Arbiter, an AI-powered escrow protocol that eliminates human intermediaries using smart contracts, won first place and the $2,500 top prize in the Tezos EVM (Etherlink) AI Hackathon. The results were announced during a livestream that drew more than 2,000 viewers, closing out a competition hosted by Now Media and Trilitech that challenged builders to ship working products at the intersection of AI and blockchain on Tezos’ EVM Layer 2.

Etherlink No-Code Agent Builder took second ($1,500). SlashMarket, a DeFi protocol that transforms staking yield into a competitive marketplace, placed third ($1,000).

Eight projects made the finalist round. The range was wide: autonomous escrow agents, no-code workflow builders, AI-managed treasuries, generative art systems where the auction itself composes the artwork, and NFT platforms that track creative identity over time. What connected them was a shared thesis: AI agents need verifiable, non-custodial infrastructure to be trusted with real value. Etherlink’s sub-second finality and near-zero gas costs made that thesis buildable in a weekend.

A judging panel that included Now Media CEO Matt Medved, Trilitech Head of Arts Aleksandra Art, Ledger CXO Ian C Rogers, Visualize Value’s Jalil Wahdat, and Bright Moments founder Seth Goldstein scored submissions on AI innovation, technical execution, reach, and ecosystem impact. Several judges remarked on the maturity of the builds given the two-week timeline.

First Place: Arbiter

Arbiter lets users write a deal in plain English. “I’ll pay 0.4 XTZ to 0x5EE5… when they deliver the logo in 2 hours.” The system parses the intent, deploys a locked escrow contract on Etherlink, and waits. When the seller submits proof of delivery, a verdict engine evaluates it and settles the funds automatically: release to the seller or refund to the buyer.

The entire process runs without custodians or manual arbitration.

The AI operates in two stages. GPT-5.4-mini handles natural language parsing, translating the user’s deal terms into contract parameters. GPT-5.4 runs verdict reasoning with structured outputs and confidence scoring when the seller submits proof. The separation matters: the AI never touches funds. It produces a verdict, and a distinct agent wallet executes the settlement on-chain.

Every escrow carries a hard deadline. If no verdict is issued before the deadline passes, anyone can trigger a refund. Funds are never stuck. The seller receives a Telegram notification with the deal conditions and a direct link to submit proof. Both parties get real-time updates as the escrow moves through its lifecycle.

The judges noted Arbiter’s completeness. It shipped a working product with a clear use case, a tight UX loop, and a principled separation between AI judgment and on-chain execution.

Second Place: Etherlink No-Code Agent Builder

The runner-up tackled accessibility. Etherlink No-Code Agent Builder is a visual workflow platform that lets users create, deploy, and manage AI-powered blockchain agents on the Etherlink Shadownet without writing a single line of code.

The platform supports 10 blockchain tools out of the box: token transfers, swaps, token and NFT deployment, DAO creation, airdrops, yield calculations, price fetching, and wallet analytics. Users drag and drop these tools into workflow sequences, connect them to AI decision logic, and deploy. All tools interact with smart contracts already live on the Shadownet.

The project’s bet is that the next wave of on-chain AI agents won’t be built by Solidity developers. They’ll be assembled by operators, analysts, and community managers who understand what they want an agent to do but don’t want to write the code to make it happen.

Third Place: SlashMarket

SlashMarket rethinks staking from the ground up. The protocol, deployed across both Tezos L1 and Etherlink L2, turns passive staking yield into a dynamic, tradable marketplace.

When a user deposits XTZ, the protocol issues a liquid vault token that can be split into two components: principal and yield. The principal acts as a stable claim on the original deposit. The yield token represents the right to future staking rewards. Because these are tokenized separately, users can trade, price, or reposition their yield exposure immediately rather than waiting months for rewards to accumulate.

