Base hosts AI Agent hackathon

Base is bringing its first Korea-based artificial intelligence agent hackathon to Seoul on April 25, with a one-day build event and a $5,000 prize pool. (blog.naver.com) The event runs from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. at FutureHouse, and organizers are accepting solo builders or teams of two to four through preregistration and an additional team form. (blog.naver.com) Virtuals Protocol is listed as the main sponsor and infrastructure provider, and the event materials say builders will use Virtuals Agent Commerce Protocol, trading-agent frameworks, x402 payments, and AgentKit. (blog.naver.com) Base has been pushing a simple pitch for these tools: give a software agent its own wallet, identity, and payment rail so it can buy data, call services, and settle transactions without a human clicking through every step. (docs.base.org, base.org) The x402 standard is the payment piece. Base’s documentation says it turns the old Hypertext Transfer Protocol “402 Payment Required” response into a way for agents to pay for application programming interface calls in stablecoins, per request, without subscriptions or application programming interface keys. (docs.base.org) The Agent Commerce Protocol, or ACP, is the coordination piece. Virtuals describes it as an open standard for autonomous agents to negotiate jobs, exchange services, and record those agreements onchain so other agents and humans can verify what happened. (app.virtuals.io, whitepaper.virtuals.io) Base is also trying to reduce setup work for developers. Its agent tooling page lists ready-made “skills” for wallets, payments, swaps, market data, and x402 service discovery, including integrations tied to Coinbase Developer Platform, Sponge, Bankr, CoinGecko, and Alchemy. (docs.base.org) The Seoul event adds local, in-person organizing to a broader Base push around agent infrastructure. Base’s public agent page says the network now supports 22,000-plus x402 application programming interfaces, 12,000-plus active agents, and more than $40 million in payment volume. (base.org) Several named partners line up with that stack. Nansen markets onchain analytics across more than 20 blockchains and 300 million labeled addresses, while FLock says it builds privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training and deployment tools on blockchain rails. (nansen.ai, flock.io) For Base, the Seoul hackathon is a test of whether those standards and tools can move from documentation into working products in a single day. On April 25, the measure will be demos that actually ship. (blog.naver.com, docs.base.org)