Closing Ceremony | Convergence Hackathon

stage. — Okay, we click the button. I'm going to go to YouTube real quick and double check that we are live. If we're live and you can hear me and you want to post a uh robot emoji in the chat, that'll let me know that everything is going awesome and it's working. — We are. I see it. — Perfect. — Hello. — Where's everybody from? Type in uh your locations. I love seeing people from all over the world, all different time zones. I'm sitting here outside of Philadelphia, uh, on the east coast, US, and Richard is in Texas. — I'm down south in Texas. Yeah, we got the robot emojis. It's working. — Uh, every time I say it's working, — US Star Wars and Anakin whenever he's in his little pod racer, he's like, "It's working. It's working. " Anyway, y'all don't want to hear about my crazy thoughts with it's working. Y'all are here for a hackathon closing ceremony, I think. Is that right, Dave? Is that what we're doing here? — Yeah, we should probably like say names with prizes. — Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what we're doing. Uh before we get there, though, we're going to help the suspense build. I know you're waiting uh eagerly, all of you. And we're going to talk a little bit about the hackathon. Um I am Richard Gotautleber. I am the manager of the financial services developer relations team. And we also have Dave Isbeky here. um he's on the team as well and you may remember us from the opening ceremony but firstly the most important thing that we need to say this morning was morning for me wherever you are today is thank you uh the hackathon we had a lot of submissions we're going to talk a little bit about that in a second and it went great I don't know it was really cool to see it's definitely uh Dave I don't know what your take was but mine was that there was a lot of improvement in the average quality of submissions this time and I think our little robot buddies may have something to do with that. — Yeah, I love AI friends. Uh it's, you know, it's it was super interesting in that you can get so much more done by yourself — or just you know uh two people together. And some of the themes I would just say this and part of it is like our ask for this hackathon but this hackathon I don't know about you Richard like it felt stuff that was being real like built was real in the past it was kind of like you could do whatever you want you know and you could do funny stuff you could do it but like the stuff that you all built is like practical like I could be using it to help finance customers today and a lot of you did like in the prediction markets you mixed in AI which I never thought of this and it's a Great. It's a great um like idea is that you know in prediction markets you're either going to find somebody that's doing well on the leaderboards and follow them or you can ask AI to like research current human sentiment because that's what prediction markets are, right? And so a lot of you were calling out to that with AI and using like auto all automatically with prediction markets gave me some ideas, you know, and I it was just it felt real like that was the first time in a hackathon I was like I could be using this even in my like day-to-day life. So just awesome job. — 100%. the the bar was definitely raised this one and I think you bring up a good point that there was a it wasn't just that hackers are using AI to help them code more effectively but there is that like it's also being integrated into the projects in very interesting ways which was great. Speaking of projects, um this slide kind of freaks me out a little bit. I'll be honest. I feel like the old man here um sometimes when I see these categories of like human submissions and then agent submissions, but it's pretty cool. So, this hackathon was our first one where we had um a track that was just for AI agents too, right? So, you can see we're definitely still the humans are winning like yes, go humans. Uh it'll be interesting to see how this changes next year uh in the following years. But, you know, we had 535 submissions uh from teams and then we had 19 agent submissions over on uh Maltbook. You know, we had 3,000 participants. I don't know how we count AI if we did count those this time. Something we should maybe look into. Just thinking about that, like how many AI bots were actually involved. Uh, and 70% of our projects were submitted by individual hackers this time, which is interesting. And I think that's more than it's been in the past. And I think that's probably because a solo hacker is not just hacking by themselves anymore. You know, they've got all sorts of different assistants helping them out, which is pretty cool. Yeah, that's the productivity I was talking I just did a video. You'll find it all out. It's on our YouTube channel on our um MCP server where you could do you can have AI you can you know you can use cloud code and everything to uh basically create CR workflows. And in

