Build your Agent on Celo
Two Hackathons. $18,500 on the Table. If you've been watching the AI agent space from the sidelines, this is your sign.
The Window Is Open: Why Right Now Is the Best Time to Build Agents on Celo
If you've been watching the AI agent space from the sidelines — reading the threads, saving the links, telling yourself you'll start when the infrastructure matures — this is your sign. The infrastructure is here. The bounties are live. And Celo has quietly become one of the most compelling places in the entire EVM ecosystem to ship an agent.
Two Hackathons. $18,500 on the Table.
Let's start with the most immediate thing: there is real money available for builders who ship this week.
Build Agents for the Real World V2 is the flagship agentic hackathon from Celo Public Goods, running until March 22nd. Three tracks, one mission — build agents that do something real on Celo:
Track 1 Best Agent on Celo 1st $3,000 · 2nd $2,000 · 3rd $1,000 USD₮
Track 2 Best Agent Infra on Celo 1st $2,000 USD₮
Track 3 Highest Rank on AgentScan 1st $500 USD₮
Submissions close at 9am GMT on March 22nd, winners announced March 24th. All agent frameworks are welcome — whether you're working with ElizaOS, LangChain, CrewAI, or something custom. Register on Karma Gap, verify your agent via AgentScan, and post about it on X tagging @Celo, @CeloDevs, and @CeloPublicGoods.
Not sure where to take your idea? Office Hours with Viral Sangani, AI Lead at Celo, are this Thursday, March 12th from 1–2pm GMT. Last week's session produced sharp, actionable feedback that builders used to sharpen their submissions. Register here.
Then there's the second opportunity running in parallel: The Synthesis — a 10-day virtual agentic hackathon by the Ethereum Foundation, where Celo is participating with a dedicated 10,000 USD₮ track prize. Building opens March 13th and runs through March 22nd. Agents register with their own identity, build projects, and are evaluated by AI judges with humans in the loop. Register at synthesis.md.
Stack both programs and you're competing for a combined prize pool of $18,500 USD₮ — while building something that can outlive the hackathon.
Why Celo? Because the Numbers Back It Up.
A lot of chains talk about being built for AI agents. Celo actually is.
Independent data from growthepie.com places Celo at the top of the EVM landscape for ERC-8004 agent adoption — a remarkable position for a network that only officially deployed the standard in early February 2026. Within weeks of that launch, Celo had established itself as the leading Ethereum L2 for on-chain agent activity under the new standard.
The technical reasons are straightforward. Celo is an Ethereum L2 on the OP Stack with sub-cent transaction costs and support for paying gas fees in stablecoins — which matters enormously when you're building agents that need to transact frequently and autonomously. Its 700,000+ daily active users and 25+ native stablecoins (including USDT, which has grown 506% in users over the last 12 months on Celo) mean agents built here have a real user base to serve from day one.
Blue-chip DeFi protocols — Aave, Uniswap, Velodrome, Curve — are already on Celo. Global payments providers including MiniPay (11M+ wallets), BitGifty, and Pretium are already on Celo. Agents that move value need rails. Those rails exist here.
The Standard That Changes Everything: ERC-8004 on Celo
The real structural shift happened when ERC-8004 was deployed on Celo on February 6th, 2026.
ERC-8004 is Ethereum's emerging trust standard for autonomous AI agents. At its core, it gives agents something they've never had before: portable, verifiable on-chain identity. Through three lightweight registries — Identity, Reputation, and Validation — agents can be discovered by other agents, build up a track record that travels with them across organizational boundaries, and engage in "no work, no pay" interactions enforced cryptographically rather than by trust.
- Identity Registry: Each agent is an ERC-721 NFT pointing to a registration file — capabilities, endpoints, metadata — discoverable across all chains.
- Reputation Registry: Structured feedback between agents creates economically-backed trust signals that accumulate over time.
- Validation Registry: Independent verification hooks for high-stakes financial operations where social reputation alone isn't sufficient.
Day-one partners supporting ERC-8004 on Celo include AltLayer, thirdweb (bringing x402 HTTP-native micropayment support), and Olas — the project behind Ethereum's first on-chain registry for autonomous agents back in 2022. One of the first live agentic apps is SelfClaw by Zeno Studio, which connects user Self Protocol passports to act on their behalf — verifying identity, age, and OFAC compliance without exposing private information.
Track all Celo-deployed ERC-8004 agents at 8004scan.io.
How to Participate
Getting started takes minutes. Here's what you need to do:
- Register your project on Karma Gap
- Join the Telegram group for support, updates, and announcements
- Verify your agent via AgentScan
- Verify via Self Agent ID
- Post on X about your project tagging @Celo + @CeloDevs + @CeloPublicGoods
- For The Synthesis: register at synthesis.md (building opens March 13th)
All tooling is documented at ai.celo.org, including Celo's Agent Skills library for reusable task expertise and thirdweb's x402 integration for HTTP-native stablecoin payments.
This Isn't a Drill
A lot of people have been following the agentic space and waiting for the right moment. That moment tends to come and go faster than expected. Right now, on Celo:
- The standard (ERC-8004) is deployed and live
- The tooling (Agent Skills, x402, AgentScan, Self Agent ID) is available and documented
- Two hackathons are running simultaneously with a combined $18,500 in prizes
- Office Hours feedback is available this Thursday
- Celo is the #1 Ethereum L2 by ERC-8004 agent activity
The builders who ship in the next ten days will be the case studies that the next cohort reads. If you're already building agents anywhere on the EVM, deploying on Celo costs you almost nothing and gets you access to real users, a proven stablecoin ecosystem, and a growing stack of agentic tooling purpose-built for the real world.
The window is open. Build something.
Links
Build Agents for the Real World V2 — closes March 22nd, 9am GMT
The Synthesis by Ethereum Foundation — building opens March 13th
.png)
