‘Agents’ swarm inaugural Solana AI hackathon

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The primary Solana AI hackathon concluded on Monday.

Greater than 400 tasks threw their respective hats into the ring for a contest that provided money prizes, however extra importantly, the prospect of doubtless profitable publicity for so-called AI brokers, at the moment flooding social crypto feeds.

A number of new entrants have already got tokens buying and selling at multi-million greenback market caps, and co-pilots of crypto buying and selling brokers and “swarms” of AI brokers have been well-liked classes.

The winners of the hackathon, organized by SendAI, will likely be introduced round January 10, SendAI co-founder and CEO Yash Agarwal instructed me. A listing of contributors and related particulars are anticipated to be revealed later at this time.

Hackathons are frequent in Solanaland, however what makes this one distinctive is the variety of participant tokens already being traded. The overall market capitalization of Solana AI agent hackathon tokens has surpassed $200 million, Agarwal instructed me. That is in regards to the measurement of Solana DeFi protocol Orca’s native token.

One such undertaking is FXN, a so-called AI swarm whose authentic token briefly reached $70 million in market capitalization after launching round December 11. It at the moment has round $44 million in market cap, in keeping with DEX Screener.

FXN is a protocol that enables a number of AI brokers to work collectively to perform greater than a single agent is able to, in keeping with a white paper dated October 3, 2024. The white paper offers an instance use case of a bunch of brokers basically working as a Social media advertising firm to create and promote social content material.

AI brokers tied to crypto tokens exploded in recognition after an out-of-control social media chatbot with a token went viral in October. The variety of hackathon contributors introduced simply two weeks earlier than its begin underlines how a lot competitors there may be for mindshare 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 known as Undertaking Plutus, instructed me.

Customers do not want AI bots to carry out actions they might do themselves. That is why Undertaking Plutus constructed an AI companion that appears at charts and may commerce whereas customers are away, she added.

There appear to be numerous trade-oriented brokers, primarily based on an preliminary listing shared with me by the hackathon organizers.

“The Solana AI Hackathon underlines how on-chain buying and selling and DeFi are rising as essential verticals for AI brokers. These use instances are more likely to drive innovation in Q1 and Q2 2025,” wrote X-threader 0xJeff.