021Lab

Still deciding whether to submit to @HSKChain Horizon Hackathon? We're sitting down with the people who decide what wins and what gets supported after. Join us tonight at 8PM UTC+8

Ecosystem Partners: @sgunidao, @AsiaWeb3Ai, @WAVE599395, @sitblockchain, @smu_blockchain, @SJTU_DAO, @SUTDBlockchain, @NTUBlockchain, @1024EX, @1024EXAgentX, @followin_io, @followin_io_zh, @1783Dao, @apubcc, @gig_dao, @web3globalconf, @ChainRctnGlobal, @NapulETH, @MoodServices, @nimo_web3, @Growthlabsg, @moledao_io, @SmallWOD, @insidersdotbot, @OfficialRUChain, @LXDAO_Official, @allscaleio, @Web3NoahLu, @fruteroclub, @Scaling_X, @DFG__Official, @JSquare_co, @42space, @HackQuest_, @_creatorsand, @shirleneliu69, @UpchainDAO, @OpenBuildxyz, @robinn_eth

Hosts: @solana @Solana_zh @SafePal @021Labxyz @seegrowthhq @seegrowthlabs Co-hosts: @OGBCGroup @ChainforGood @AWS_HongKong @Gus_Nobody Media: @TechFlowPost @BlockBeatsAsia @ChainCatcher_ @PANews @OdailyChina @foresight_news @MetaEraCN @broadchain_info @0xmediaco @BlockTempo

Three prize pools. One hackathon. Stack them all. 🇸🇬 Compete for all three simultaneously at Singapore Solar Mini Hacker House: 💰 $250,000 USDC — @colosseum Global Prize Pool 💰 $12,500 USDC — @Solana_zh Solar Prize Pool 💰 $1,500 USDC — Singapore Local Prize Pool April 28–29 · Singapore Register now👉 luma.com/ofp8mtbl 💬 All key updates will be shared via our official Telegram: t.me/SolarSingapore

SG builders, your local stage is ready. 🇸🇬 Join us at the OGBC Innovation Hub on April 28-29, to unlock exclusive $12,500 prize for the Chinese-speaking region through Solar + win $1,500 local pool on top of the global prizes. Register + join us 👉 luma.com/ofp8mtbl

3/Our community partners: @_creatorsand @shirleneliu69 @HackQuest_ @UpchainDAO @OpenBuildxyz @SeeGrowthHQ More partners to be announced soon. Follow us for mentor lineup and workshop updates.

2/ How to join: 1️⃣ Register for Frontier at colosseum.com/frontier 2️⃣ Select Hong Kong as your region + fill in Solar as referral → unlock the exclusive $12,500 Chinese-region prize 3️⃣ Secure your hacker house spot: luma.com/ofp8mtbl 4️⃣ Join our Telegram: t.me/SolarSingapore Submissions due May 11. See you in SG. 💪

$1,500 USDC in prizes. Singapore. April 28–29. 🇸🇬 We're hosting a Solana Mini Hacker House — 2 days of building, mentors, and demos. Top 10 teams all win. Powered by @Solana_zh × @solana × @SafePalCN Register 👉 luma.com/ofp8mtbl

Singapore is in. 🇸🇬 We're hosting a Mini Hacker House on April 28–29 with @Solana_zh — build locally, compete for $250,000 globally. $1,500 USDC in exclusive local prizes for SG builders. Top 10 teams all walk away with rewards. Secure your spot 👉 luma.com/ofp8mtbl

