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"Employees Won With AI Shell Projects": The Base Hackathon Controversy
Last Updated: October 20, 2025
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Key Takeaways
- Hackathons have long been shadowed by controversies, with idea theft and rigged results seemingly slowly becoming the norm;
- Base's Onchain Summer Awards were condemned after a researcher noticed some of the winners to be 'AI-generated shell projects';
- One of the flagged projects was linked to a Coinbase employee, sparking further backlash against the organizers.
The developer community has long debated the true value of hackathons. Across forums and social media, many have voiced concerns that these events are often predatory by nature, serve as little more than PR stunts, or exploit participants by using their ideas and labor for free under the guise of "community building".
From the CodeX hackathon offering lackluster rewards to winners, to Hack the Hill's student fee hikes, to Salesforce's pre-made project winner controversy all the way back in 2013, you'd be hard-pressed to find a hackathon event without some sort of controversy following suit.
The most recent hackathon that sparked outrage from the developer community was Coinbase's Base "Onchain Summer Awards" event that took place on September 2. It was a hackathon hosted to celebrate the most innovative, engaging, and widely used consumer mini-apps in the Base ecosystem.
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Over 500 developer teams competed for a $200,000 prize pool. The winners were supposedly determined by on-chain engagement data reflecting real user activity. However, when the results were announced on October 7, people quickly started pointing out some shady aspects surrounding the winning projects.
The X user Alanas (@alanonchain), a co-founder of Ogvio (an international money transfer service), began analyzing the winning submissions. While reviewing projects in the Top New Consumer Apps category, he noticed something unusual in regards to some of the winners, calling out owatch (second place) and Opi Trade (third place) specifically.
According to his findings, both projects appeared to be little more than AI-generated one-pagers with little to no actual functionality.
Further investigation revealed that some of these AI-generated shell projects were connected to Coinbase employees. Coinbase is the company behind the Base network, who were the organizers of the hackathon.
Alanas pointed out that the participant roster was filled with promising projects that already have products deployed and running. When comparing these projects with the winners of the hackathon, the reason for the backlash becomes even more evident.
There is literally no functionality. <...> Doesn't matter what you press, none of it is working.
Community members have been tagging the Base team in the replies to Alanas' post, demanding an explanation, but as of writing this, Base has yet to respond in any way.
Hackathons are often marketed as these incredible opportunities to network, kickstart your idea, and potentially receive funding for your start-up. However, this latest controversy involving Base has soured the space even further, prompting the community to demand answers from the organizers.
The Base hackathon controversy comes on the heels of Coinbase's plans to list BNB
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