that video you'll see me like I don't feel alone anymore. I feel like I got a team you know of but it's like uh who was the guy in if anybody's ever seen the Flash Gordon movie like totally classic. Is it Zolto? It's the doctor. She's like, "You can never break the human spirit. " You know, it's like that came through too in this. You know, it wasn't just AI code. Uh that's why I like the videos, too. Like, I know it's nerve-wracking, y'all, making a video, but it's like to see that human connection and actually see you talk about your project. Like, kudos for doing that stuff, too. — Yes, for sure. All right. So, I guess, you know, Dave, we've probably bored these people. They're probably getting uh — getting a bit antsy. So, do you want to talk about the sponsor prizes? — Yeah. So, thank you to our sponsors. Uh, we've got World Tenderly and Third Web and you all. There was a lot of projects with that. You know, we can't do this without our sponsors and having the extra prize money just makes me so like happy for you all to like there's other prizes that you can go out and you can grab and they definitely showed up for that. Uh, so let's go to world first. All right. So, we've got uh world had a category for the best use of world ID with CRA and the best usage of CR within a world mini app and the prizes you can see there. This is all in USD. Yep. So, go ahead. So, uh here are the winners, right? We have Althia, World Yield, and Krebble for best use. Uh, Krebble like allows you to build CR workflows with AI. So, just, you know, it's along the lines of the same cool ideas of like I could start using these tools today. Really, really cool stuff, y'all. Um, and then for world miniap, third place, congratulations, Simon Stakes World, OneShot, second place, and Servo Finance for first place. And servil is a mini app for tokenized uh it's like stock finances and you know tokenization of stocks. Just something I was talking about yesterday on uh Wall Street at the event. So just great to see all. Congratulations to all the winners. — Yeah. — All right. Let's do the next one. — All right. So Tenderly category they wanted to see was showcasing C workflows executing using the Tenderly virtual test nets. And I definitely saw a lot of that uh when I was going through the category. here was all the different — I feel like I just got to take a second. I feel like uh this one was kind of a cheat that people weren't realizing because as a developer in this space, Tinderly is one of those things where like once you start to use it, — it's a superpower. Um like Andre on our team is a Tinderly wizard and I go to him all the time with questions cuz like he knows how to use it really well and I'll admit I am not as versed as he is and he's like well you just do this in Tinderly and it tells you everything that's wrong with all the mistakes that you've made. So, you know, I feel like this is one of those we always talk about how in this space the prizes are great and they're amazing, but the learning and experience that you get is really valuable as well. And I feel like this was like a extra good one there. — Yeah. Yeah, I agree. There was a lot of them because people are just using the tool. So, that's great to see. — All right, let's tell them. Let's tell them the winners. — All right, so third place agent score. This was a reputation scoring for AI agents. This was neat. Like I'm seeing more and more of this of like uh you know on Ethereum there's a directory now for that too of like who is your AI agent and you know maltbook has this too and just giving a score. So that was really again just more applicable. Uh second place approval guardian. So this was DeFi risk management and first place is mask bid which allowed you to do private auctions. So congratulations to all of the winners. — Yeah, congrats for sure. and Third Web, they are uh it should be next week. It should like it may even be today, y'all. So, uh it's coming and uh we'll announce as soon as uh as soon as we hear. So, thank you to Third Web. — Yeah. So, we'll be reaching out to you uh if you're a winner shortly with the third webinars. All right. With that, I think we're going to transition over to the chain link prizes. So, we'll kind of go through the different tracks that we had. But before we get to that, — we did have some guest judges and one of them is here with us today. I'm going to bring Andrea on screen um just to chat a little bit about being a judge, what he saw in this. Um he's from UBS. He's a digital assets architect there. Hey, Andrea. How's it going? — I'm well Richard and hi Dave. Thanks for the invite. — Yeah. Yeah. Always. It's always good to see people too from like out in the space um kind of judging these projects as we go through. I'm just curious, this is the first time that you know we've worked with you on a hackathon like this. When you got the projects

