'll be using for the rest of this hackathon, where we'll be showcasing all the amazing things that come out of the next 2 weeks.
Now, you are participating in an ETHGlobal event, and those of you who don't know, and this is if this is this is your first event, our goal is to onboard thousands of developers into the web3 ecosystem. And we do this by running hackathons and summits, both in-person and async. This is one of our async events, and we have four more in-person large-scale hackathons coming up in New York, Lisbon, Tokyo, and Mumbai. And not only that, we're doing a massive conference in New York City called ETHConf that brings in institutional crypto and everybody in the world of finance and blockchain together to talk about how we can rebuild the future of finance. But right now, I want to talk about Open Agents and make sure that you have all the information you need to be ready for the next 2 weeks to participate in this hackathon.
We have [clears throat] over 800 hackers coming in and participating from all different parts of the world. 19% of them are new to web3. People are hacking from six different continents. You can see all the cities that people are coming from. So, we're super excited to meet so many of you, and that we can't wait to see what all of you hack on and how you use AI with crypto.
And not only that, we're giving away $50,000 in prizes, thanks to our incredible sponsors. I'm going to give a massive shout-out to our five partners: Uniswap Foundation, Zero G, ENS, Gnosis, and Keeper DAO. Now, what I want to do for the rest of this is give you a good set of information and key points on how to take advantage of the next 10 days and what matters in terms of getting ready for building your project. I'm going to talk about all the things that are important here, starting with communication. Everything about this hackathon will take place on Discord and your hacker dashboard, which means that from a communication standpoint, you can reach the ETHGlobal team, all of our partners, all of our mentors, our volunteers, and all the other hackers on Discord.
If you are successfully RSVP'd for the hackathon, you'll see the Open Agents header on your Discord sidebar, and that's where you can see all the channels that are only accessible to people who are participating in this hackathon. And you also get to message anybody who's on the mentor side or our partner side, so you can talk to all the engineers, dev rels, product managers, designers, and founders of various companies. This is where we will notify you about anything that's happening, and you also get to ask us any questions. If you're not already on Discord, you can head over to ethglobal.com/discord and get access to all the channels, or you can do that on your hacker dashboard as well.
In terms of how the hackathon is set up, hacking officially begins today, which means you have until next Sunday, 10 days from now, to work on your projects. You can work [clears throat] on your project as an individual, or you can work on them with a team of up to five people, and submissions are due on Sunday, May 3rd, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. So, you get this weekend and all of next week to work on something super interesting to you, and the week after and a few days after that will be where we look at all the submissions and walk you through the closing of this event.
The rules and criteria for this hackathon are fairly straightforward. Everything that you do must be done from scratch, which means you cannot build on an existing project, you cannot add a feature to something you've been working on, you cannot add a pull request or clone something that you already did from one repo to a different language, to a different blockchain, and call that a new submission. It has to be done entirely from scratch. And only people who are RSVP'd for this hackathon are eligible to win, which means that if you are working on a team and your individual team members are not listed as your team members on your dashboard, and we see more than one commit, but only one person on the team, you will be disqualified and you will not be able to win any prizes. So, make sure that all of your team members are successfully part of your team on your dashboard, and you are following all of our rules for how do you properly create and manage the auditability of your submission, which is all listed in your project page on your hacker dashboard.
And of course, you are absolutely allowed to use open-source projects, frameworks, libraries, SDKs, boilerplate. We want to make sure that you get to use a lot of existing nice open-source work. You just cannot work on something that you started before and qualify that as a new submission.
[clears throat]
So, submissions are going to be due on Sunday, the 3rd of May, at 12:00 p.m., which is noon. Make sure that it's not the end of the day. It is Eastern time, New York time, 12:00 p.
m. And when you are submitting your project, you'll be asked to do the following, which is you have to create a demo video of your submission that is up to 4 minutes long, and it walks us through who you are, what made you select this project and this idea, and how does it work, where you get to see an actual demo of your project. And we really recommend that you spend time doing this thing early and not the day of, because it will take you more than an hour to really make this video. You have to really spend time thinking about it and really carefully convey what you built and and how it works, and really make sure everything fits in the right amount of time, and all the parts that are interesting or not interesting or we should pay attention to or the judges should look at or what's going to matter here. So, communicating your hackathon demo is going to be key, and we recommend you give it as much time as possible.
All of this happens on your dashboard, so there's no need to do anything separately or keep track of it anywhere else. This is part of the submission process, and you get to pick all the submission-related information from there, and you'll be guided through all the steps piece by piece. Now, when you're submitting your projects, you get to talk about what you want to do with your submission. You can qualify for different prizes from our partners, but also from ETHGlobal. And when you are submitting your project on Sunday, you will be asked to pick one of these two tracks.
