Welcome & Opening Ceremonies of ETHGlobal Cannes 2026 I Kartik Talwar

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 ETHGlobal Con 2026. This is not a conference. You are here at an ETHGlobal event, and we are an organization with a very simple mission. Our goal is to onboard thousands of developers into the web3 ecosystem.

And this weekend is a hackathon. Now, what makes these events different is that our goal is to focus on the builders. This entire weekend is about making things, creating things, and putting new stuff in the world for others to use. These whole weekends are designed for you to learn new things, get help, grow as individuals, as developers, as designers, and contribute to the rest of this ecosystem. And the most important part of what set these sets these events apart is that showing is way more important than telling.

We want you to not just talk about ideas, we want you to build things and show off your work and discuss after you have something that people can use and try. We started by running a very small version of this in 2017 in a city called Waterloo in Canada. This is where NFTs were invented, and we kind of got way more excited about making this a much, much bigger thing. In 2018, we launched ETHGlobal as a big entity, and we started doing these events all across the world. We did our very first official events in Buenos Aires in 2018, went to San Francisco and Singapore after, and we really scaled things up in 2019.

We went to Africa and Asia and Europe and hit a few more places across the globe, continued doing these things in 2020, then stuff happened. We started doing more online events. 2021 was all about getting way more people into the space because you had no longer any restrictions on traveling, and we got 10x the number of people to build on Ethereum. 2022, we started resuming our in-person events. We went to New York, Mexico, Bogota, SF again, Bangalore, started doing more bigger-scale events, scaled things up even more in 2023, and added a few more of our favorite cities from where the developers were.

Our goal was to always be where the developers are and go there instead of having them travel to where we are. And 2 years ago, we finally hit off our sixth continent on the list by hosting Sydney. We went back to a few other places that we liked, ran the biggest hackathon we've ever had with 3,000 people in Bangkok, and last year we did Taipei, Prague, New York, Buenos Aires, New Delhi, and Con as a first time, and we're excited to be going to 2026 with our first official event of the year, and we have five more to go. We have New York, Lisbon Hackathon, Tokyo Hackathon, Mumbai, which is Devcon, and the thing that we're excited about the most is ETHCon, which is going to be our biggest event ever in ETHGlobal's history. It's a conference along with a hackathon.

We're getting the biggest names in crypto and traditional finance and these mutual side to come in and talk about how they're making everything we've been working on for the last 10 years a reality. Some of the companies, funds, everybody's super excited to be with us in New York, and we can't wait to see you next after this weekend. And it's being held in the biggest venue in New York. So, we're excited for ETHCon, and I want to get back to why we are here today, but one of the things that I'm super excited about is all of you have helped make this possible over the last 9 years. This is the footprint of ETHGlobal so far.

We've done 2,800 videos of how to use different APIs, workshops, and just talks around what's happening in the space. More than 16,000 projects have been created. $15 million of prizes have been given away. People have built companies out of these events, and they've raised over half a billion dollars from just what we can count. We've done events and hosted people from 156 countries.

160,000 people have physically been to our events. And the best part, which we just realized when putting this together, was that this event, which is this hackathon, is our 300th event, which is an amazing milestone. That's awesome. And we're officially back in Con, second time doing this thing. We're excited to be here with the rest of the ECC week, and this is the first hackathon of 2026.

It's going to set a lot of expectations for what this year looks like. We're doing some new cool things. We'll talk about that in a minute. And I want to welcome all of you that are here. There's 810 attendees from all across the world.

650 of them are hackers. 43% of them are brand new to web3, so we're still getting people building stuff around, especially payments. People are here from 214 cities, 59 countries, six different continents are being represented. You can see where everybody came from. It's a full spectrum of the rest of the globe, and of course, to no one's surprise, almost every country in Europe has a presence at this in this venue.

So, we're excited to host all of you, and I want to see how people are coming. Who here is a first-time hacker in the audience? Make some noise. This is awesome. Congratulations for your first ever ETHGlobal Hackathon.

