🎉 730 hackers, 43 countries, 1 groundbreaking weekend in Taipei!

ETHGlobal Taipei (April 4–6, 2025) marked ETHGlobal’s first-ever hackathon in Taiwan — and it was one for the books. The weekend brought together over 730 hackers from 43 countries, with 42% building on Ethereum for the first time. Hosted alongside the larger ETHTaipei developer week, the hackathon served as a builder-first close to a week of talks, meetups, and workshops.

From Friday night to Sunday evening, 226 projects were submitted, spanning domains from defi automation to zk-based identity tools and AI-driven trading agents. Eight standout projects were selected as finalists and dozens more walked away with partner-sponsored prizes. The total prize pool? Over $200,000 USD!! with prizes offered by World, 1inch, Celo, Self, and many more.

What stood out most was the intent. Hackers zeroed in on improving crypto UX, making crypto usable in disconnected environments, and reimagining privacy tooling as public goods. It was Ethereum innovation, routed through the lens of everyday use.

Check out a recap video of ETHGlobal Taipei below👇🏼

📚 Key themes from the hackathon floor

Crypto x AI: Several finalists used AI as a core protocol primitive. EthereumFighter turned DeFi into an on-chain PvP game with AI agents simulating trades, battles, and strategy, all while preserving data secrecy via FHE. DynaVest created an autonomous DeFi portfolio advisor that builds and rebalances yield strategies based on user risk preferences. Ask CaiShen, a cheeky but capable “Wealth God” chatbot, offered portfolio analysis and adapted its UI for any skill level.

Offline and Inclusive Payments: Cellfi was a showstopper. Built for the billions with phones but no consistent internet access, it lets users send USDC via text. No wallet needed. No app. Just text and receive. Meanwhile, Solva designed a Venmo-style UX for crypto, removing the concept of wallets altogether, and Nomadia let users swap fiat P2P offline using World ID for Sybil resistance.

Privacy as UX: How Doxxed Am I? flipped the script on privacy tools. Instead of building yet another mixer, the team built a scanner that checks your wallet hygiene and shows how much you’re leaking. It’s Chainalysis-grade analysis, given back to users. EthereumFighter also explored private logic in gameplay via FHE, and identity tools like Nomadia balanced anonymity with verification.

DeFi Strategy & Market Structures: Signals built a prediction market with probability heatmaps for BTC price ranges — an experiment in crowdsourced sentiment beyond binary bets. DynaVest abstracted away DeFi complexity by optimizing multi-protocol strategies under the hood.

✨ Hacker sentiment on the ground

The energy in the venue was undeniable. Hackers formed teams across languages, helped each other debug, and many pulled all-nighters to craft their submission. Mentors were swarmed. Many first-time crypto devs got their wallets funded, learned Solidity or Cairo, and shipped.

Judges shared their praise during the closing ceremony: “This was such a high-quality event. Judging was never so fun — or so hard.”

Partner reps echoed this, highlighting the diversity and creativity of the submissions. One said, “This is the most excited I’ve been about the future of crypto in a while.”

ETHGlobal Taipei proved that Asia is an important community in crypto.

🌍 Pragma Taipei: The Ethereum ethos, updated

Held on April 3, the day before the hackathon, Pragma Taipei brought together ecosystem leaders, core EF contributors, and founders for a series of technical talks and philosophical debates.

It felt like an Ethereum state-of-the-union, delivered with Taiwanese hospitality.

Check out a recap video of Pragma Taipei below👇🏼

⚡ Major topics & takeaways

Ethereum Resilience & Open Standards: Several speakers emphasized the importance of preserving Ethereum’s interoperability as L2s proliferate. Instead of diverging, many called for unified infra standards and better tooling to keep the ecosystem cohesive. “EVM fragmentation is a bug, not a feature,” noted one speaker.

Account Abstraction (EIP-7702): Martin Derka (Zircuit) offered a deep dive into EIP-7702, where EOAs can temporarily act like smart contracts. Builders left curious and a little cautious. The UX opportunities are immense, but the implications for transaction origin, tooling, and gas abstraction are still being mapped.

ZK Identity & Proofs: Talks from the Self Protocol team and others brought zk identity to the forefront. The idea: prove uniqueness or credentials without ever revealing PII. With World ID and other tools maturing, many in the room believed zkID was going from niche to a requirement.

Reframing Public Goods: Vitalik Buterin’s fireside chat centered around rethinking public goods as ”open-source funding for useful things” — not charity. He emphasized that open source isn’t inherently good; only valuable open source deserves funding. Builders appreciated the blunt clarity.

Check out the deeply engaging chat between ETHGlobal co-founder, Kartik Talwar and Vitalik Buterin below 👇🏼

You can watch all the talks on the ETHGlobal Youtube channel.

🚀 Developer vibes

Attendees were all-in. From early-career engineers to protocol founders, there was a quiet intensity to the talks.

One attendee shared, “This felt like being inside the mind of Ethereum — equal parts technical and moral conversation.”

Workshops were packed. Questions were sharp. The conversations didn’t end when the stage lights dimmed; they moved to tg groups, twitter, and other forums to continue the convos.

📊 Final Thoughts

ETHGlobal Taipei was a huge success! We paired a technical summit with a high-energy hackathon, and grounded it in all local Taiwanese community. Here were the results:

• 730+ hackers

• 226 projects

• 8 finalists

• $200K+ awarded

• 43 countries represented

• 42% first-time Ethereum devs

But beyond the numbers, what stood out was the ethos: build for users, challenge the assumptions of existing infra, and don’t be afraid to get weird.

Whether it was sending stablecoins over text, predicting markets via heatmaps, or battling bots on encrypted arenas, the builders in Taipei reminded us why Ethereum matters.

More importantly, they reminded each other that building in public, across borders and time zones, is still the best way to learn, ship, and shape what comes next.

See you at the next one!

ETHGlobal Team 💚