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The first-ever Solana AI hackathon wrapped up on Monday.
More than 400 projects entered the competition, vying for cash prizes and the opportunity to gain valuable exposure for AI agents, which are currently dominating the crypto social media scene.
Several participants have seen their tokens reach market caps in the millions, with categories like agent copilots for crypto trading and AI agent “swarms” generating a lot of buzz.
The winners of the hackathon, hosted by SendAI, will be announced around January 10th, according to SendAI’s co-founder and CEO Yash Agarwal. A list of participants and additional details will be released later today.
While hackathons are common in Solanaland, this event stands out for the number of contestant tokens already being traded. The total market capitalization of Solana AI agent hackathon tokens has surpassed $200 million, Agarwal revealed. This is comparable to the market cap of Solana DeFi protocol Orca’s native token.
One standout project is FXN, an AI swarm protocol whose token briefly reached a $70 million market cap shortly after its launch in early December. It is currently valued at around $44 million, as reported by DEX Screener.
FXN enables multiple AI agents to collaborate and achieve more than what a single agent could accomplish alone, as outlined in a white paper dated October 3, 2024. The paper illustrates a scenario where a group of agents function as a social media marketing agency to create and promote content.
The popularity of AI agents linked to crypto tokens surged following the viral success of a chatbot with a token in October. The high number of entries in a hackathon announced just two weeks prior emphasizes the intense competition among crypto AI projects for attention.
Many projects share a common goal of developing an “intelligent interface for the Solana ecosystem,” according to Potatoe, the anonymous lead developer of Project Plutus, a hackathon participant.
Project Plutus designed an AI companion that monitors charts and executes trades while users are away, recognizing that users prefer AI bots that perform tasks they cannot do themselves.
Based on an initial list shared by the hackathon organizers, there appears to be a significant focus on trading-oriented agents.
“The Solana AI Hackathon highlights the growing importance of on-chain trading and DeFi as key sectors for AI agents. These applications are likely to drive innovation in the first and second quarters of 2025,” noted X threader 0xJeff.