We live in an age where Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a buzzword, but a tangible force reshaping industries and daily life. From personalized recommendations to automating complex tasks, AI’s presence is undeniable. Yet, as AI models grow larger and more powerful, a critical question emerges: who controls these intelligent systems? The current trajectory points towards centralization, where a handful of tech giants dictate the terms, potentially recreating the very power imbalances the internet once sought to dismantle. But what if there was another way? What if software could learn to trust itself, operating autonomously on a decentralized network, free from single points of control?
This isn’t a hypothetical future; it’s the challenge Neo and SpoonOS are putting before developers worldwide. With their Scoop AI Hackathon, launched on October 20, 2025, they’re not just distributing $100,000 across eight global cities. They’re asking a far more profound question: can we build truly autonomous AI agents on blockchain networks before AI fragments into incompatible, centralized ecosystems? It’s a race against time, and the next phase of the internet might just depend on the answer.
The Sentient Economy: Where Software Makes Its Own Decisions
Strip away the futuristic terminology, and the “sentient economy” describes a world where software makes decisions without constant human approval. This isn’t about humans losing control, but rather encoding their intent into systems that can execute autonomously, reliably, and transparently. Imagine an AI agent managing your investment portfolio based on parameters you set, reacting to market shifts in real-time. Or picture another coordinating complex supply chains, reading sensor data, executing contracts, and routing shipments without manual intervention. These are not just advanced automation; they are systems that can learn, adapt, and even reinvest in their own capabilities.
Such agents demand robust infrastructure. They need secure places to store data, mechanisms to prove correct task execution, and ways to coordinate with other agents they’ve never encountered. Crucially, they need to transact value without intermediaries that could censor or delay. This is precisely where blockchain technology steps in, not as a speculative asset, but as the foundational infrastructure for coordination among autonomous systems.
SpoonOS, launched in April 2025 with a $2 million fund, is building the layer that empowers developers to create these very agents. This platform runs on Neo, a blockchain originating in 2014 that has weathered multiple market cycles by consistently prioritizing developer tools over token speculation. Da Hongfei, Neo’s visionary founder, sees this as an evolution from a “Smart Economy” – where contracts are automated – into a “truly Sentient Economy,” where systems actively make decisions. The numbers echo this shift: 64% of blockchain developers are now integrating AI into their work, generating significant revenue in AI-driven DeFi and blockchain security, hinting at immense demand for solutions that don’t yet exist at scale. The hackathon aims to build them.
A Different Kind of Hackathon: Global Scope, Deep Dive
The Scoop AI Hackathon isn’t your typical weekend sprint. Running from October 2025 through January 2026, its four-month duration acknowledges that truly deployable solutions require iteration, testing, and refinement. Participants can join in person or online, with local developer communities in each city providing mentorship and support. This structure is designed to filter for long-term builders, not just prize-chasers.
Global Reach, Local Insights
The choice of cities—Moscow, Hanoi, Tokyo, Seoul, Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing, and London—is highly strategic. These aren’t just hubs of blockchain development; they represent diverse regulatory environments, technical capabilities, and unique market challenges. Asia-Pacific, for instance, commands 39% of the AI in Web3 market share, while North America holds 33%. But the distribution goes deeper than market share alone.
Bangalore grapples with infrastructure limitations, while Beijing, despite banning crypto trading, actively encourages blockchain development. Silicon Valley possesses capital but sees talent increasingly migrate to regions with lower costs. Tokyo and Seoul offer technical sophistication, and Moscow and London navigate geopolitical crossroads where trust infrastructure is paramount. This geographic distribution isn’t just about accessing talent; it’s about hedging against regulatory risk and cultivating solutions that can function across borders and diverse conditions. A system designed in Hanoi might withstand conditions that would break one built exclusively for Silicon Valley.
Three Tracks, Three Futures
The $100,000 prize pool is strategically split across three themed tracks, each tackling a crucial layer of the sentient economy:
- AI Infrastructure: This foundational track addresses how AI models run, how data flows, and how computation distributes across networks without re-centralization. Developers here will confront questions like running large language models across distributed nodes without any single node seeing the entire dataset, or verifying model outputs without rerunning computations. It’s about ensuring AI operates on decentralized networks without compromising speed, accuracy, or privacy.
- Agent-Based Systems: Focusing on truly autonomous software, this track challenges developers to create agents that execute tasks—from managing portfolios to coordinating supply chains or providing customer service—without constant human oversight. The key is making these agents reliable, transparent in their decision-making, and aligned with human intent, preventing unintended optimizations. Imagine a freelancer deploying an agent to find clients, negotiate rates, and manage payments autonomously.
- Decentralized Intelligence: This track explores how AI systems can learn and improve without the centralized control that creates single points of failure. Solutions here might include federated learning, where models train on distributed data without the data ever leaving its source, or novel governance systems that allow communities to guide AI development without corporate capture or mob rule.
Each track addresses a different layer, but they are intrinsically linked. You need robust infrastructure for agents, agents to demonstrate value, and decentralized intelligence to prevent the entire system from becoming centralized. Projects that connect these layers will undoubtedly capture significant attention.
The Stakes Are High: Shaping the Future of AI and Web3
The Web3 market is projected to reach $41.45 billion by 2030, with AI in Web3 alone hitting $17.8 billion. These aren’t speculative figures; they reflect institutional capital flows and technical capabilities. Coinbase’s $2.03 billion institutional revenue in Q1 2025 and over $100 billion institutional allocations into DeFi in 2024 signal a clear demand for solutions that don’t yet exist at scale. Hackathons like Scoop AI serve as crucial talent identification mechanisms in a market where skilled developers are the scarce resource.
The hackathon also addresses a critical “timing question”: can developers build open, decentralized AI-blockchain solutions before the market consolidates into a few dominant platforms? History offers a cautionary tale: the web, cloud computing, social media, and mobile all consolidated into a handful of powerful entities. While efficient, this centralization limits innovation and concentrates power. Blockchain promises to prevent this by decentralizing infrastructure, but AI’s computational demands threaten to recreate the problem. The tension between blockchain’s need to decentralize and AI’s tendency to centralize for efficiency is the core challenge. Solutions that resolve this tension will define what comes next.
This moment is particularly interesting because several transformative technologies are maturing simultaneously. Large language models achieved practical utility around 2022-2023. Blockchain infrastructure became viable for applications beyond speculation between 2020-2024. Zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving computation and cost-competitive decentralized storage have also recently hit their stride. This convergence creates a unique window for new, decentralized architectures to emerge.
The Scoop AI Hackathon offers some of the necessary tools, incentives, and support, positioning Neo and SpoonOS not just as platforms, but as catalysts for a more open, equitable future for AI. Whether developers seize this window of opportunity will determine if the sentient economy blossoms on infrastructure anyone can use, or if we end up asking permission from a few powerful gatekeepers to participate.