What about people who are coming back? There we go. That matches the right side of audiences. And not only that, we have a lot of amazing people who are here to help make your project be successful. 75 different people from various companies and 17 dedicated mentors were here 24/7 to help make your projects never be unstuck.

We're hosting 10 different workshops on how to use different APIs. They've all happened earlier today. They're all on YouTube now in case you missed them, and you can watch them on demand. And because this is not a conference, there are exactly zero talks. So, we're going to focus most of our time this weekend building things and sharing with the world what we came up with.

And the best part about all these things is that there is going to be prizes that we're going to give away. $150,000 of prizes are being given away, and you get to use a lot of these products, protocols, and APIs into your workflow and win amazing prizes. Especially thanks to our 12 incredible partners. So, please join me in thanking all of our 12 partners, and we want to thank Worldcoin, Ark, ENS, Hedera, Ledger, Uniswap Foundation, Zero G, Chainlink, Flare, Dynamic Wallet Connect, and Unlimit. They're all here.

You can go talk to them, learn about how they work, and try to use the stuff they've already done so you don't have to start from scratch. Now, I want to take the next few minutes just to talk about some important things for how this weekend is set up, which means all the stuff about this venue and especially how project submission and judging is going to work. Hacking officially begins now, which means you can start working on your projects. You can have a project of with up to five members on your team, so one, two, three, four, five people can work on it. It's totally okay if you're an individual, you want to just do something on your own, absolutely allowed, and you have until 9:00 a.

m. on Sunday to submit your project. All that happens directly on your hacker dashboard, which you are all familiar with by now. And the rules for being a participant are very straightforward. Everything that you're doing must be done from scratch, which means that you cannot add a feature to something you already built before today, and you cannot just redeploy to a different chain or change some small stuff and call that as a new project.

You must be start from scratch, and we get to verify this because we want you to make sure that you are properly using GitHub as source control from the starting and the ending of this event. It's okay to fork an existing boilerplate. A lot of our partners here have given you repos that you can just use to have things set up. All that is allowed. If you're forking a repo, make sure you keep the fork version reference there so we can see which part was there.

Don't clone the repo and then re-push it without uh giving us an idea for where it came from. But we also want you to use open-source libraries. You absolutely can use any package out there. You can use any other boilerplate code. All that is allowed, and if something is properly licensed, you can use that easily as well.

There's going to be some edge cases. We understand that, so if you feel like you're not sure or it's not clear if you are in this category, come talk to me, come message us, come talk to anybody on our team, and we'll individually look at your project and let you know if this is going to be okay or not. And the most important piece is the last sentence, which is if your team members are not in the building right now and they have not checked in, they will not be eligible to win any prizes. They must physically be here. We run this script at midnight.

Make sure they are here. If they're not in there, they'll be kicked out of the event, and if they're on any of your teams, they will also be removed, which means that if you win any prizes, you will not get their share of the prize amount. Now, this is a pretty exciting year for everybody, and naturally, we want to make sure that we make things very clear up front. We love LLMs. We want LLMs to be part of all your project.

You are absolutely allowed to use whatever tool of your choice, Codex, Claude, Cursor, some other new thing, doesn't matter. All that is allowed. But the important piece here is that there has to be a clear explanation for what you did versus what you delegated. You will see a form as part of project submission asking you to clarify what parts were done with AI, and you need to do a great job of actually telling us specifically what was and wasn't done. The other thing is we're also going to verify that things that you're using AI for actually is properly integrated.

Some of this is intentional, some of this is unintentional. We see unintentional pieces happen a lot more, and that is that you'll tell Codex or claw to do something for you, and it'll say it did it, but it actually does not properly do it, and it mocks the output. We see this all the time. So, make sure that if you're using AI, you're actually testing things, especially if you're doing any smart contract interaction. We need you to verify that it's actually making the call and the transaction is going through.

And you will be now judged on the actual cohesiveness and does it actually fully work on what you're building. There's a lot of good things about this. There's a lot of things that may not be good. The good things are now all of you can have really, really polished products, and that is awesome. That also means you get to work on your core strengths.

