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The first Solana AI hackathon concluded on Monday.
More than 400 projects threw their respective hats into the ring for a competition that offered cash prizes, but more importantly, the prospect of potentially lucrative attention for so-called AI agents, currently flooding the crypto-social feeds.
Several new entrants already have tokens trading at multi-million dollar market caps, and co-pilots of crypto trading agents and “swarms” of AI agents have been popular categories.
The winners of the hackathon, organized by SendAI, will be announced around January 10, SendAI co-founder and CEO Yash Agarwal told me. A list of participants and relevant details are expected to be published later today.
Hackathons are common in Solanaland, but what makes this one unique is the number of participant tokens already being traded. The total market capitalization of Solana AI agent hackathon tokens has surpassed $200 million, Agarwal told me. That’s about the size of Solana DeFi protocol Orca’s native token.
One such project is FXN, a so-called AI swarm whose original token briefly reached $70 million in market capitalization after launching around December 11. It currently has around $44 million in market cap, according to DEX Screener.
FXN is a protocol that allows multiple AI agents to work together to accomplish more than a single agent is capable of, according to a white paper dated October 3, 2024. The white paper provides an example use case of a group of agents essentially operating as a Social media marketing company to create and promote social content.
AI agents tied to crypto tokens exploded in popularity after an out-of-control social media chatbot with a token went viral in October. The number of hackathon participants announced just two weeks before its start underlines how much competition there is for mindshare among crypto AI projects.
Many projects share a “similar focus” of creating an “intelligent interface for the Solana ecosystem,” Potatoe, the anonymous lead developer of a hackathon project called Project Plutus, told me.
Users don’t need AI bots to perform actions they could do themselves. That’s why Project Plutus built an AI companion that looks at charts and can trade while users are away, she added.
There seem to be a lot of trade-oriented agents, based on an initial list shared with me by the hackathon organizers.
“The Solana AI Hackathon underlines how on-chain trading and DeFi are emerging as important verticals for AI agents. These use cases are likely to drive innovation in Q1 and Q2 2025,” wrote X-threader 0xJeff.