ETHOnline 2026 Kickoff | Kartik Talwar

Transcript

Opening and Introduction

Morning, [music] good afternoon, and good evening everybody. My name is Cartik, one of the co-founders of ETH global and I want to welcome all of you to ETH online 2026. You are all watching this on ETH global.tv TV and this is the platform we'll be using for this entire event where you'll see what's happening for this whole hackathon along with what we're going to do for the next 10 days as well as what the winners made as part of their final submissions. All that will be through this page. So we'll this is a real-time interactive platform. You

Welcome to ETHOnline 2026

can ask us any questions, talk to all the other attendees from all over the world directly here and we'll be able to see and talk to you back. Now for those of you who are joining us for the very first time, this is an ETH global event and we're an organization with a very simple mission. We do hackathons and summits all across the world. Our upcoming two events are in Tokyo and Mumbai and we want to just onboard as many smart developers as we can into the web3 ecosystem. These happen both in person and async and through summits where we do informational talks, mini conferences and directly developerdriven hackathons where we care about building projects.

ETHGlobal Mission and Event Calendar

The next version of both our summits and hackathons [clears throat] are happening in Tokyo and Mumbai. These are the two remaining events of the year after ETH online. So those of you who are joining us in Tokyo, we'll see you all in person in just two weeks. And our last event of the year is in person is going to be in Mumbai with Defcon in November. But the next 20 minutes are about Eon line. So what I want to do for this next uh few slides and sections is cover how Eonline is set up and what you need to know to be successful at this hackathon.

ETHOnline Format and Global Community

This is already a massive event. We have over 1,300 hackers, 1,400 total attendees, including our partners, speakers, mentors, and volunteers. 26% of them are brand new to web 3. They are coming in from 88 different countries, close to 400 cities, and spanning across six continents. This is where everybody is coming from. So, it's incredible to see so many talented developers and builders participating with us for the next 10 days. and we can't wait to see what you hack. And on top of that, we're also giving over $100,000 in prizes. So, our goal here is to tell you everything you need to know to successfully integrate a lot of these protocols and

win some incredible prizes. Especially we want to give a massive shout out to our 11 incredible partners starting with one inch arc presented chain link ensera ledger and privy the graph initial foundation and world now let's talk about a few things that we need to know to be successful for this hakaban going to cover how to think about all these sections and how to make best use of your time and the resources we have available for all of you. Let's start with communication. Everything we're going to do for this event is going to be on Discord. That means everything here is meant to be as async

Discord and Event Communication

as possible. There are private channels for all developers and participants and everybody participating at this event is within this ETH online set of channels. So if you are a confirmed attendee, you will automatically get access to these channels and only people in those channels are allowed who are participating this event. So anybody you message is guaranteed to be one of the attendees and other hackers for the hackathon. This also includes our mentors and our partners. So you can also ask questions to any of them directly here and talk to them on an asynchronous mode. If you're not already on our Discord, you can head over to

eglobal.com/isord and simply sign in with the same email that you signed up for the hackathon and automatically permissions will come off to you. Now, let's talk about how this hackathon is set up. Hacking officially begins now, which means you can continue working on your projects and you have until Sunday, September 13th, 12:00 p.m. Eastern time, which is noon New York time to submit your projects. You can have these projects be an individual submission or you can work with a team. If you're working with a team, you can work on a team with up to five different members.

And as part of a big update to our recent rules, as of three months ago, you are allowed to do the following things. You can work on your project if it's pre-existing, start from scratch. You don't have to all start your projects from scratch. But if you are choosing to extend an existing project then you need to let us know ahead of time and this is part of application process and that's called a continuity track. We will be able to share a bit more in a couple more minutes on how continuity track works but you have to make sure that you are picking between the force scratch or continuity track ahead of time and there you can do as you please based on the rules for the track. Also, only

Team and Submission Rules

attendees who have successfully RSVPd and are on your team will be allowed to win any prize amounts. Which means if your team members are not fully confirmed on your dashboard and they are not already part of your team, if you win a prize, we'll only give you your portion of that prize and no additional edits will be allowed after this event begins. And there's going to be a bunch of other things that we know you will need to understand or clarify and some things might be case by case. So you have any other questions you can ask us directly on Discord or email. We'll be clarifying any of those cases for you. Now we want you to use AI and LMS for your