If you're really good at smart contract engineering you don't want to do front end, that simplifies your whole weekend a lot. And you're going to end up getting more time. So, what we want you to do is we want you to talk to each other and show off what's going on with your projects before Sunday. Get feedback from people, and actually try to see if you can build something that others can use faster than you would in the past. And not only that, one of the things that we're excited about and why we love LLMs here is that the feedback loop gets shorter every week now.

And that is exactly why we created ETHGlobal. We wanted people to make Ethereum and this protocol and just everything in our space better. So, now if you can build something quickly and improve not only the experience, but also if you go back to one of our partners and say, "Hey, I saw this error in your documentation or this is not clear or I think this is how it could be done better." You can actually make them improve the product and give them that feedback. So, I would really encourage all of you to just share what you learned and things that you found useful or not useful with everybody, especially our partners, and make this entire space better.

So, everything is allowed, but use this opportunity to build something that can go out and be used by others faster. Now, I'm going to share a bunch of stuff, but a lot of this is also going to be visible on your dashboard. And the quick note here is this event is designed for everybody, whether you're first-time pay person or this is your 10th hackathon. You are all welcome and want to make sure that all of you have a good time. All the workshops are there for people who are trying to get more into this space, especially on the beginner side.

And that's why we record them. So, if you missed any of these workshops, you can go to youtube.com/ethglobal and watch anything on demand. And the best part is that all of those people who did these workshops are still in the building and they will be tomorrow. You can also go walk up to them and ask any clarifying questions, and they will happily explain what they did or how uh to do something else and really make sure that you get the right help specific to your project.

And I won't cover everything, but if you have any other questions, there's a help desk that's going to be monitored by us. So, you can walk up to the help desk that's right next to the catering side. You get to see us a lot. And we'll answer any questions that have come in. Let's talk about security really quickly.

Everybody has a wristband. This is the security measure. This venue is 24/7. The security guards outside will check for this. If you do not have your wristband, you will not be allowed back into the building.

It doesn't matter if you forgot your stuff in there or you don't know what's going on or you forgot it at home, you have to go back and get it. And if you lost this thing, there will not be a replacement here. So, please make sure you do not lose your wristbands. And this is waterproof. You can take a shower, you can wash your hands.

None of that is going to be an issue. Please make sure that you have your wristband at all times. And a couple simple things, just watch your belongings. It is 24/7 accessible, which means everybody can come in and out who's allowed to be in this building. And if you fall asleep and you can't find your stuff after, that will not be a good thing for for either of us.

So, make sure you're watching your belongings and don't make a mess. Yes, we're going to clean stuff quickly, but don't drop things. Leave things the way you found them. And last but not least, Wi-Fi hotspots still make the experience for the Wi-Fi for everybody else not that good. So, if your internet's slow, we have staff watching the internet speed and all the access points.

Let us know where you're sitting, and we'll come to you and test it and verify it, but do not turn on a hotspot on your phone because you will actually affect the spectrum and make the experience better or worse for everybody near you. One of the common things we see, which is something that you can quickly fix, is that if you move your phone or your laptop, it will try to hang on to the same access point that it was stuck on. So, now it's going to try to maintain the same connection, but you get farther and farther and it's a weaker signal. So, if you move places, just turn your hotspot or Wi-Fi off and turn it back on. It will then connect to a closer router and you'll be back to how things were.

Now, a couple other small things. Schedule, everything is on the website. We're using the website as the source of truth, which means that if something is running late, we'll update the website first and then notify you by running around or using the mic and then tell you that there's change. All that is on ethglobal.com/con.

Very easy to get there. And everything else is going to be on Discord, which means all the announcements, if something is running late, if something is about to happen, all the different reminders, all of our mentors, all of our comp like all the companies that are here, you get to talk to them directly on Discord. And the good thing about this setup is that there are a lot of people from each of the the partners that are not physically here, but they're on Discord because they're in different time zone. So, you may have a question at 3:00 a.m.