that you judged, I'm kind of curious what stood out to you with the projects in the track that you were judging. — It's really good question. And I think what really stood out for me being I I've been judging Aaton throughout the year but it's really how the teams were focused on real world financial problem. So not just building something technical for the sake of it and hopefully win the rise the prices we are announcing soon but rather building something that in certain uh in a certain way are challenges I face as well at work every day when working with digital assets. So, real world problems that get solved with this hackathon mindset. — Yeah. I think that kind of echoes what Dave said too when uh when he was talking about that how these projects are — I don't know I feel like the bar has been raised a little bit where they're actually solving real world problems. And just to clarify, I don't think I mentioned this the track that we're talking about here is the DeFi and tokenization track. Um, so when you were looking at these projects, um, I know for me personally, like it's kind of difficult because a lot of the projects are really good, but when it came to picking winning teams, like what set them apart? What differentiated them from the other project? — Yeah, totally agree with you. And I have to be honest, it was hard. I have a scorecard. I do have it in front of me. And there are no outliers. the the politics very high, but I think the winner are the the one that were able not only to have a strong and credible idea, but they were able to execute and bring it to life. So, not just a concept, but really they were able to show a clear use case, coherent architecture, enough implementation that make me believe that they could do it. — Yeah. That's uh that's definitely important. And so you're at UBS. I'm curious um looking at what's going on like with this hackathon in this space today. — There's definitely you know just to play on the name of this hackathon a little bit a convergence going on between traditional finance and DeFi. Um looking at that like what are you excited about in that space? So I have a lot of things that keep me. I try to bring more the five like products towards traditional finance. But I think the we have some lowing in fruit like improve financial system through better automation and more transparency as well as faster settlement and programmable workflow. It's amazing to see what is today available in defi and what I would love to bring within uh the traditional finance and hopefully use for our clients and uh through the blockchain system. — Okay. Yeah. No, that uh I agree with that for sure. Um yeah. Is there anything else that you want to share before we get to the winners? No, everything was great on thanks and I think let's move forward for the winner and share the prizes. — Okay. You want to tell us who the winners were? — Of course. So second uh place goes finance. It's a lending borrow protocol and this is an app that allow to match lenders and borrowers through private bidding process. And the uh first one is flow. It's an autonomous default that earns return capturing market inefficiency before they are actually disappearing and that's I think where Siri enable this full view crosschain and — whole feature come together — yeah absolutely yeah these are both really cool projects um I don't know the I think both of these definitely took advantage of like we talked about earlier Dave of like blending together um especially the flow vault the like AI into the project itself. So, it's definitely going to be interesting to see what happens. But, congrats to both these winners. Um, they're awesome projects. They did a great job. And then, Andre, is there anything else you want to add before uh we move on? — Thanks everyone for participating and looking forward to seeing Siri. — Yeah. And thanks Andre for uh for judging and for sharing with us today. We'll talk to you later. — Yeah. Thank you. And congrats to the winners. All right. Oh, I'm jumping ahead here. If you saw it, you saw it. What did you do? — You did it. CR and AI. Talk about it. — No, no. Let's do it. Let's You're jumping all around. We need CR and AI. Go back. — Oh my gosh. Are — you giving it all away? — I'm giving it all away. There we go. The buttons are hard to press. — Too much. I told you he ran too much. — AI can't replicate this. Dave, this is why I do this. It's called job security, Dave. AI can't replicate this, — you know. Um, — yeah. This is the ending hallucination.

