TLDR: I won a hackathon and am a partial owner of a bitcoin miner.
When I first got to San Francisco, I knew about the whole stereotype of hackathons and "tech bros," but the only ones I'd done before were at Rice. Those were fun, but let's be honest — the competition was mostly just other Rice students and maybe a few from UH. My roommate, on the other hand, was from Waterloo and had done more hackathons than I could count, especially in the crypto space.
One night, we came across this hackathon hosted by MARA: 100 hackers, 8 hours, and the prize was literally 1 Bitcoin (about $120k at the time). Split between us, that'd be 60k each. It sounded way too wild to pass up. We both submitted our résumés and LinkedIns, brought in another friend of his who was also ridiculously talented, and somehow all of us got in.
Even though I was interning at Coinbase that summer, I wasn't really in the "crypto world." I was on the AI/ML side, working on risk models — as far away from Bitcoin mining as you can get. So I figured this was my chance to dive in headfirst.
The Idea
They gave us access to an API with mining allocation data, and at first we weren't totally sure what to do with it. After bouncing ideas around, we thought: what if we built an AI assistant for mining ops? Something that could look at all the energy prices, hash rates, and profitability stuff in real time, and then actually tell you what to do with it.
We didn't just want to make another dashboard with charts. We wanted it to feel like you had a smart co-pilot — one that could highlight risks, make suggestions, and answer questions in plain English. So that became WattsonAI.
Of course, this wasn't a straight shot. We spent a lot of time iterating with the judges on what would actually be useful vs. what was just hackathon glitter. Some of our early ideas got scrapped, some evolved, and the final design was really shaped by those conversations.
And somewhere along the way, we got a little too obsessed with the "liquid glass" effect in the UI. Every time we showed progress, we'd be like, "Okay but hear us out… what if we add more liquid glass?" By the end, I think we were 50% building an AI system and 50% just trying to justify sneaking liquid glass into every corner of the app.
I have done many projects before, but shipping this fast requires lots of tools. Shout out to Claude Code and Cursor, as even though they weren't perfect at all, they provided lots of help in creating the building blocks for the UI and general structure of the code, so we skipped a lot of the tedious repetitive parts of building a website like this. Also Vercel was extremely useful for deploying websites super easily, I'm pretty sure we just attached our github, added the API keys, and vercel took care of everything else, so we actually deployed our website live during the hackathon, which really stood us apart.
After the initial presentations, we stood in anticipation waiting for the top 5 teams to be announced. We visited the Founders, Inc. office because it was right next door, and one of the employees just showed us around which was really cool!
Then they started announcing the top 5 teams for the prize of 1 bitcoin. They listed out 3 numbers, none of which were ours. Then, we heard our number "team 75", the excitement was brewing. We had 20 minutes to ensure our presentation was solid, and essentially 110,000 dollars was on the line. We cooked something up, and finally it was our turn. It was honestly a blur to me, all I remember was talking and showing the features, and then the whole room turning to applause.
The award ceremony was right after. Did we win? Did we get anything? They advertised the only award was 1 bitcoin, so I was surprised when they said there were other prizes, but then we found out we won best design, which we were happy about, but when we walked back, they said we won a miner???
Yea, we won a $3000 dollar bitcoin miner, where we are currently earning around $15 a day minus electricity. We talked to the judges and we found out it was between our team and another team for the 1 bitcoin grand prize, which was tough, but it honestly taught me so much, and was such a fun experience!
Thanks to MARA for organizing such a fun hackathon, and my teammates Cole Dermott and William Wang!
Here is the video of the project in action!:
Watch the WattsonAI demo on YouTube
Also if you want to check out the UI, the project is live at https://wattson-ai.vercel.app/config . Keep in mind, the MARA api isn't fully working post-hackathon so some functionalities aren't up and running, but I am still very proud of the UI and design of the general website, as well as all the features we were able to put in it in such a short period of time :)