AI agents are moving money autonomously. Most of them are doing it wrong. The second Horizon Hackathon AMA got into exactly why — and what builders need to get right before they ship anything in this space. Three things dominated the conversation: why AI agent transactions keep failing, what's blocking crypto payment adoption, and what a strong project in this space looks like right now. Host: @MetaEraHK Speakers: @johnsmithkaka, Senior R&D Engineer, HashKey On-Chain BG Huy Vo, @Tiny_Fish ML Engineering Manager @0xshawnpang, @allscaleio Co-founder & CEO 1. The Authorization Gap: Why AI Agent Transactions Keep Breaking Giving an AI agent a wallet is easy. Doing it responsibly is not. Hui opened with the core problem: reliability. On-chain, agents face the same challenges as on the web, but actions are irreversible. Three things break most often: infrastructure not built for autonomous actors, non-determinism where even a 1% error rate is catastrophic, and observability where every action needs to be fully traceable. Shawn added the authorization angle. AllScale explored AI agent transactions early and chose to slow the full launch. "Building something for AI agents is easy, you could vibe-code it in a couple of hours. But optimizing for human-in-the-loop and proper authorization is a completely different story." Most projects today simply give an agent a private key, often deployed on Vercel as a hidden environment variable. That's not a foundation worth building on. 2. Three Things Standing Between Crypto Payments and the Mainstream The panel was honest about where adoption actually stands. Most on-chain payment volume is still trading activity. Real-world B2B transactions remain a rounding error. Compliance isn't finished. The Genius Act and incoming Clarity Act are real progress, but businesses still run into trouble with tax treatment, AML obligations, and transacting cleanly in stablecoins. Good solutions are rarer than they look. The market appears crowded, but genuinely compliant on/off ramps with decent UX are still hard to find. HSP Protocol touches on a similar direction, framing itself as a bridge between Web2 commerce and Web3 payment rails, with an emphasis on smoothing over the gaps between the two. Vector, Senior R&D Engineer, suggested the challenge may be less about capability and more about how the pieces come together. UX is the real wall. Shawn's view is that the only path to mainstream adoption is making crypto invisible. AllScale's invoicing and checkout products are built around this. Users transact on-chain without knowing it. Hui framed the same problem from the agent side. An agent that can verify and execute but cannot pay is only half the story. TinyFish focuses on everything before the transaction: navigating fragmented sources and verifying deliverables so that when a payment triggers, it's the right one. 3. Why AI and Crypto Actually Fit Together The case here isn't about narrative. It's about how each technology is built. Vector was direct: the common problems in cross-border payments today are high costs, slow settlement, low transparency, and difficult reconciliation. HashKey Chain and HSP are designed to address all of these, acting as the missing layer between compliance, settlement, risk control, and developer experience. Shawn added the structural argument. Traditional finance hides its complexity. Crypto is open and transparent by default. On-chain transactions that feel confusing to a regular user are actually quite readable from a coding perspective. As AI coding improves, crypto becomes one of the most natural places for those capabilities to land. Hui connected it to what agents actually need: scoped identity, payment rails built for their speed and volume, and full audit trails. Not nice-to-haves. Prerequisites. 4. What a Strong Hackathon Project Looks Like Vector was direct: a breakout project solves a real problem, not one that simply combines AI and payments as a concept. Practical use cases, meaningful use of HashKey Chain and HSP, and a clear path to serving real users rather than just a demo. Hui's bar was simple: if you remove the agent, the whole system should break. The interesting projects are where agents work at speed and scale across fragmented sources that no single API covers. Shawn pointed to two archetypes. Products where the tech disappears, where users never think about what's underneath. And genuinely new ideas that simply weren't realistic before recent progress in AI and crypto. Conclusion The conversation was operational, not speculative. The questions being asked are: how do you build authorization guardrails that hold up, and how do you make the experience simple enough that people trust it with real money. Vector, Hui, and Shawn each approached this from different angles: infrastructure, intelligence, and payments. What they agreed on is that the last mile is product work. Visibility, compliance integrations, and authorization that captures intent and not just spending limits. That's what turns a working demo into something people come back to. HashKey Chain (@HSKChain) is an institutional-grade layer 2/blockchain, bridging the gap between traditional capital markets and the on-chain economy. Register for the Horizon Hackathon at dorahacks.io/hackathon/2045…. TinyFish (@Tiny_Fish) is built to give agents everything they need to navigate, authenticate, extract, and transact at scale. Learn more at tinyfish.ai. AllScale (@allscaleio) is building the first self-custody stablecoin neobank for global microbusinesses and AI agents. Learn more at allscale.io.

