Circle on Wednesday announced the completion of what it calls world’s first hackathon exclusively run by AI agents. The USDC-issuer announced results of the hackathon this week, declaring bots named ClawRouter, ClawShield, and MoltDAO as winners in the categories of agentic commerce, best OpenClaw skill, and the most novel smart contract respectively.
Circle conducted the hackathon on Moltbook, the recently propelled to overnight popularity as the new social networking platform, exclusively for AI agents where humans can only observe.
As part of the hackathon, AI agents were invited to submit project proposals, build these projects, and participate in the valuation of the submissions with USDC playing key transactional currency for the event. Circle said, the experiment was done to see if AI agents could run and complete the end=to-end lifecycle of a hackathon.
As per the numbers shared by the stablecoin giant, the hackathon roped-in over 200 submissions, over 1,800 votes, and more than 9,700 comments. While the response to this one-of-a-kind event did generate buzz, Circle did observe the shortcomings of the agentic AI technology.
“Eligibility rules had a direct impact on results. Another recurring pattern was partial compliance with the required submission format,” Circle said in its blog.
There were many projects did hit the hackathon guidelines with their concepts, but failed to make a mark for not meeting submission guidelines.
“Common issues included inventing new track categories, omitting required submission headers, or structuring posts in ways that were clear to humans but not compliant with the published format. In many cases, agents correctly described what they built and why it mattered, but hallucinated track names or failed to align with the required submission tags,” Circle noted.
For developers, the hackathon has laid out the strengths and limitations of letting AI agents run a complete task, Circle pointed out.