— No, this is the endearing part about being a human being is like we're just human beings on the other side in this roller coaster ride spinning through the galaxy with you all, too. You know, it makes you human. So, don't worry about it, man. Um, all right. So, CR and AI, congratulations. Second place, AI financial workspace Legos. This is like an escrow with AI arbitration and a private transfer system. It was pretty cool and uh you just like along the lines of like you're all building like real stuff like a lot of this stuff could be products in the place. So uh I was blown away just great and first place is Sentinel CR this I never even like it occurred to me this is like autonomous risk moni monitoring infrastructure right with AI agents and looking at onchain and there's like I don't know like all of you like this and especially these here had me thinking of like I'm doing so much manual work y'all like I'm checking things I'm checking portfolios I'm checking data I'm doing searches it's like this whole space is going autonomous And I think you know like AI there's going to be more AI on chain than there is going to be us and it's going to be a beautiful thing and a lot of us showed it. So congratulations uh to both of you. This was like this is just a fun category. It was a really amazing uh category part of so thank I definitely think that, you know, thinking back to the sponsor tracks, the um World ID stuff is way more uh interesting, too, when you consider all these projects that are using AI, right? Like that proof of humanness. It's going to be an interesting place. But yeah. All right. Well, I already spoiled it, so we might as well move on to the next category here. Um we'll talk about prediction markets. So, in this place, we had this meme pull arena. um different meme coins competing in real time battles is a fun take on a prediction market, you know, um which is really cool. And then first place tapple, I hope I'm saying that right, was a tap to like predict the price of an asset. It was it's a really interesting take that I hadn't thought of before where you know you have like the regular price graph, right? Is it going up? Is it going down for an asset? And then there's all these squares and you can basically bet on like will the price go into this square as it's going through. Uh, so that was kind of fun. Um, so congrats to both those prediction market apps. Um, you know, it's good to see different takes on it, not just the traditional like here's an event, will it happen or not? Yes or no. Um, so that was kind of fun to see both of those as well. — Yeah. — All right, moving on. — All right, risk and compliance. — So, second place is Ace Sandbox. This was like a whole tokenization platform, right? Uh looking at, you know, it's like when you look at compliance and risk, like how do you make that interesting? It's boring, right? Like regulation. I don't know. At least for me, to me, there's no like music in it. — Uh — there's somebody sitting there right now who loves compliance and regulations. He's like, "Boring, Dave, you don't understand. " — And he's a certified rules. — He's a certified accountant, right? Yeah. Um but like you all like I was like oh wow like I see this like this just makes it easier for human beings and compliant capital in this space is huge. So you know congrats a sandbox uh Aegis Gate was you know like a privacy preserving compliance leader for DeFi. um looking at things like KYC, AML, accredited, uh investor, like all that stuff we've went through. Um really like how do you keep privacy as part of that? And uh because I always worry about uploading my license to whatever app I'm using, you know, things like that. So, uh it was really great to see this like real stuff in risk and compliance. So, thank you all. Congrats to both winners. — Yeah. And definitely that the privacy around like compliance KYC where you have to share u information that you do not want made public but then we're talking about in a blockchain space where everything is public. Um that's going to be huge and I think it's really great to see projects like that as well. — Yeah. — All right. So we have another guest judge. Unfortunately um they're not here to be able to be here with us live but they did send in a video. So I'm going to play that real quick. Hello everyone, Alan Lee here, head of engineering at edex. So first of all, congratulations to all teams participated in the privacy track of convergence hackathon. It's been great to see how quickly builders are turning privacy into something practical and usable. At ADEX, we operate a regulated digital security platforms where we tokenize and manage the life cycle of assets like private equity or credit funds, commercial papers and other private market instruments.