We've been closely following the HashKey Horizon Hackathon — here's the recap from the kickoff AMA March 2026 | HashKey Chain X Space Part 1 of the Horizon Hackathon AMA series Host: Enid (@0x_enid_) — Group Head of BD, ME Group (@MetaEraHK) Speakers: Alex (@AlexD_HashKey) — Core Builder, @HSKChain David Sung (@david_sung) — Senior Solutions Architect, @awscloud James Ward (@James_0x_) — Hackathon Specialist, @DoraHacks Before builders spent a single hour coding, @HSKChain brought together the people who decide what wins and what gets supported after the event ends. The kickoff AMA covered four tracks, what judges actually look for, and how to ship something that survives past demo day. — 1/ What HashKey Chain Actually Wants Built Four tracks. Real use cases. Nothing that stays in the crypto bubble. @AlexD_HashKey laid out the framework: RWA, PayFi, AI, and ZK. Each track has a specific gap to close. RWA needs individual-facing tools — most projects only serve institutions. PayFi requires building on HSP. AI should improve Web3 UX: onboarding, security, auto trading. ZK needs privacy tooling regular users can actually access. Projects that serve only crypto-native users won't stand out. — 2/ Why These Four Tracks, Why Now Timing matters. None of these tracks were chosen randomly. Two shifts: demand has changed — institutions and everyday users want real value, not speculation. And the tooling is finally ready. ZK is developer-friendly. Open-source AI models mean you no longer need a large team to build an AI-integrated dApp. @david_sung and @James_0x_ both called PayFi as the track most likely to drive real-world traction within a year. AI agents need a protocol-level payment layer to operate autonomously. PayFi plus AI is where both trends converge. — 3/ What Judges Are Actually Looking For Three signals. Not demos. @AlexD_HashKey on the incubation path: → Working code — stable, documented, mainnet-compatible. A security audit team will review. → Compliance awareness — especially for RWA and PayFi. No legal team needed, but show you've thought about it. → Real user problem — who are the users, what's being solved, why would they keep using it. Target: shippable dApps moving from testnet to mainnet within six to twelve months. — 4/ Resources Available to Builders Right Now Solo is possible. Support is real. @DoraHacks has team-finding built in — create a buidl and flag you're looking for teammates, or register solo and join an existing team. Your buidl enters a library of 30,000+ projects, discoverable by future ecosystem partners beyond this hackathon. From @HSKChain: docs, SDK, VC funding, exchange listing support, security audits, and @awscloud infrastructure discounts — for teams that deploy and keep building. The kickoff was a calibration, not a pitch. Build something shippable, know your compliance requirements, and don't treat this as a one-off event. The support exists for teams that show up with real products. We'll be posting recaps for the rest of the Horizon Hackathon AMA series — follow along so you don't miss what's coming. @HSKChain | @DoraHacks | @awscloud

Most early-stage startups fail not because the idea was bad. They fail because nobody showed up. Nobody found out. Nobody believed in it early enough. The founders who make it aren't always the smartest. They're the ones who got in the right rooms, built the right community around them, and found people who gave a damn early. That's what 021Lab is built for. We run events and hackathons that put you in front of the right people. We incubate startups from idea to product-market fit. We handle your marketing, your growth, your merch — everything you need to go from zero to one, and from one to one hundred. The leap is hard. You shouldn't have to take it alone.

The best conversations at tech conferences never happen inside the main venue. Side events = free access to the same speakers, investors, and founders — no $2,000 ticket required. We help startups host these - hit us up ;)

We've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. AI x payments, no fluff. Join us online at 8pm today!

📢HashKey Chain Horizon Hackathon Kickoff: Everything You Need to Know Join us with: 🎤 @MetaEraHK, Host ⭐️ @AlexD_HashKey, Core Builder of @HSKChain ⭐️ @david_sung, Senior Solutions Architect of @awscloud ⭐️ @James_0x_, Hackathon Specialist of @DoraHacks 🕗 Time: 20:00 UTC+8, March 19 🔗 Space link: x.com/i/spaces/1nxnr… 💬 Follow @HSKChain & drop your questions in the comments 🎁 3 selected questions will each win 100 $HSK #HashKeyChain #Hackathon #RWA #AI #DeFi #openclaw #HorizonHackathon

021Lab is in the arena 🤝 @HSKChain Horizon Hackathon — $40K USDT, 4 tracks, Demo Day at AWS HK, Finals at Web3 Festival. Builders: Apr 15 deadline. Don’t sleep on this.