The Flare x Google Cloud Hackathon took place from March 7-9 in partnership with Blockchain at Berkeley, uniting students and researchers to investigate how blockchain technology can bolster AI-driven applications while upholding security and trust.
Participants from UC Berkeley, the University of Waterloo, and ETH Zurich collaborated on projects utilizing Google Cloud’s Confidential Space to run AI computations in a way that can be validated.
Confidential Space offers a secure computing environment that safeguards against external disruption while producing cryptographic attestations. These attestations verify that an AI computation was performed accurately, and they can be confirmed on the Flare (FLR) blockchain, as mentioned in a note shared with the community.
This configuration enables AI models to manipulate data without exposing it to outside parties, all while ensuring that the outcomes remain reliable.
The hackathon attracted over 460 participants competing across four categories. The projects spanned from AI-driven financial tools to consensus learning solutions. Each project utilized Confidential Space instances operating on AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization platform, which guards computations against tampering.
2DeFi: AI-powered DeFi onboarding
Among the standout projects was 2DeFi, developed by two students from the University of Waterloo. It achieved first place in the AI x DeFi category and second in the RAG Knowledge track. This project simplifies the entry of traditional finance users into decentralized finance on Flare.
2DeFi enables users to upload screenshots of their Robinhood portfolios, which are then analyzed by Google’s Gemini AI to determine their risk tolerance. The AI-generated profile informs recommendations for a DeFi strategy, such as staking or providing liquidity.
To streamline the onboarding process, 2DeFi incorporates Google login-based wallets, allowing users to engage with Flare without needing to handle private keys.
Flare AI Kit
The hackathon also saw the unveiling of the Flare AI Kit, an open-source SDK designed for creating AI-enhanced blockchain applications. This SDK enables developers to link AI models with Flare while ensuring both verifiability and security.
The Flare AI Kit is set to evolve further, with intentions to introduce it to the Google Cloud Marketplace as a production-ready offering.
This initiative seeks to enhance the transparency and security of AI computations on blockchain for developers and enterprises alike.