One Trillion Agents Hackathon: A Retrospective
The One Trillion Agents Hackathon wrapped on March 2, 2025, marking a milestone moment in the evolution of decentralized AI. Over 2,000 participants from around the world joined forces to push the boundaries of what autonomous agents can do onchain, cross-chain, and beyond.
Hosted by Hackbox and powered by the NEAR ecosystem, the hackathon ran entirely online, blending education, experimentation, and healthy competition into a month-long sprint toward the future.
- 2,049 participants
- 147 project submissions
- 16 bounty sponsors
- $100k+ in prizes awarded
Participants built across three core tracks: DeFi Agents, Social Agents, and Absurd Agents, each one tackling unique challenges at the intersection of AI and Web3.
Bounty Highlights
A huge thank you to our sponsors who made this hackathon possible with meaningful bounties and mentorship. Standouts include:
- Aurora – for the “AI Agentic Chains” challenge, which saw multiple chain-spinning, agent-led economies emerge.
- Proximity Labs – for pushing the limits with cross-chain trading and Bitcoin-signing agents.
- Bitte – for leading the way on chain abstraction and agent deployment.
- Swanchain, Questflow, Veax, Frax, HOT Wallet, and others – for injecting real-world use cases, from marketing agents to advanced liquidity management.
Winning Projects
We saw everything—from agents using NEAR Chain Signatures to interact with Bitcoin L1, agents interacting with an e-sports betting platform, agents used for enhancing military field operations, agent-powered trustless portfolio management solutions, and more! Many teams pushed past prototypes and into deployable, testable tools. You can check out the Project Gallery, the Winners Highlight Thread, and explore the full showcase on YouTube for more on these standout builds.
What We Learned
- Sponsored bounties work best. Turns out, constraints are rocket fuel. The most polished projects came from bounties with clear prompts, helping teams focus and execute on real needs, not just abstract concepts.
- Live sessions like the keynote from NEAR CEO Illia Polosukhin and weekly sessions hosted by DevHub proved useful in motivating participants and providing valuable resources.
- Indian devs showed up. With over 4 million developers and a culture of grit, Indian hackers consistently shipped mature, high-utility projects. Their submissions looked closer to startups than side-projects.
- Hackathons still matter. When AI can write your code, it’s tempting to sit back. Hackathons remind us that building still matters. Competition adds urgency. Peers make it collaborative. And the stakes, even if just for fun or pride, pull people into deeper, hands-on learning.
What’s Next?
The energy from this hackathon was real, and it’s not fading. Based on what we saw, here’s where we think the movement is headed:
- Cross-chain by default: Agents will need to transact, reason, and read data across multiple blockchains.
- Useful agents matter most. Agents that reliably execute tasks and meet concrete performance metrics will win out.
- Shade Agents, the multichain AI-powered smart contracts that run autonomously and securely on NEAR, using Chain Signatures and TEEs for full decentralization and privacy will become increasingly important. They open the door to verifiable, trustless AI agents that can manage assets, execute decisions, and interact across chains without human intervention.
- Stronger standards: Security, auditability, and compliance are top of mind as agents move closer to production.
The One Trillion Agents Hackathon laid down the tracks. Now, the community is running with it.
Let’s keep building.