Nobody is at that table, but there's a good chance that somebody is monitoring that Discord channel for that company, and you can ask a question and it's daytime for them, they'll be able to answer. So, use Discord to check and ask any questions cuz your questions will be answered um much faster. And you're here in person. This is one of the great things about being in an in-person event. You get to meet people from all across the world.

You get to meet people who know things that you are not so good at and they can teach you. And if you are stuck, chances are the person next to you can help you get unstuck and teach you something as part of the process. And of course, the thing that I know all of you really enjoy, which is learning about food. You've had dinner now, so you know where that food station is going to be for the rest of the weekend. But this is the venue map.

This is also on the website. You can see everything, including where companies are going to be, especially from the judging process. And there's a couple things I want to highlight. So, one is just going over the food schedule. We had dinner today.

This was the last full meal. Tomorrow it's going to be brunch, dinner, and a midnight snack. And Sunday it's going to be breakfast and lunch. All this is on the the schedule. For tomorrow's midnight snack, we're going to make things super interesting.

There's going to be cheese tasting. There's going to be a baguette bar. And we're going to do some Easter chocolates. This is at midnight, so hence midnight snack. So, if you're here tomorrow night working late, you get to enjoy some really cool seasonal and festive things.

There's also going to be a cool painting canvas painting activity tomorrow at 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. That's right next to where the food line ends, and you get to well, enjoy the rest of this experience just the way that thematically this whole event has been about, a canvas painting.

You get to do some of this with the help of our team. And if you are haven't already, you get to take a photo at the photo booth that's right next to the mentor station to get a selfie. And if you also have not gotten your swag bag, this is what's in it with an amazing t-shirt. So, enjoy some amazing memorabilia of this whole hackathon and grab a swag bag. Now, I quickly also want to talk about what does it mean to be in this space and also contribute to being on chain.

There's two things that matter here, the NFC wristbands that you all have on now and the token faucet. These wristbands that all of you're wearing have a special chip that is 256 compatible, which means that it is designed to sign Ethereum transactions specifically and every wristband is an Ethereum wallet that is connected to you as a person. It has your profile information, and if anybody scans the wristband with their phones, they don't need to install anything, they'll be redirected to a browser. You can connect with anybody at this event, but also you can go to Arc's website, which is arx.org, go to their docs page, and use these chips to use their SDK to talk to these chips and integrate this in anything that you were interested in, whether it's part of your hack or just just for fun.

You get to take these home and you can use these chips to sign. And everything that's going to happen this weekend will be published on chain anonymized. So, we get to put these things as attestations on chain. And a lot of you will still need to build things this weekend, and you may need to use testnets for various things or just get testnet tokens, whether it's for USDC or just different L2s. You can go to ethglobal.

com/faucet and get access to a lot of testnet tokens for 18 different chains. And one other thing is our spotlight track. So, every time somebody finishes a hackathon and tries to make their projects better and bigger and makes them more than just a hackathon project into companies, we give them the ability to show off what they've been doing. And we have four teams here that are trying to make their hackathon projects do a lot more. One Claw, Autopay, Incent, and Postplay, they all have booths at the back.

Go talk to them. These are hackers from just a few weeks ago to the last couple of events, and they built things as their hackathon projects and now continue to improve them and make them into real, bigger companies. So, all of them are here looking for feedback, looking for users, and looking to just show you that you can make something more than just a weekend project. Now comes the most important part, judging and prizes. Submissions are due at 9:00 a.

m. sharp this Sunday. All of this thing happens on your hacker dashboard. And when you are submitting your project, you get to one, really win a lot of these prizes, but two, specify which track you want to be part of. There's a partner track, and there's a finalist track.

And I'm going to tell you what the difference is between the two, so you can be really aware of what you need to do on Sunday. For the partner track, you get to win prizes from our partners. And the restriction here is that you can win or you can select up to three partners for your project, which means if there's there's 12 companies that are here, you are able to qualify for any three of them as part of integrating their SDKs or their protocols in your project. It doesn't mean you can't use all of them or four of them or five of them, it just means that for winning a prize, only three are allowed. And these are not three prizes, these are three companies.

