The Flare x Google Cloud Hackathon, held from March 7-9 in collaboration with Blockchain at Berkeley, brought together students and researchers to explore how blockchain can support AI-powered applications while maintaining security and trust. Participants from UC Berkeley, the University of Waterloo, and ETH Zurich worked on projects using Google Cloud’s Confidential Space to run AI computations in a verifiable way. Confidential Space is a secure computing environment that prevents outside interference while generating cryptographic attestations. These attestations confirm that an AI computation was executed correctly, and they can be verified on the Flare ( FLR ) blockchain, according to a note shared with crypto.news. This setup allows AI models to process data without exposing it to third parties while ensuring the results remain trustworthy. The hackathon attracted more than 460 participants competing across four tracks. Projects ranged from AI-driven financial applications to consensus learning solutions. All projects used Confidential Space instances running on AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization platform, which protects computations from tampering. You might also like: Jokers Inc. and Project J announce strategic partnership for next-generation web3 gaming 2DeFi: AI-powered DeFi onboarding One of the top projects was 2DeFi, created by two University of Waterloo students. It won first place in the AI x DeFi track and second place in the RAG Knowledge track. The project helps traditional finance users enter decentralized finance on Flare. 2DeFi allows users to upload screenshots of their Robinhood portfolios, which Google’s Gemini AI then analyzes to assess risk tolerance. The AI-generated profile is used to suggest a DeFi strategy, such as staking or liquidity provision. To simplify onboarding, 2DeFi integrates Google login-based wallets, allowing users to interact with Flare without managing private keys. You might also like: ‘The SEC was the market manipulator’: SEC drops case against XRP, CEO claims Flare AI kit The hackathon also marked the launch of the Flare AI Kit, an open-source SDK for building AI-powered blockchain applications. The SDK allows developers to integrate AI models with Flare while ensuring verifiability and security. Flare AI Kit will continue to evolve, with plans to bring it to the Google Cloud Marketplace as a production-ready solution. The initiative aims to make AI computations on blockchain more transparent and secure for developers and enterprises.
