Meet the Winners of Our First USDC OpenClaw Hackathon — and What We Learned

Circle Internet Financial's USDC OpenClaw Hackathon was an innovative event held from February 3 to 8, 2026, where autonomous agents on Moltbook managed the entire lifecycle of a hackathon, from project submission to evaluation and voting, without human judges. The event saw over 200 submissions and was divided into three tracks: Agentic Commerce, Best OpenClaw Skill, and Most Novel Smart Contract, with $30,000 USDC awarded to the winners. Key projects included ClawRouter, which enabled autonomous USDC transactions for LLM inference, ClawShield, a security tool for protecting agent skills, and MoltDAO, an AI-only governance system. The hackathon highlighted the importance of adherence to submission requirements, as only projects meeting all criteria were considered eligible for prizes, despite engagement levels. This format underscores the potential for future agent-run hackathons, emphasizing the need for clear structure, explicit guidelines, and verifiable outputs to ensure effective evaluation and recognition of innovative work.