Using AI With Proper Attribution

submissions. However, there are a couple things that we recommend that you do and don't do. So keep in mind that you are allowed to simplify how you think, how you kind of work on prototyping projects and use different tools like codeex or cursor or cloud code and all that is fine. However, you have to know exactly what is being done on your code in your submission. You cannot simply delegate and assume that it'll work. If your project does not actually properly integrate, that is a full disqualification of your submission. And you also have to explain exactly how AI was used and where and what were the instructions. So if you're using any LM service, we recommend that you use

things in plan mode and actually commit the plans in your repo and then continue doing everything. So please make sure you do that. And then as part of the submission process, you have to really know exactly what was done and what was not done and verify things because we want to make sure that you are not submitting something that is not properly implemented to qualify for a purpose. Now, submissions are due on Sunday the 13th at noon. We'll tell you more about how to prepare yourselves for the submission process. The key thing here is you will be asked to record a 4-minute demo of your video.

Four-Minute Demo Requirements

um you have to kind of do a good screen share that shows exactly what your project is and do a live demo and that is your submission. You can talk about what's happening and why you chose to work on it and how things work as part of that demo but you will be capped at communicating everything in four minutes. This means you have to be really good at concisely and clearly communicating what is being done, how it works and why. We really recommend you do not do this thing last minute. If you speed up the video, you get automatically disqualified. And if it's unclear what's going on, it directly affects your ability to win any prizes. All this still happens on your dashboard. So,

please make sure that uh you are keeping an eye out on the project submission page and using that to prepare ahead of time what information you need to gather and how. Now, let's talk about something new. Uh the continuity track. We changed the event rules 3 months ago to allow people to build on existing projects. Historically, hackathons have been a place where you have to start from scratch, only prototype things, and really sort of stop or not have a good reason to continue working on your project after the event ends. We want to change that.

Continuity Track Overview

And as part of this, we're introducing the ability to continue adding on features for something that you've been doing before. Whether it's a personal project, whether it's your own company or it's something that you feel like you wanted to contribute to in an open source format that really could change your workflow or your life because of how important some service is to you. And as part of this whole change, we've introduced two additional tracks and classifications of how you can work on your project. So everything that you know right now is part of the from scratch track and there you just have to start something from scratch and continue doing what you've always done.

From-Scratch and Existing Projects

Otherwise you can use continuity where you have the ability to do two things. You can extend any open source software which means that if you use some open source service or there's an open source repo that has a bug report or a feature request or things that you yourself started you want to maintain. You can absolutely take on a feature and contribute to that repo and uh consider that as a qualified submission for this event. So you can fix some bugs, you can add new features, you can add new functionality, you can do all those things and qualify for different prices if they are part of the continuity track. Or if you are a founder and you want to add a feature to your existing company, you

are also allowed to do that while relying on your private code as long as the new submission that you have is a public open source module that plugs into your existing codebase. So this means things like integrations that you would want to do for different protocols to support additional functionality or anywhere from different chain support to different protocol support. All those are allowed as long as that new stuff that you're doing is fully public that lets you be part of continuity and still win different prizes. So summary default track nothing changes same rules as before. Your code must start today and in a brand new repo. But you can extend open source by just working at

repo, adding new features and sending us the repo link that's on your own GitHub account and really kind of making that clear separation so we can trace how things went or you can add a new feature to existing private code as long as the new features are modularized and open source. There's going to be some mesh cases here. So if you are in this situation, send us a quick message and tell us how you're planning on using your existing code and what you want to do and we will give you the full confirmation on whether this will be allowed or not allowed.

So that is continuity. We hope that you get to work on some exciting projects and really make next 10 days a way to improve something that can really be useful for not just you but many other people in our ecosystem. Now the tracks are binary and the prizes are track specific which means that you can only be in continuity or from scratch and they're going to be different prizes that are available for continuity versus from scratch. You are not automatically eligible for all prizes. You have to make sure that the prize you're trying to get is eligible for your respective track. So please make sure you get to see all those things properly written out and uh traced on the prizes page.

Track-Specific Prize Eligibility

And there you can see if a certain provider or SDK will qualify you to win something of continuity or just from scratch. Now when you submit your projects you will be asked to pick which judging track you want to go to and you will be given two options. You can go to the partner track or the fiveless judging where the differences are as follows. If you go with the partner prize judging only, this is an entirely asynchronous process, which means that as soon as you submit your projects, all the partners that you are trying to win prizes for will receive your name and they will start reviewing your projects

Partner Judging Process

on their own. There is no demo that you need to give them. The 4-minute demo video you have is what they will use along with your codebase and the project description to evaluate if you successfully used their integrations. And if they have questions and only if they have any questions, they will reach out to you via email or Discord. This lets you fully understand how different partners are thinking about your submission and during the closing ceremony and the live stream, you will know if you want their prices.

