This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . The inaugural Solana AI hackathon concluded on Monday. Over 400 projects threw their respective hats in the ring for a contest offering cash prizes but more importantly the prospect of potentially-lucrative attention to so-called AI agents, which are currently flooding crypto social feeds. Multiple entrants already have tokens trading at millions of dollars-worth of market cap, and agent copilots for crypto trading as well as AI agent “swarms” were buzzy categories. Winners of the hackathon, organized by SendAI, will be announced around Jan. 10, SendAI co-founder and CEO Yash Agarwal told me. A list of entrants and relevant details is expected to be posted later today. Hackathons are common in Solanaland, but what makes this one unique is the number of contestant tokens already trading. The total market capitalization of Solana AI agent hackathon tokens has crossed $200 million, Agarwal told me. That’s roughly the size of Solana DeFi protocol Orca’s native token. One such project is FXN, a so-called AI swarm whose native token briefly touched $70 million in market cap after launching around Dec. 11. It currently has roughly $44 million in market cap, according to DEX Screener. FXN is a protocol that lets multiple AI agents work together to accomplish more than what a single agent is capable of, according to a white paper dated Oct. 3, 2024. The white paper gives a sample use case of a group of agents essentially operating as a social media marketing firm to create and promote social content. AI agents tied to crypto tokens exploded in popularity after an unhinged social media chatbot with a token went viral in October . The number of entrants in a hackathon announced just two weeks before it began underscores how much competition for mindshare there is 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 who execute actions that they could do themselves, which is why Project Plutus built an AI companion that watches charts and can trade while users are away, they added. There do appear to be a lot of trading-focused agents based on an initial list that was shared with me by the hackathon’s organizers. “The Solana AI Hackathon underscores how on-chain trading and DeFi are emerging as key verticals for AI agents. These use cases will likely drive innovation in Q1 and Q2 2025,” the X threader 0xJeff wrote . Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter . Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter . Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more. The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.