The real innovation sits underneath. Instead of relying on a fixed validator or a static delegation strategy, SlashMarket deploys AI agents that continuously compete to determine where capital should flow. These agents evaluate Tezos bakers on reliability, fees, historical yield consistency, and operational risk. Every few minutes, each agent submits its strategy on-chain along with a predicted yield outcome and a cryptographic commitment to its reasoning.

Once real yield data is observed, the protocol scores accuracy. Top-performing strategies gain influence. Weaker ones lose it. The entire process is recorded on-chain, keeping it transparent and verifiable. Validator selection becomes a merit-based competition driven by performance data rather than user preference or inertia.

Tezos EVM (Etherlink) AI Hackathon https://t.co/pprR1poqxX
— Now Media (@nowmedia) April 15, 2026

The Finalists

Five additional projects earned finalist status, each exploring a different surface area for AI agents on Etherlink.

Imagine on Tezos built an autonomous curatorial system that transforms social media posts tagged #imagineontezos into evolving NFT identity portraits. A multi-agent panel of three specialized AI curators plus a chief synthesizer reads each post through chromatic, narrative, and pattern lenses, then mints a three-layer NFT: DALL-E generated abstract art, an animated HTML artifact, and rich on-chain metadata. Over time, the system tracks each author’s identity evolution, building a living gallery of the Tezos community’s collective creative fingerprint.

AgentLink built a full-stack automated DeFi trading system powered by the Gemini AI Agent and secured by an ERC-4626 Vault. The architecture is deliberate: users deposit capital into a smart contract vault, and the agent discovers real-time arbitrage loops across Etherlink DEXs like Curve and Oku Trade. The vault mathematically guarantees that funds are never withdrawn to the agent. They can only pass through verified rebalancing operations. The AI has strategy authority but zero custody.

Mederu Lineage is an experimental art DApp where AI autonomously creates, titles, and interprets artworks on Etherlink. When a user requests a “reinterpretation,” the AI reads the parent artwork and generates a new derivative, minted as a child NFT with an on-chain link to its ancestor. Over generations, a visible family tree of AI-driven creativity emerges. The team behind mederu.art, an established Tezos L1 art platform, built Lineage as their first bridge into the EVM ecosystem. The project leans hard on Etherlink’s economics: on Ethereum mainnet, nobody would pay gas to reinterpret an artwork. On Etherlink, reinterpretation becomes a casual, everyday act, and that volume is what lets the genealogy grow.

Celestial Convergence turned the auction itself into the artist. Each bid in the system pulls a new planet into orbit within a Three.js animation. The planet’s mass is set by the bid amount, its color seeded by the bidder’s wallet address, its orbital inclination inherited from the collection’s first generation. When the auction closes, all orbits freeze permanently, and the agent mints the finished 1/1 NFT to the winner’s wallet. No human intervention between bid and mint. Claude Code acts as the autonomous agent harness, polling Etherlink RPC for bid events and executing the mint. The team chose Etherlink for sub-second confirmation, which makes real-time auction-responsive generative art viable at scale.

Sovereign Genesis built an autonomous AI treasury agent that manages its own finances on Tezos. The agent allocates surplus funds to create development bounties, then reviews pull request submissions using OpenAI reasoning to verify accuracy, relevance, and authenticity. Valid pull requests are automatically merged, and contributors are paid directly in XTZ from the bounty allocation, all verifiable on the Etherlink explorer. It is, in effect, a self-governing open-source project with an AI as the maintainer and treasurer.

The Bigger Picture

The hackathon surfaced a pattern worth watching. Nearly every finalist separated AI reasoning from on-chain execution. Arbiter’s verdict engine doesn’t hold funds. AgentLink’s Gemini agent can’t withdraw from the vault. SlashMarket’s competing agents submit strategies but don’t move capital directly. The builders, independently, arrived at the same design principle: let AI think, let the blockchain enforce.

The Etherlink AI Hackathon was produced by Now Media in partnership with Trilitech. All finalist projects are live and linked in the competition’s official thread.