And because they are looking at just your project page, the better you communicate what you've done and how things work and why, the better your odds are in helping them understand if a submission is a proper qualified integration. So this means the more details you put in, the better your odds are of really making sure that what you're trying to do officially lands in the eyes of the reviewer on the other end. Then you have the finalist judging which is broken out into two rounds and this is a synchronous track. So what this means is that if you are trying to be a finalist, which is one of the top 10 teams for this hackathon, you get to be part of the finalist track

Finalist Judging Overview

where a smaller set of judges will review your submissions on Sunday after you submit and they will qualify you to be one of the teams to go to the live judging call. Judges will watch the videos async. They will look at the projects. They will look at your descriptions. They will look at the code and they will assess if you have done a good job of building something that is actually following the event rules is live which means it's a production deployment and follows git procedures properly so that we can really trace what was done and how things were built.

The Live Finalist Call

From there you will be notified of being on the finalist call. This is a Zoom call that happens on Monday, September 14th at 12:00 p.m. Eastern until 2:00 p.m. Eastern where every team will get seven minutes to demo their projects and ask or answer questions from our judges. You must be available to join this call and this call is universally happening at this time which means that if you are in different time zone and this is in the middle of the night for you. You will only be considered qualified for this round if you are able to actually join this call and answer the questions that our judges have.

Selecting the Finalist Teams

And from there we will pick the finalist teams and you get to be part of one of the winning best projects of this haka. Now there is going to be up to 10 finalist teams from which up to seven of them will be from scratch and up to three of them will be from continuity. The finalist teams are the best projects from this hackathon. So over 1300 hackers will only pick 10 incredible projects. And this doesn't disqualify you or put you in a different situation from winning any of the other prizes. If you want to be one of the top 10 teams, the condition is that you have to deploy your project on production, which means it cannot be on local host.

Production Deployment and Rewards

It's fine for it to be on test net. It doesn't have to be on mainet directly if it's a contract. And anybody on the other end must be able to use it without you physically being there to show or run a server. And you still qualify for all the prizes from our partners. And they're not either or. They are very complimentary. And if you are a finalist in one of these 10 teams, you get to win the ETH Global Finalist Pack, which has the following incredible perks. You get Elo Plus access for 12 months, which lets you claim thousands of dollars of credits and get access to different events and a,000 USDC per team member is given from the global team. You also get a $500

flight credit to the next inerson hackathon. So you get to see us in person in Tokyo or Mumbai. You also get a free pro pass to ETHcon next year which is the biggest institutional theorem event in the world and we do a lot of private events with different founders in this space. You get to be part of those and really get to ask questions and learn from each of them on how to build a successful project and a company in this space. And the qualifications here are that to be a finalist, you must start from scratch, but you also are part of it from the continuity side. You must have an auditable repository, which means that we have to be able to see how things developed over time. You cannot just have three commits with a million

Finalist Eligibility Requirements

line diffs. It has to be properly chucked. So we can see commits who did what, if this is a bug, feature request, proper following proper branch rules, and pull request rules and really making sure that there's no ambiguity on when this was done or what was started by. Project must also be open source if you're part of from scratch tech or the continuity track if you have to be able to see the code and it must be deployed and live. So, anybody should be able to use it and you have to show up to this call to win. Otherwise, you get automatically disqualified even if you passed round one. And kind of the end of day, one of the things that you can

Open Source and Working Deployments

remember for how to really be a standout project submission is that you want to make the video as good as possible. The better you do a job communicating what your project did and and how it works, the better your odds are in impressing the judges, our partners, us, and anybody else on the internet on how talented you are and how incredible of a solution this is to the problem. And this lets you really stand out. And the more details you put in, the better it runs. And of course, because there's so many people from so many different backgrounds, we want to make sure this event is welcoming to everybody with all different backgrounds.

