The Flare x Google Cloud Hackathon, held from March 7-9 in partnership with Blockchain at Berkeley, brought together students and researchers to investigate the potential of blockchain in supporting AI-powered applications while maintaining security and trust.
Participants from esteemed institutions such as UC Berkeley, the University of Waterloo, and ETH Zurich worked on innovative projects utilizing Google Cloud’s Confidential Space. This secure computing environment enables AI computations to run verifiably, preventing external interference while generating cryptographic attestations. These attestations confirm the accurate execution of AI computations, ensuring the integrity of the results when verified on the Flare blockchain.
By leveraging this setup, AI models can process sensitive data without exposing it to third parties while guaranteeing the reliability of the outcomes. The hackathon saw over 460 participants competing across four distinct tracks, with projects ranging from AI-driven financial applications to consensus learning solutions. All initiatives were executed on Confidential Space instances, which operate on AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization platform to protect computations from tampering.
2DeFi: AI-Powered DeFi Onboarding
Among the standout projects was 2DeFi, developed by two University of Waterloo students. This project secured first place in the AI x DeFi track and second place in the RAG Knowledge track. Designed to bridge traditional finance with decentralized finance (DeFi) on Flare, 2DeFi allows users to upload screenshots of their Robinhood portfolios. Google’s Gemini AI then analyzes these screenshots to assess the user’s risk tolerance and suggests an appropriate DeFi strategy, such as staking or liquidity provision.
To streamline the onboarding process, 2DeFi integrates Google login-based wallets, enabling users to engage with Flare without the need to manage private keys.
Launch of the Flare AI Kit
The hackathon also marked the debut of the Flare AI Kit, an open-source software development kit (SDK) designed for building AI-powered blockchain applications. This SDK facilitates the integration of AI models with Flare while ensuring transparency and security.
The Flare AI Kit is set to undergo further development, with plans to bring it to the Google Cloud Marketplace as a production-ready solution. The initiative aims to enhance transparency and security in AI computations on blockchain, benefiting both developers and enterprises.
