AI agents, tokenized real-world assets & on-chain infra… as thousands of developers converge on the Internet Computer for the World Computer Hacker League, their early-stage builds offer a unique window into where Web3 is really heading in 2025.
The World Computer Hacker League (WCHL) 2025 — the Internet Computer ecosystem’s four-month, global hackathon program — was designed to be more than a competition. True to promise, its just-completed Qualification Round has become a powerful industry signal. With more than 1,000 developers submitting functional demos across North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, WCHL25 is offering a rare lens into the ideas global builders currently believe are worth shipping. While the hackathon funnels through the mechanics of multiple competitive rounds, the real story lies in the shape and ambition of what these builders are trying to create — and what that says about where Web3 is headed next.
This isn’t about NFT drops or viral meme coins. These teams are pointing squarely at questions that have dominated crypto discourse for months: Will AI agents become the primary users of blockchains? Can real-world assets migrate on-chain at scale? Is it finally time for developers to abandon AWS in favor of full-stack blockchain infrastructure?
Looking across the Qualification Round winners reveals a striking pattern — one that suggests the Internet Computer is increasingly becoming a playground for what comes after basic crypto infrastructure.
AI-Native Platforms: Blockchains Designed for Machines, Not Humans
One of the clearest clusters emerging across qualification-stage projects is the fusion of AI tooling and decentralized infrastructure.
Prometheus Protocol (USA Funnel) is building an economic layer for autonomous agents — a kind of internal financial system for LLM-powered services that require on-chain authorization and micropayments. Kenya’s OHMS is transforming traditional machine-learning models into self-monetizing, decentralized AI agents via ZK-SNARKs and Internet Computer canisters. Brazil’s TAAS turns real-time fact-checking into a decentralized AI service, while ALAYA (China) aims to provide a decentralized AI creator platform and network.
The common thread here isn’t novelty. It’s a bet: that in the next cycle, the primary participants in Web3 ecosystems will be autonomous machine agents — not humans clicking buttons. To serve them, blockchains need low-latency compute, composability, and native storage — precisely the technical qualities developers cite as reasons for choosing to build on the Internet Computer.
Real-World Assets & Bitcoin DeFi: A Shift Toward Tangible Markets
If AI represents one end of the hard-tech spectrum, real-world assets (RWA) are the other: messy, slow, highly regulated — and now the fastest-growing segment in crypto. Builders across WCHL25 reflect that energy.
Canada’s Satsurance provides Bitcoin DeFi insurance for BTC-native protocols. Egypt’s Mercx focuses on tokenized asset marketplaces in the MENA region. Projects like Mercx, DawnPickCFDA (China), Internet of Buildings (Bulgaria), Riverr Finance (Nigeria), and Rexx (Nigeria) collectively reveal a significant truth: builders are no longer interested in closed-loop token economies. They want to bring real economic flows on chain
It’s telling that Bitcoin-centric and ICP-native DeFi both appear throughout the winning project list — not as replacements for Ethereum-style DeFi, but as thematic expansions. WCHL25’s Qualification Round is showing that future liquidity wars may center around real-world economic assets, not just native crypto.
Developers Want to Kill Conventional Cloud Infrastructure
The most surprising takeaway may be just how aggressively builders are trying to eliminate traditional Web2 dependencies. Several winning projects target the full tooling stack that startups normally outsource to centralized platforms:
Hosty.live offers one-click frontend deployment to ICP canisters. OpenKeyHub (Global Projects) is a decentralized GitHub alternative. CanisterDrop (India) builds a blockchain-based CDN. Consensus (USA) provides verifiable HTTP gateways. GhostKeys (UK) and VaultStamp (UK) tackle secure on-chain credential storage and IP timestamping. These are not consumer-facing experiences — they are fundamental developer utilities recreated natively on chain.
This trend signals a belief within the builder community that decentralized applications can — and should — be truly serverless and censorship-resistant top to bottom. The Internet Computer’s ability to host frontend, backend logic, and storage in a single environment appears to be attracting builders who want to exist outside the reach of traditional cloud platforms entirely.
Consumer Apps & Social: Ownership, Incentivization, and Creative Networks
Finally, the Qualification Round reveals a quieter but persistent push toward new consumer experiences.
Projects like Candid Curio (Vietnam) reimagine storytelling and intellectual property as AI-assisted, NFT-native workflows. Kaisen (Brazil) and KnowFi (Korea/Philippines) lean into edtech and the creator economy, signaling ongoing demand for “learn-to-earn” and credential platforms. Design Guardian (Argentina) provides IP protection and monetization rails for fashion designers.
Together, these projects suggest that while consumer crypto may have taken a back seat to infrastructure, the desire for ownership-based social platforms remains strong — just less speculative, more purposeful, and more hybrid (combining AI, NFTs, and token incentives in novel ways).
What This Means for Web3 — And Why It’s Happening on ICP
Zoomed out, WCHL25’s Qualification Round mirrors the broader macro shift inside the crypto industry: utility over hype, infrastructure over speculation, real-world integration over closed-loop financialization.
What’s notable is that these trends are not emerging from a single geography or domain — they are appearing in funnels from Africa to Asia to South America, tied together only by a shared belief that full-stack decentralization is finally viable.
The Internet Computer’s technical architecture (canister smart contracts, reverse-gas model, and transparent compute) appears to be giving developers the confidence to build directly on-chain what they would normally prototype using Web2 tools.
From Signal to Execution — National Round Begins
As the WCHL25 National Round kicks off in August, only 30% of Qualification-stage teams will move forward. But the bigger takeaway is already clear: if you want to know where Web3 is going, watch what builders choose to spend their time on.
AI agents, RWA tokenization, fully on-chain infra, and experiential consumer apps are no longer hypothetical storylines — they’re the prototypes being tested and funded right now.
The next four months will reveal whether these early builds graduate into production-grade products. But one thing is already certain: the world’s Web3 developers are collectively pointing toward a future that is more autonomous, more integrated with real-world markets, and more truly on-chain than anything we’ve seen to date — and they’re choosing the Internet Computer to get there.
About DFINITY & the Internet Computer
The Internet Computer (ICP) is a decentralized cloud platform that enables developers to build, host, and scale applications entirely on-chain. Its mission is to replace traditional IT infrastructure with blockchain-native computation. The DFINITY Foundation leads R&D efforts behind the protocol.
More info:
- https://internetcomputer.org
- https://wchl25.worldcomputer.com
- Press Contact: comms@dfinity.org
- X: @dfinity | @ICPHUBS
