The Flare x Google Cloud Hackathon, held from March 7-9 in collaboration with Blockchain at Berkeley, brought together students and researchers to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology. The event focused on how blockchain can enhance AI-powered applications while maintaining security and trust.
AI Meets Blockchain with Confidential Computing
Participants from prestigious institutions such as UC Berkeley, the University of Waterloo, and ETH Zurich worked on projects utilizing Google Cloud’s Confidential Space. This secure computing environment ensures that AI computations run in a verifiable manner, preventing external interference and generating cryptographic attestations. These attestations confirm that AI models execute computations correctly and can be verified on the Flare blockchain, according to a report shared with crypto.news.
This setup allows AI models to process sensitive data without exposing it to third parties, reinforcing security and ensuring trustworthy results. The hackathon saw more than 460 participants competing across four distinct tracks, developing innovative solutions ranging from AI-driven financial applications to consensus learning models. All projects leveraged Confidential Space instances powered by AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization platform to protect computations from potential tampering.
2DeFi: A Standout Project in AI and DeFi
One of the top projects from the hackathon, 2DeFi, was developed by two University of Waterloo students. This innovative application secured first place in the AI x DeFi track and second place in the RAG Knowledge track. 2DeFi is designed to simplify decentralized finance (DeFi) onboarding for traditional finance users by analyzing screenshots of Robinhood portfolios using Google’s Gemini AI. The AI then assesses risk tolerance and suggests tailored DeFi strategies such as staking or liquidity provision.
To further ease the transition into DeFi, 2DeFi integrates Google login-based wallets, enabling users to interact with the Flare blockchain without managing private keys. This feature significantly enhances accessibility for users unfamiliar with blockchain technology.
Launch of Flare AI Kit
The hackathon also marked the launch of the Flare AI Kit, an open-source software development kit (SDK) aimed at enabling AI-powered blockchain applications. This SDK allows developers to integrate AI models with the Flare blockchain while ensuring security and verifiability.
Flare AI Kit is set to evolve further, with plans to make it available on the Google Cloud Marketplace as a production-ready solution. The initiative seeks to provide developers and enterprises with transparent and secure AI computations on blockchain, fostering greater innovation and trust in the ecosystem.
With the success of the Flare x Google Cloud Hackathon, the collaboration has showcased the vast potential of combining AI and blockchain to create secure, verifiable, and scalable applications for the future.
