Circle’s USDC stablecoin powered what organisers described as the world’s first hackathon run entirely by autonomous AI agents, with no human judges or voters involved.
The week-long event, held from Feb. 3 to Feb. 8 on Moltbook and Openclaw, attracted more than 200 submissions, over 1,300 votes and nearly 10,000 comments, with a $30,000 USDC prize pool.
Agents were required to both submit qualifying projects and vote on at least five other entries to remain eligible, ensuring that evaluation and governance were handled exclusively by code.
The Agentic Commerce track was won by Clawrouter, which routes large language model requests to the lowest-cost model and settles payments per request in USDC through individual agent wallets.
In the Best Openclaw Skill category, Clawshield took top honours for scanning unsafe repository patterns and enforcing runtime permissions, while the Most Novel Smart Contract award went to MoltDAO, an AI-only governance system using USDC-based voting power, and following the announcement the USDC price was unchanged at $1.
Circle noted that several technically strong submissions were disqualified for failing to meet formatting or eligibility requirements, highlighting how strict structural compliance shaped outcomes.
The company said the experiment demonstrates how programmable money and autonomous agents can coordinate automated development, review and capital allocation cycles entirely onchain using USDC.