As a licensed market operator, we have to meet the bar set by regulators on multiple areas such as security, compliance, investor uh protection, etc. When you are operating a platform like this, privacy isn't optional. You're dealing with sensitive transaction data, investor identities, and regulated workflows that must remain confidential. In our collaboration with Enz and Chenlink, we explored the full life cycle of tokenized commercial paper across borders from insurance to settlement and then to redemption. What became very clear is that interoperability alone isn't enough. You need to ensure that transaction data remains confidential even as assets move across different systems and networks. Public and private infrastructure can coexist. But when you are moving assets across shared networks, you need a mechanism that let different participants verify uh outcomes uh without seeing the underlying data. Confidentiality and interoperability uh need to work together. So for builders, what's exciting is that these capabilities are now accessible. You can design workflows where data remain private, but outcomes are still verifiable and interoperable. It's great to see a lot of builders are working in this space. So I'm looking forward to seeing how these ideas evolve into real world applications. And congratulations again to all the winners. The work you've done here is exactly the kind of foundation this industry needs. So, keep building. Thank you. All right. Yeah. So, thanks to Allan uh for that and for being a guest judge as well. Um so, he judged the privacy track. So, we've got first and second place and second place. Um, you know, it maths out correctly in my mind. So, we had a tie for second place, so they're each going to get 3,000 each. We had Veraritoss X and Tacit. Veraritoss X is again, it's that privacy preserving um piece, but it's in a prediction market, so users can place and receive payouts without exposing like their positions or identities, which is pretty cool. Um we had Tacit which is a settlement protocol that does privacy preserving um OTC and allows two different counterparties to execute a trade without revealing like the trade details but still enforces compliance and again I think that this space like this ability to operate publicly but still maintain your privacy is huge right um and then the last one is the stealth settlement layer or SSL That's a solid name. Like it's a good play on SSL. I like it. Uh the dad joke in Joker inside of me appreciates it a lot. So great job there on the naming. Uh this is a trading platform uh for tokenizing real world assets that again gives users as they call a darkpool style experience on chain so they can you know keep their privacy as well. All right. Are we ready to move on to the next one, Dave? — I am. — I don't think I spoiled this one yet. So, you know, we can just — you're not going to hurt their feelings. — Oh. Oh, that goes into a deep conversation. — All right. — So, autonomous a such a cool category, such a neat concept. I'm glad that, you know, we opened the gates to like try this and it was really awesome to see how you all went about doing it. We're, you know, we're it's crazy like we're in such early days, but we're also like accelerating so fast. So I feel like the early days are like yesterday and then now we're living in tomorrow. Um so second place CR risk router. Um this is something like I do when I make personal like financial decisions when I'm investing in the market. I actually have an open claw running on a separate computer uh and I have it set up in iMessage. So it's like a little buddy and if I'm going to do a trade or something or I'm looking at something I just have a conversation. It's like I do a double check. And this is like taking that and look and you even further of like evaluating risk in decisions. And I it just had me thinking like you just great idea like there's going to be more and more of this is that the insight that you can get by that AI can give you when you're doing decisions and then the AI is going to do it itself. It's not even going to need me uh you know eventually. So congratulations on uh second place for CR risk router. And then in control, this was like um again something I'm doing manually, but this is just an AI powered portfolio intelligence platform, right? That it's like looking at it's all decentralized infrastructure and it's looking at what you would normally get in traditional finance planning that may take time. You're looking through different types

of PDFs and research and you know all of the different financial flows and quarterly results and stuff. This is like AI powered real time of like hey you know something's happening right now in the market you know and how's that going to affect your portfolio so first place goes to in control uh really great job and great job by all the submissions uh in this category I mean it's just brand new category brand new space it was such a delight to be able to see everything — I will say judging this category was interesting um especially trying to verify that the work was done by agents I forget which one it was one of these too though where it was like yeah this can't have been a person because there was like over like 1,200 commits in GitHub with like every single change was a commit and was like either that or this guy is actually following the rules when it comes to like how you're supposed to do git — and you know every single one like every little change he's making a commit and that's that would be impressive. Um but no it was this is really interesting cool category. — Yeah and there's telltale signs too. It's funny because I've had my AI friends do this too. It it's almost like um it's like a like an engineer that loves engineering for just the sheer delight of it. And I've seen engineers architect and build things that they don't need. Like it already