You can either go for the finalist judging track or the partner prize judging track. And we'll talk about what the differences are, but one thing to note here is that both of these tracks allow you to win any of the prizes from our partners. But if you want to be a finalist, there's a lot more things you get on top of being any of the winners of the partner prizes, and we'll give you a bit bit of a rundown into what goes into this. Let's quickly talk about the partner prizes first. It means that for the $50,000 that are being given away from our partners, when you submit your project, you will be asked to select which companies or organizations you want to qualify for the prizes of, and after you do that on your dashboard, all of these partners will get a ping, and they will see your project under their review queue.
They will look at everybody who submitted their projects, and they will review your 4-minute video and your project submission.
[sighs]
They will do that asynchronously on their own, and they will reach out to you for any follow-up questions if something in your project description or your video is not clear. You do not have to go present to them, you don't have to message them. They will only message you if they have any additional questions, which means that everything that you want them to know should be part of your submission. And kind of to put it simply, the more detailed your submission is, the better your chances are of getting their interest or getting them to fully understand what you built and why. So, that means a great video that goes right into the demo, relevant screenshots that really show what's going on, a live URL for them to review and even play with the application if it's a website, and a lot more specifics on how something works under the hood.
This is not just in your read me of your codebase, but also in the description of what the technical side of this looks like. All this [clears throat] happens as part of the submission process, so the more time you spent doing a great job at communicating this thing, the better your odds of winning the prizes from our partners. But on top of that, you can also be one of our finalists for this hackathon, and if you do that, you have another round of judging to go through. And what this means is that if you want to be on the finalist track, you will be looked at by another set of judges, and they will look at your project, and they will look at how unique it is and how interesting it is, and they will look at anywhere from your live demo to your code, and they will select a small set of teams to go and qualify for live judging. And the first round of finalist track happens on the first day of the submission, which is that Sunday, and you'll be notified on Sunday at the end of the day if you made it to the live judging or not.
That's where the second round starts. So, immediately, 24 hours after you submit your project, you will [clears throat] be asked to join a live Zoom call where you get to demo what you built to a set of judges who will look at all of the submissions, give feedback, ask more questions, and then qualify you to be one of the top 10 teams from the hackathon. This is a live call, which means that this call happens this exact same time for everybody in the world. So, if you are trying to be one of the top 10 teams for this hackathon, you have to be available from 12:00 p.m.
to 2:30 p.m. Eastern time. Which means that if you're in America, this is a lot easier, but if you are in Asia, you will have to be up late at night to be on this call. And you have to join this call to be a finalist.
Now, being a finalist is a pretty incredible thing. 10 teams will be one of considered one of the best projects from this entire hackathon, which means that they'll be standing out as projects, and you get the rights to be one of the best submissions that kind of are at the leading edge of AI and crypto. Uh it does not impact anything about being qualified for any of the partner prizes. You can win more. You can do everything else.
But as a finalist, you get way more than just some of our prize partners. And what you get is our finalist pack. This is a collection of perks that you get from ETHGlobal, which gives you access to ETHGlobal Plus for a whole year, $1,000 per team member that we give out for being one of the top 10 teams. You get a $500 flight credit to the next hackathon that we organize in person. You get on-chain proof of being a finalist.
We do a lot of events. We'll bring on founders of really uh popular and well-established protocols in this space, where you get to ask them questions and get their advice. And we also give you $15,000 in developer credits that help you take your project from this hackathon project to a lot more. And the only rule there for being a finalist is that everything that you're submitting must follow similar rules as every other project submission, but your finalist project must start from scratch and have a very auditable repository, which means that you cannot just have three commits with a million lines each. You have to have a full history of smaller changes that led to your project submission or us being able to trace that things were done in sequence, and things were done collectively as part of this hackathon.
And it also needs to be deployed and live, which means that if your website is not accessible as part of your submission, you cannot qualify for being a finalist. It needs to be live. And you have to be on the Zoom call to really talk to one of our judges and answer their questions to be one of these 10 teams. So, this is what it means to be a finalist. You can see a lot more information on your dashboards.
And we have a lot more specifics on what goes into being qualified for one of the other tracks and anything else that you need to know. But kind of from all of the things we've seen over the last years and seeing what a great submission looks like, the best advice we can give you is make the video really good. If you can convey what you are doing and why you did it and how it works really well within 4 minutes, that makes you look great. It simplifies everybody looking at the video submission and your project to understand if you qualify for any of the prizes. And overall, these videos are proof of what you were able to accomplish.
You can give this as a way to share any with anybody else that this is what you built over the last 10 days and be proud of your work. So, make the submission good and really make sure that you are clearly communicating how your project works. And of course, this event is open to everybody with all types of skills and backgrounds. So, if you're a first-timer here, you need to any of the pieces. There's a lot of stuff we're doing to help make that easy for you.
There's a lot of workshops and talks happening. Even if you're looking for a team member, you can see all of that on the website and really get involved in looking at any of the tutorials. All that is also recorded, so even if you can make one of these workshops because of time zone or some other commitment, you can watch them on demand. And the speakers of these workshops are on Discord, so you can immediately ask them any follow-up questions or clarifications. They'll be happy to ping you.
