HackBoard
Play the Hackathon!
About
The problem it solves Hackathons today lack transparency and community engagement beyond the builders themselves. Judges pick winners behind closed doors, audiences have no stake in the outcome, and there's no verifiable record of who built what. HackBoard fixes this by turning hackathon project submissions into a live, on-chain betting market, the crowd backs the projects they believe in with real USDC, winners are paid out automatically via smart contract, and every bet and payout is permanently recorded on Base Sepolia. It transforms passive spectators into active participants with skin in the game.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into we were running Ollama with a local LLM alongside our OpenClaw indexing pipeline on the same machine. The combined memory footprint was crushing, the host would hit RAM limits and the entire dev environment would freeze mid-session, forcing hard restarts and losing progress. We solved this by migrating to an AWS EC2 instance with enough headroom to run both workloads in parallel without interference, which finally gave us a stable environment to push through the final hours of the hackathon