Backing builders solving real-world problems.

RealFi Hack 2025 (September 23-October 16)

A global hackathon advancing open infrastructure for real-world coordination.

240 builders from 33+ countries developed practical tools for financial access, privacy & identity, and open information systems.

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Top 5 countries: India (51), Nigeria (29), US (20), Argentina (14), Kenya (10).

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• $60,000+ in prizes across 15 partner bounties

  • Most popular tracks: Build RealFi (general), Content bounty, Private Data Manager (Nillion), Resilient Activist Technology (Logos), Secure Onboarding to RealFi (human.tech) → showing big interest in stacking bounties, especially across the privacy themes (the hackathon saw a total of 146 project-challenge pairs)

• 64 projects

• 18 mentors from organizations including Tor Project, Internet Archive, and NEAR

• 8 recorded sessions; 6 technical workshops

  

RealFi Hack supported:

• Accelerated experimentation – A live environment where open coordination tools were tested in practice, resulting in deployable prototypes that addressed concrete system needs.
• Ecosystem growth – Collaboration across regions, disciplines, and partner networks, expanding the community of builders advancing public-interest technology.
• Collaborative problem-solving – Partner challenges surfaced real responses to issues in finance, data, and governance, generating relevant prototypes and shared insight.

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The content bounty opened the hackathon to non-technical contributors (writers, designers, and researchers) who helped spread the word and make RealFi ideas easier to grasp. 14 finalized projects produced explainers, visuals, and stories that amplified the builders’ work and extended the hackathon’s reach beyond the dev community.

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Testimonials:

Steph Orpilla, Head of Developer Relations at Nillion Network:

“The Nillion team was genuinely impressed by the projects submitted to RealFi Hack, especially the privacy-preserving AI applications that tackled real data protection challenges. What stood out most was how the prize structure pushed builders toward tangible apps with real-world impact, and the submissions clearly reflected that focus.”

https://gist.github.com/oceans404/01ba6c5bd5919751124d526731a1c45f#-privacy-preserving-ai

Lessons learned

• Our team is too lean to run hackathons on beta platforms - huge lift for us to do this as we did it
• Preference for embedding tracks inside bigger hackathons in the future (include the PL one)