So, if a company is doing five prizes, you select that company, you're eligible to win any of those prizes or many, but this is just partners. You get to do all of that on your dashboard. And if you select this to win any of the prizes from our partners, you have to go to their booth and demo your project to them on Sunday. Very simple. If you've done any other hackathon before, this is kind of how it works.

But the part that's different is if you want to be a finalist. Being a finalist means you get to be one of the top 10 teams for this weekend and one of the best projects that came out of this hackathon. This is another step on top of the partner prizes, which means that if you want to show off your project to everybody here on the main stage on Sunday, you will pick the finalist track, and you are still eligible to win any of the partner prizes, and you can still win the same thing, but you just now have to have one more extra judging step, cuz you now have to demo your projects to a different set of judges. That's the biggest difference, which means if you pick three prizes, and you also want to be a finalist, you have to demo to three partners and our judges, so that's four total demos. That's basically it.

But you also get to win for a lot more things on top of just the partner prizes. And as a finalist, you get to win the ETHGlobal finalist pack. What is the finalist pack? Well, it's an on-chain credential that gives you access to a bunch of things. You get ETHGlobal Plus for 1 year.

You get a 1,000 USDC on top per member. We also will fly you to the next hackathon that we're hosting in the next 12 months. You get to pick which one. You get a chain on-chain proof for showing off that you're one of the amazing developers in this space. We do a lot of events where we bring on founders from big protocols to kind of give advice on how to scale projects to big companies or anything else you're curious about.

You get invitations for those. And there's $15,000 of developer credits that every finalist gets. So, things like RPC, AWS, anything around products you want to use to make this into a real thing and go into production, all these things are simplified by being a finalist. And every single member gets all of these things. The rule for being a finalist is that in addition to just being a hacker here, everything must start from scratch, but you have to have a really, really good history on your GitHub, which means you cannot just commit a million lines and two commits that says initial commit and added stuff and call that a prize and say you want to qualify.

We need to see exactly how things worked. If you have multiple members, they need to show who contributed what. Use pull requests. Talk about small things per change in a commit. Make sure the comments are understandable.

We want to be able to see that you actually did things step by step, and you were kind of doing this thing intentionally. The other important piece is that your project must be deployed and live. It doesn't have to be on production, it doesn't have to be on mainnet, but you cannot give a localhost URL. If you are submitting a project you want to be a finalist, I need to be able to click through your live demo page, go to a website. It's fine if it's a Vercel app, it's fine if you own a domain name, but I need to be able to interact with it and show to our judges, and they need to be able to play with it and use the same thing that you're going to demo off.

And if you don't have that, you do not get to be qualified for a finalist. We will check that when you're going to go judge, you have to show us a live page, and if you don't have a live demo that's deployed somewhere, you will not be allowed to demo. And you also have to record a video of your demo in case something goes wrong, so that we can look at the video and make sure that you're not affected by internet being slow or transactions taking long or something else happening unintentionally. And you have to physically demo to a set of judges. That happens over there in that room.

So, if you have three companies that you want to qualify for the prizes, you do three demos there at their booths, and then a fourth one on your right. That's basically it. So, add-on is the finalist judging, which means you get to use do one more thing and qualify for a lot more. And to keep things simple, we have a separate set of judges that are founders of these various companies in this space who are contributors to big EIPs as well as just uh big projects, and they get to talk to you about what you've been demoing. Each team will get 7 minutes to demo.

4 minutes are for your demo time, and there'll be 3 minutes for Q&A, and you have to have the video recording there so that we can also replay it, especially our judges. And it may sound like simple to record a 4-minute video, but let me tell you it will take you more than 4 minutes. Anything, it will take you at least 30 minutes, usually an hour, to really get this video down. It's fine if the video is edited, which means you can kind of cut things that are waiting for transactions to to resolve, you can edit things, but you really have to be concise about what you want to show and why you built it and communicating how your project works in in a short amount of time. So, make sure that you plan for this early.

If you have your demo working tomorrow night, don't wait until Sunday morning to do the video. You also have to upload it. We also check the video. And all this happens on your dashboard, so there's no additional work required. You just have to make sure you have all the information in, and tomorrow morning you'll be able to see all the questions that we ask as part of the submission process.

