AI Exploration on Blockchain: Google Cloud-Powered Hackathon Concludes by Flare

The Flare x Google Cloud Hackathon, which took place between March 7-9 in partnership with Blockchain at Berkeley, gathered students and researchers to investigate how blockchain can facilitate AI-driven applications while preserving security and trust.

Participants from UC Berkeley, the University of Waterloo, and ETH Zurich developed projects utilizing Google Cloud's Confidential Space for executing AI computations in a verifiable manner.

Confidential Space is a secure computing environment that guards against unauthorized external interference while generating cryptographic attestations. These attestations validate that an AI computation was carried out correctly and can be authenticated on the Flare (FLR) blockchain, according to a message shared with crypto.news.

This configuration enables AI models to analyze data without revealing it to third parties, while also ensuring the results remain reliable.

The hackathon drew more than 460 participants competing across four tracks. Projects varied from AI-driven financial applications to consensus learning solutions. All projects employed Confidential Space instances running on AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization platform, which safeguards computations from tampering.

2DeFi: AI-driven DeFi onboarding

One of the standout projects was 2DeFi, developed by two students from the University of Waterloo. It secured first place in the AI x DeFi track and second place in the RAG Knowledge track. The project aids traditional finance users in transitioning to decentralized finance on Flare.

2DeFi enables users to upload screenshots of their Robinhood portfolios, which Google’s Gemini AI then evaluates to determine risk tolerance. The AI-generated profile is employed to recommend a DeFi strategy, such as staking or liquidity provision.

To streamline onboarding, 2DeFi incorporates Google login-based wallets, enabling users to interact with Flare without handling private keys.

Flare AI kit

The hackathon also saw the introduction of the Flare AI Kit, an open-source SDK for creating AI-powered blockchain applications. The SDK enables developers to integrate AI models with Flare while guaranteeing verifiability and security.

Flare AI Kit will keep developing, with intentions to introduce it to the Google Cloud Marketplace as a production-ready solution. The goal is to make AI computations on blockchain more transparent and secure for developers and enterprises.