Nervous, excited, uncertain: these were our emotions when we staked Ethereum and submitted our entries for ETHGlobal New Delhi 2025.
Almost a year ago, we came across one of our seniors' profiles and saw the massive number of hackathons he had won. We tried to connect with him to learn how he got into blockchain and how we could approach the same. It was new, exciting, and different from calling the OpenAI or Gemini API to create a chatbot that the whole world was immersed in at the time.
We took our time going through Cyfrin Updraft's courses and slowly learned how to write code in Solidity. It took us almost two months to build a full-stack blockchain application, EthTown. We were really proud of this accomplishment. We built the architecture ourselves, defined every function, tested it multiple times, and fixed the spurious dragon error and other issues. We learned about DAOs, ERC-20 tokens, quadratic voting, and many such concepts in our application.
We had a hard time finding a team for this hackathon. The people we approached refused due to their commitments.
A few weeks before the hackathon, we came across some YouTube videos about Markov chains. So, the idea to use it for yield farming was born. We then started to explore which sponsor tracks we could target and build around.
Getting there
We booked our tickets, arranged our trip, and got on our first Rajdhani Express to Delhi. We were relaxed and exploring the same topics and had not really started building a product yet. We thought the 72-hour hackathon would be enough to build an application.
We reached the venue on the afternoon of 28th September and were really pleased to see the enormous venue and decoration. The best part was the endless food. Everything from lasagna to tiramisu to exquisite gastronomical delights was present. Even when we were at our lowest, we had a great time enjoying the treats and the free merch from the sponsors.
We were fed snacks and shown some workshops, and the Hunger Games began at 9:00 p.m. We had a momentary heart attack when we realised that we had no liquidity pool while discussing our idea with one of the participants. After talking with the sponsors from Rootstock, we came up with a workaround and felt reassured.
The grind
Although we felt that we had overcome the bump, we were not ready for what was to come. We divided our tasks roughly and started building. It was difficult as most of the platforms and tools we were using were new to us. We did not get much sleep on day one, nor did we build anything substantial. We were still looking around us, exploring, and talking with the sponsors.
We thought we had enough time, but boy, were we wrong! On the night of day 2, we had decent progress, but we were not near a working project.
Ryan was working on the AI agents but was facing major issues, and he sat near the mentors while building and getting feedback. We were not able to implement the x402 Protocol as the facilitator kept failing due to the heavy load from all the developers present there using it. The contract logic was in a failing state, and the Rootstock implementation was still under wraps. We somehow made it through the night, with no sleep and crushed spirits. Add to this the constant issues with Wi-Fi and one of our members' sickness, and we felt like we would fail.
Submission and the wait
The next morning felt like it would never end. We were not able to stay awake while submitting. We kept dozing off. Somehow, we finished our submission and went for breakfast. We were not happy with our finished product and did not feel like presenting. But we somehow managed to present to the three sponsors we had chosen and went for lunch. Three of my teammates left the venue, but I thought to wait for the results and take a little nap.
After my nap, I realised that I had lost my bag of goodies and merch and was so sad. It had many different things like caps, a mousepad, and a sweatshirt that we had collected. We had left our hopes of winning, but somewhere in my heart, I had a tiny glimmer that kept me waiting at the venue for the results.
The announcer kept announcing the names one by one. We did not win anything for the first sponsor; same for the second one. It all came down to Rootstock, and there we were listed in the EveryDay DeFi track. I was overjoyed. I called my friends, and they were watching the livestream, unable to believe we had finally done it.
It felt surreal. What started as a dream that felt impossible was finally in our clutches.