So, you just see those questions, have the answers ahead of time, and on Sunday you can just copy-paste. And same thing for partners, which is they all give you two to four minutes each. You just have to select which partners you want to qualify for. Once you select that, they get a notification that they have to expect you on their table. And as long as you're selecting that, they will know who hasn't come to their table.

And when you get there, you demo your project, they will give you some feedback, they will record your scores. And the part about this is that you can go to any company in any order. Whichever line is smaller, you can join that. And if you're like, "Oh, I want to do a finalist judging, too." It's first come, first serve.

You get to form the line here. You'll be demoing there. If you get to the partners first, all that can happen at the same time, so it's your choice. And to win any of our partner prizes, you also have to demo at their desk. You can't just say I submitted a project, they'll just look at my repo and decide.

If they don't see you, they will not consider you a finalized candidate, so only people who show up to the desk will be receiving partner prizes. And just generally, we've done this thousands of times, and we've seen what works really well and what doesn't. And here are some quick tips on how to make a good project stand out. Record a video, because even if something goes wrong, anybody can watch the video and really understand how you wanted things to work. We also want you to get to the demo faster, so you don't need to talk about all of your backgrounds, your motivation, talking about some TAM.

This is not a pitch deck. Get to why you built it, what is the problem, maybe one simple intro slide. Don't spend more than 40 seconds before you get to the demo, and use the rest of the 4 minutes to actually show what you built. Make sure you use GitHub properly, because if the judges have questions and want to see your code, they can always find things easily. Otherwise, they'll just ignore it, and you may not get the the points you wanted.

And the better your project looks, the better your odds. If you have good screenshots, if you have clear explanations for how you use different protocols, all that helps people answer any questions that they may have, cuz you've done a good job at clarifying this ahead of time. So, to kind of keep it very succinct, make the submission good. The better you look on the project page, the better your odds. And you look great, everybody else understands what's going on, and we want you to win prizes.

Simple. And there's a lot of people who are new to this space, and you want to understand why things are not working or something is going wrong. There's a lot of help here. We have mentors who are here 24/7, which means you can talk to a mentor at 4:00 a.m.

or 4:00 p.m. And that's right at the mentor station. There's a dedicated station. There's also a channel where mentors are watching specific questions.

You can send links there or any exact questions that you have. And these are all of our amazing mentors for this weekend. They're They're wearing neon vests. They're not construction workers. You can talk to any one of them and ask them for help.

A lot of them know things about back end, front end, smart contract development. You can ask any sort of questions, and they're there to help make your lives a lot easier. I can't explain everything I want to here, so we're going to keep things very short. Email us if you have any questions. You can find anybody on the ETHGlobal team on Discord.

DM us. Ask questions. And we're physically at the help desk the whole event. So, just find and walk up to us and ask for anything that you want to know. And lastly, our code of conduct is on ethglobal.

com/rules. It talks about how to behave here as well as what matters for the hackathon. Just of it is please be respectful. It is an in-person event. There are people from all over the world and we want to make sure that everybody has a good experience here.

So, harassment or abuse in any form will not be tolerated. If you see someone being treated the way they should not be, come report it to us. We'll take immediate action. We also want you to treat everybody just the way you would treat someone from your family. And the most important piece here is anything that you build is owned by each member of that team equally.

Which means neither ETHGlobal, none of the sponsors have rights to any of your work. If five of you built a project and you win a prize and you want to make this more than just a project, all five of you have equal rights to that work and you get to own everything that you built. Those were all the logistical things. I want to bring on one amazing person before we get to the last set here. For this one, I'd like to bring on Ian from World to tell you a little bit more about why they're here and why they're excited to be at this event.

So, please give a big round of applause to Ian. Thank you, Kartik. Hi, everyone. I'm Ian Bilic. I lead developer relations at World Foundation.

And I'm here to tell you a little bit more about World and what we're doing here in Cannes. So, World is here to answer one big question. How do you know who is a really unique person online? Uh and just as importantly, how do you do that privately? So, for that, we built World ID.