And everything is accessible on our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/ethglobal. And of [clears throat] course, a lot of you I bet are still looking for team or ideas. So, you can head over to find a team channel on Discord and share with others who you are, what you're excited about, or what you have experience in, and there you'll find opportunities to collaborate with other people from all different parts of the world and join up with people who are looking for somebody with the skill set that you may have or just ideas that they can be part of. And of course, don't forget to say hi to us.
We want to meet all of you from all different parts of the world. So, you get to join us for not only just our team formation brainstorming, but just in the general chat and introduce us um yourself to us, and we get to see who you are and what you're excited about. And a couple other small things that matter here are that we're going to make sure that you are getting all the help you need. So, there will be two check-ins that happen next week. Um these check-ins are kind of like mini stand-up updates, where you get to fill out a small form that just helps us understand if you're still on track, if you're getting all the help, if you have any questions for any of our partners that need to get back, or are you still stuck, or if you want to just see if you have an idea that is possible or not, and if you're blocked on any of those things, it makes it easy for us to give you the help you need to continue finishing up your project.
And these are required, so if you do these things, your stake is also returned as part of finishing and participating at the hackathon. Not every single person has to do this thing. These are per team. So, if you are working on a team, just one person from your team has to do this check-in. And all this happens on on your hacker dashboard.
And of course, in addition to these uh check-ins, you also have the opportunity to come on a live call and get some feedback live from our mentors and our partners. We'll be hosting two live calls, where you can join on Tuesday from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Eastern or Thursday from 9:00 a.m.
to 11:00 a.m. Eastern and uh showcase what you've been working on and talk about your progress and get some real-time feedback. And kind of some other small things I want to talk about are just in general our code of conduct. Even though this is an online event, uh our standard rules and code of conduct applies.
And you can see all of that on ethglobal.com/rules, but the gist of it is, please be respectful, and harassment or abuse in any form will not be tolerated in our community. So, if you are seeing somebody being treated the way um that should not be the case, please report that to us, and we'll take immediate action. And anything that you build as part of this hackathon will be owned by you as a team, which means that neither ETHGlobal nor do our sponsors have any rights to your work. And if you submit something as a team, each team member has equal rights to that work, and they can do whatever they'd like, and you can do whatever you'd like with your submission.
And of course, we can't cover all possible things that you may want to know. So, if you have any other questions or any clarifications you need from all the information we've shared, you can ping us on Discord, reach out to us over email, or any other form. And uh one kind of common question we get all the time is, what happens if I'm using AI agents or LLMs to do a lot of the programming? All that is allowed and encouraged. We want you to use agents to get better.
We just want to make sure that you are clarifying where AI was used as part of your submission, and uh we will be making sure that you are still following best practices on GitHub. So, again, if you're using any agents like Codex or Cursor or Cloud Code, make sure that you are committing immediately a small set of changes and you're not doing tens of thousands of lines of code commits because you're trying to do everything through agents and then push to GitHub in batches. So, you want to still follow best practices. Otherwise, we will flag that as a disqualification because it's not clear what was done by you versus an agent. So, keep that within your repo.
Even if you have different plans for executing, those smart contract files should be part of your GitHub repository, but agents are encouraged and you're allowed to use as much as you'd like. So, all the information we're going to share is on the website, including prizes, where we're getting a lot of amazing partners giving out prizes. So, you're just getting 15K, and Uniswap, Gnosis Safe, Keeper, Argent, and ENS are getting 5K each. So, all the details are on the prizes page for this hackathon, and there you'll see anywhere from specifics for what qualifies as a prize to also what does not qualify as a prize, and also links to repos, where you can just clone and get set up. So, you don't have to worry about getting all the libraries installed or configuring everything to integrate before you start.
So, check everything out on the website. And finally, before we kind of end things up, I want to make sure that you realize that this is still a hackathon. So, I want you to pace yourself. There's a reason why these are 10 days long. We want to make sure that you get to use multiple days to learn about what something looks like in this space to what possibilities are and how something works, and then slowly get familiar with actually implementing those things.
So, you have a lot more time to understand and absorb, instead of just doing something quickly. And uh we want this to be fun for you. So, don't sacrifice sleep. If you have an idea, try to spend a little bit more time um understanding things, playing with it, and really using the next 10 days to your advantage. And this is very much about experimentation and learning.
We want to see really interesting ideas that intersect with crypto and payments and AI. So, this is the best place for trying that out. And uh we hope that we get to see some creative things come out of this, and we hope that you get to learn something new that you did not know um before this event started. So, with that, uh I want to wish all of you happy hacking. If you have any questions, we'll be able to answer them on ethglobal.
tv and Discord. So, uh we're excited to see you all, 800 of you, hack at this event, and we'll meet all of you directly on Discord and see you for some of our workshops. So, happy to have all of you here and in the meantime, enjoy your weekend, have fun hacking times, and I will see you in a week at the closing ceremonies where we talk about all the amazing projects. So, that concludes our kickoff. Good luck everybody and we'll see you on Discord.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.