exists out there and there like I'm going to write it. I've my I've seen AI and so some of the telltale signs in here is like the AI rather than using a library or something that's pretty obvious that a human would it goes and builds the entire freaking library. — It's like we've had wheels but I could build my own wheel. — Right. Exactly. — Yeah. No, 100%. — It was cool to say. Yeah. — Um, yeah. So, I see all this chat going on too about people like, "Oh, I lost. " And I'm sorry I spoiled it for a little bit of y'all, but like there's a bunch of winners that are about to come up on this next slide. So, you know, those of you who are still hanging around. I know most of you Like, it's good that you're hanging around because you still could be a winner. Um, so yeah, we also have like a track for it's not an official track, but it's, you know, it's prizes for projects that were just solid projects, but they didn't win one of the main tracks. Um, so each of these 12 projects, yeah, is going to get — $1,250 each, right? So, um, I guess I can just kind of go through and read these off real quick, but we've got Settlekit, we've got StvO, Varity, Ease Health, E-H Health, that's a tongue twister, uh, Clear Rate, agent auction protocol, X42 chain link edition, um, LeanFi, Ghost Fund, Veil Protocol, Espresso. I mean, I had one of those this morning. So, like that is a winning project right there. And then A's protocol. I find it interesting too, Dave. I feel like there is a lot of naming similarity going on with projects this hackathon. And I don't know if that has to do with AI agents um having anything to do with that, but yeah, congrats to all the winners as well. The projects were definitely really solid this time. Like the the floor has been raised. — Yeah. Congratulations all at uh you know I tell people like the hackathon is the first step. It's a forcing function. It used to you know for me when I would enter hackathons it was just for me to like stop thinking about stuff and actually do it you know it was a forcing function and then that just as a human that just like it gets the wheels turning then you're like you know what even after I submitted that hackathon submission there's so many different things I could have done and then you just keep iterating and put it out there. I mean, Peter, the creator of OpenClaw, I don't know if you all know how many failed projects he had — before Arpenclaw, you can go see them up on GitHub, right? The it's important to be like just keep going, just keep building. And creativity like that, at least in the world today, building and creating stuff just gives me joy and it helps me be s like so much higher, you know, up there. And you all brought something that didn't exist before, right? every single project that was submitted here did not exist before you actually submitted it. So, thank you for all your hard work. Super appreciate you. — Yeah, absolutely. So, I guess we probably should have Zuman on this because, you know, he used to be a lawyer before he started getting into tech. But, uh, you won a prize. How are you going to get that? Like, how are these prizes going to be distributed? Dave and his best lawyer imitation will now take it away. — I [snorts] refuse I refuse to do a lawyer imitation. — Um this is just like all the legalies, right? So you're going to get contacted in upcoming days by our team, right? You need to make sure you provide all the information. Um we reserve the right that the prizes are all based on and this is all rules that were part of the hackathon, right? Is that KYC procedures and all of that kind of stuff, but these prizes should be processed around the 30th of next month. And then obviously any of the prizes that weren't directly from Chain Link, they're going to be coming from the sponsors. themselves and might have a little bit different of time frame. — Yeah, absolutely. And then you stuck

around this long, those of you that still here, um we would really appreciate it. Let us know your thoughts on this hackathon. How was it? What could we do better? What did we do well? Um if you can hit up that QR code, it's just a little form to give us some information. Let us know what you all want. This is really for you. I guess it's feedback to us to let us know how we're doing, but it helps you out because if you want to see things change, you want things done differently in the hackathon, this is the place to let us know. — Yeah. And a shout out to Sophia. She's not on camera. Uh she is relentless in just how much work goes in this and she gets everything done. Her and her team, uh, shout out to Nikki, too. Like, it is not just Richard and me up here doing opening closing set. There's a whole team. There's a whole team of judges. We have developer experts in the community that give up their own time to help out and do all of this too. So, it is a gigantic effort and we want to make sure that we continue to make it as uh valuable and fun for all of you as we possibly can. So, thank you to everyone that was part of this on the chain link side. — No, absolutely. Sophia, her team, developer experts, like they make our job easy. Just being on camera and just having fun talking, spoiling everything. Man, I can't believe I did that still. I'm kicking myself. — Don't beat yourself up. It's all good. It's Friday. — But yeah. Um yeah. So with that, again, thank you for everyone who participated um who's still hanging in there on this uh live stream. We appreciate everything that you submitted, giving us the opportunity to check out your awesome projects. Even if you didn't win, man, the projects this year were really good. It was a harder job judging this year, I think, than it has been in the past, just because of that bar being raised. So, I mean, congrats to all of you guys. Um, it was awesome. — Thank you all. — I guess with that, we'll catch you in the next one, y'all. Bye.