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The inaugural Solana AI hackathon concluded on Monday.
Over 400 tasks threw their respective hats within the ring for a contest providing money prizes however extra importantly the prospect of potentially-lucrative consideration to so-called AI brokers, that are at the moment flooding crypto social feeds.
A number of entrants have already got tokens buying and selling at thousands and thousands of dollars-worth of market cap, and agent copilots for crypto buying and selling in addition to AI agent “swarms” have been buzzy classes.
Winners of the hackathon, organized by SendAI, will probably be introduced round Jan. 10, SendAI co-founder and CEO Yash Agarwal instructed me. A listing of entrants and related particulars is predicted to be posted later at this time.
Hackathons are widespread in Solanaland, however what makes this one distinctive is the variety of contestant tokens already buying and selling. The whole market capitalization of Solana AI agent hackathon tokens has crossed $200 million, Agarwal instructed me. That’s roughly the scale of Solana DeFi protocol Orca’s native token.
One such undertaking is FXN, a so-called AI swarm whose native token briefly touched $70 million in market cap after launching round Dec. 11. It at the moment has roughly $44 million in market cap, in response to DEX Screener.
FXN is a protocol that lets a number of AI brokers work collectively to perform greater than what a single agent is able to, in response to a white paper dated Oct. 3, 2024. The white paper provides a pattern use case of a bunch of brokers primarily working as a social media advertising and marketing agency to create and promote social content material.
AI brokers tied to crypto tokens exploded in reputation after an unhinged social media chatbot with a token went viral in October. The variety of entrants in a hackathon introduced simply two weeks earlier than it started underscores how a lot competitors for mindshare there may be amongst crypto AI tasks.
Many tasks share a “related focus” of making an “clever interface for the Solana ecosystem,” Potatoe, the nameless lead developer of a hackathon undertaking referred to as Venture Plutus, instructed me.
Customers don’t want AI bots who execute actions that they might do themselves, which is why Venture Plutus constructed an AI companion that watches charts and might commerce whereas customers are away, they added.
There do seem like lots of trading-focused brokers primarily based on an preliminary record that was shared with me by the hackathon’s organizers.
“The Solana AI Hackathon underscores how on-chain buying and selling and DeFi are rising as key verticals for AI brokers. These use circumstances will probably drive innovation in Q1 and Q2 2025,” the X threader 0xJeff wrote.
