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Intelligence at the Frontier Hackathon Recap | FtC SF 2026

Funding the CommonsSat, May 9, 2026, 12:00 AM

What does it look like to build the human-AI coordination layer in 36 hours? The Intelligence at the Frontier Hackathon brought 150 builders to Frontier Tower in San Francisco for an overnight build sprint on March 14-15, 2026, across four tracks: agentic AI, physical robotics, AI safety and evaluation, and sovereign infrastructure. 53 projects shipped. $25k+ in prizes awarded. We saw builders hacking through the night, robots roaming the hallways, agents paying each other in real money, and judges giving Claude feedback. Thanks to everyone who joined us. Co-produced with Protocol Labs. Supported by ElevenLabs, Bittensor, Solana, Meteora, Metaplex, Redwood North, BittensorCommons.org, VESSL AI, Velda, Unbrowse, NomadicML, human.tech, Activeloop, Solo Tech, Learning Layer Labs, Lit Protocol, and KikiTora. 🌐 https://fundingthecommons.io 📋 All 53 projects: https://intelligence-at-the-frontier-hackathon.devspot.app/?activeTab=projects

Transcript

I am pretty radically into open source as sort of a thing that's an alternative [music] to a lot of the other stuff out there. I believe that decentralization is a big tent that includes all of the big centralized players, but we need something outside of that. You know, we need the commons to be flourishing and rich.

The thing that's been most inspiring is actually like the workflow approach. There's a lot of vibe coding. You know, it's funny like we sort of joke about it's like the prophecy of every engineer becoming a product manager. And so I think what's been interesting about these pitches is that they're becoming more strategic.

A lot of like good things that I've seen at this hackathon is people like actually trying to build stuff where you take like centralized entities out of the loop. How do you like optimize these systems so that the people at the edges of the network derive value from the services they provide and all the value doesn't like concentrate in the middle?

This is an opportunity for founders to really dream big. It's your excuse to like go for the crazy idea. And I think we've really been seeing that in some of the teams that are here today.

Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.