World ID lets you prove that you are a real unique human on the internet without revealing anything to anyone, not even to World, about which unique human you are. As AI becomes more and more powerful and more and more prevalent, it's becoming incredibly important to be able to distinguish a human from a bot on the internet. But how does World ID know that you're a human? For that, we have a hardware device called the Orb. The Orb is running over a dozen machine learning models locally to make sure that you are actually a human, not a cat, not a dog, not a photo of a human, not a mannequin head.

And then it takes photo of each iris, photo of your face, calculates the iris code, and then sends that data to your phone and deletes it all. Iris code goes in into an MPC system to check that you're unique from everyone else who's verified at the Orb. And that MPC system ensures that your iris code is never actually just secret shares. Happy to chat more about that if anyone's curious. But everything that World builds is designed to be privacy-first, decentralized, and open-source.

So, how can you use World ID? The most common way to use World ID is in mini apps. These are web apps that open inside of World app. Uh users can connect their World app wallet to your application, send transactions on World chain, and verify with World ID. You get distribution directly to our millions of users.

Uh and they're designed to be super simple to build. The easiest way to build any web3 application. All right. Everything integrates seamlessly. Uh I covered that.

But we also recently launched AgentKit. All right. I mentioned that World makes it it's super necessary to be able to determine if you're dealing with a bot or a human online. But what about an agent that is a useful extension of a human's capability, but still isn't really a human? AgentKit lets a human sort of delegate to an agent, prove that that agent has a real human behind it, and platforms that integrate AgentKit can be aware of this and treat that agent like it should rather than treating it like a bot and trying to block it.

AgentKit is built on top of X402. Uh so, there's also the payments layer. Uh and again, we're happy to chat more about that at our booth. So, World has been continuing to grow with 38 million total users, 18 million of which are verified with World ID, and 7.5 million monthly active users.

And building on World gets you distribution directly to this user base that we've built. We have $20,000 worth of bounties. 8,000 of those are for the best use of AgentKit. 8,000 of that's for the best use of World ID 4.0, the new version of World ID that we're launching.

And then $4,000 worth of bounties for the best use of MiniKit. With that, thank you all. Thanks, Ian. You get to learn about a lot a lot of cool product launches as part of this, but um that's just not all. There's a lot more other prizes, $150,000 to be exact.

So, World is, of course, giving 20,000 in prizes. Arc, Cadera, and Zero-G are giving 15,000 each. Chainlink, ENS, Flare, Ledger, Uniswap Foundation are giving $10,000 in prizes each. And Dynamic, WalletConnect, and Only Link are giving 5K. All this information is on the website in the prize section.

And the key thing here is that they're making your lives a lot easier because they specified what does and doesn't count as a valid submission. And they've also linked specifically to the documentation as well as sample repos that you can just use out of the box to save a lot of time. So, make sure you read the full prize description before you start working on a project because you may see that, hey, this doesn't count or you were thinking about something and they may not be allowed. So, all that is on the website. If you're still looking for a team, we're doing a workshop in 10 minutes in workshop room one.

You get to meet other members who are looking for a team or want somebody to join your team that have a specific set of skills. So, go meet each other and join up and work on a project with somebody from another part of the world. You get to learn new things and build something together. And last but not least, we want you to have fun at this event. So, pace yourself.

You don't have to go hard by just not sleeping. Get some rest. Enjoy this whole weekend. Talk to people. Learn new things.

Meet others from different parts of the world. And really, if you end up on Sunday with knowing something more than what you knew just now, that is a win and that's a success. Of course, you want to build your project and you want to make sure that your idea gets to come to life, but think of this as one of the many milestones to learn and get better and things happen. You may not get to the full list of what you wanted to do. Well, that is okay.

Want to make sure that you're using this as an opportunity to really test if this is something where you want to spend most of your time on in this space. And if you learn something new in the next 48 hours, that is still a win. So, for the first ever 2026 hackathon in person of the year, welcome to Cannes and let's get hacking.