Nearly 1,000 developers competed at the EasyA hackathon during Consensus Miami 2026, with participants from companies including Base, Solana, Microsoft, and Google. Organizers and attendees framed the event as a launchpad for venture-scale companies and emphasized that the center of gravity has shifted toward agentic AI this year. The EasyA format and company participation underscored a focus on AI-powered consumer applications and autonomous agents as core themes driving startup building at the conference.
At the EasyA hackathon during Consensus Miami 2026, Coinbase played a significant role by sponsoring challenges that centered around x402, a cutting-edge framework designed to facilitate AI-agent payments and interactions. This sponsorship highlighted the financial and interactive potential of agentic AI technologies.
In parallel, Solana and Solana Mobile encouraged teams to innovate with a focus on mobile-first applications, promoting consumer experiences that leverage Solana’s blockchain. These challenges reflected the broader theme of agentic AI’s growing importance and its application in creating transformative mobile and financial technologies.
A Harvard team that pitched at a previous EasyA event went on to found Cognition AI, valued at roughly $10 billion. Axal is building stablecoin yield products backed by bitcoin. Dom Kwok has said he aims for billion-dollar companies to emerge from EasyA and cited past successes, including a company that reached roughly $10 billion in valuation. Organizers framed this year’s EasyA event as a launchpad for venture-scale companies, linking the current hackathon to prior outcomes in company building. The EasyA founders described the year as the “Year of the Application Layer” with a focus on AI-powered consumer applications and autonomous agents.
The EasyA founders described 2026 as the “Year of the Application Layer,” emphasizing a concentrated focus on AI-powered consumer applications and autonomous agents. They tied that label to the hackathon’s attention to application-layer work, specifically consumer-facing products and autonomous, agentic systems.
Dom Kwok said, “Lots of developers [are] really excited about AI agentic workloads,” and he pointed to the recent wave of massive venture funding flowing into AI-agent infrastructure startups. The founders presented this emphasis as consistent with a broader shift in the field toward agentic AI. That framing also connected the event’s programming to EasyA’s positioning as a launchpad for venture-scale companies.
The EasyA hackathon at Consensus Miami brought together major industry participants, including Base, Solana, Microsoft, and Google, and featured sponsorship from Coinbase around an emerging AI-agent payments and interactions framework. The event highlighted the shift toward agentic AI and a concentration on AI-powered consumer applications and autonomous agents, with Solana Mobile promoting mobile-first consumer experiences and projects such as Cognition AI and Axal linked to hackathon outcomes. Organizers framed the hackathon as a launchpad for venture-scale company building and continued startup formation in the agentic AI ecosystem.