We have lots of content for everybody, whether you are first- timerrs or a veteran. You get to look at how different protocols work. We have lots of workshops to let you let you show you how to integrate different things. And all this thing is also public in the sense that you can watch everything on demand after and everything is also made accessible for you in our info center where you can see past documentation on anywhere from how to use different protocols to how to get it started to what does a good submission look like and everything in between. All this is on our YouTube channel and you can go to youtube.com global to watch over 2,000 talks and workshops this entire ecosystem. And of

course there's some of you who are still brand new to this whole process and are looking for team members to join their team or want to join a different team. We recommend you go to find a team channel on Discord and see if you can join somebody or if you can recruit somebody to help you with a specific skill. We want to make it easy for you to simply get all the help you need. And there's also going to be some workshops, live calls where we'll help you brainstorm ideas and form teams. And you can also do that directly. And of course, it's not a requirement that you have a team member. you're more than welcome to hack on your own, but just as a heads up, it's a lot easier to have

Finding a Team in Discord

the workbook distributed than doing everything yourself. So, we really recommend that you have at least one other person that you're working with. Now, a couple of things that you want to know. Uh, one is project check-ins. We want to make sure that you are getting the help you need to be successful at this event. And as part of this, we're going to introduce two check-ins which happen directly on our dashboard. And these kind of behave like a small standup update where it takes you five minutes to let us know if you're on the right track. Anywhere from you know what you're working on to you're stuck on something or you're waiting to hear back from somebody whether it's our mentors or partners or the global team and you haven't heard back. We look at all those responses and we make sure that we can unblock you and really make sure that

Project Check-Ins and Feedback

you can get to building as fast as possible without having any hurdles in your decision- making process. And on top of that, there's also going to be some live sessions where you can show what you've been doing and get feedback from our mentors and our team. So you can join these Zoom calls live at different times. Uh the first session is going to be on Tuesday. The next one is going to be on Thursday to optimize for different time zones where you can just come on, get some advice, show us what you've been doing and really sort of make it easy for you to get some feedback early on before the Sunday submission.

And of course, this is an equal event even if it's asynchronous. So all of our event rules still apply here. You can check out everything on egob.com. But the gist of it is please be respectful to everybody participating. Harassment and abuse in any form will not be tolerated. And if you see somebody being treated the way they shouldn't be, please send us a quick message and report that incident. We will take action immediately. And one of the core things here of this event is that anything that you produce will be considered your own intellectual property and every person on your team will be considered an equal owner of that IP. So you are free to do whatever you want. Neither are partners nor e

Conduct and Intellectual Property

global reserves any rights to that work. You have full access to your project submission and the ability to commercialize anything. And of course, we can't cover every single thing here. So, if you have anything that you're curious about, you can ask those questions directly in the chat on eglobal.tv or message us in Discord or email, and we'll be happy to answer those questions for you. Everything that I've said is also very accessible on our website, including specifics how judging works as part of the info center. So, head over to youth global.com/eonline to see all the details, and that will be our source. Now, let's quickly talk about the prizes.

Partner Resources and Prize Details

We have a lot of incredible prizes being given away over $100,000. And Hideera and the graph are giving up to $15,000 in prizes each. Arc World and One in are giving up to $10,000 in prizes each. ENS Ledger, Uniswap Foundation, Privy, Chain Link, and Bzantic are giving up to $5,000 in prizes each. You can see all this information on the prize page on the event website. There you'll see specific rules on what qualifies, what you have to do, how many winners are going to be, what is not allowed, and you'll also see things like if this project is part of continuity track or not, and you will see a lot of documentation on how to get started quickly. So you can anywhere from clone an existing starter

Starter Kits and Integration Advice

kit repo to see the documentation directly to have an example project that you can start off. All those things are made accessible and easy for you. So, just take a look at the price page and simplify your setup by using the links in the resources section for each of those prices. And as we kind of end things, some final advice. We really want this event to be a good learning experience. We want you to pace yourself. You have 10 days. And this means you get to break things down over multiple days and get feedback and iterate and really kind of make sure that you're doing the the things the right way. And at the end of the day, we want you to have fun. We want you to learn. This whole event is about experimentation. You get to now continue building things that you're passionate

about or contribute to making existing open source technology even better. All those are part of this whole new experience. So we really hope that you have fun over the next 10 days. And with that, I want to wish all of you happy hacking. We'll see you all on Discord. Let us know if you have any questions and we'll see you next time with our workshops, our team building sessions, our feedback sessions over the next few days. And then we'll back we'll be back on eglobal.tv for the closing ceremonies in just two weeks. So we'll see you all there. Thanks so much for joining and looking forward to meeting all of you.

Closing and Happy Hacking

In the meantime, enjoy some lowfi beats and uh be hacking. Take care everybody. Goodbye.