Introduction

Celestia held an online hackathon in March called ‘Mammothon’, where over 3,900 builders came together to build over 100 projects, making it the largest Celestia hackathon to date. For those not familiar with Celestia and our thesis on TIA long term, you can read our comprehensive report here. In this new note, we wanted to surface the most interesting applications having surfaced from the hackathon, including some ecosystem developments over the last few months that may have gone under the radar as markets were selling off.

For many of these projects it is still very early days, and the projects should be researched further to validate whether/when their product visions materialize over time. One high level observation is that these hackathon projects are not uniquely focused on DeFi nor many of the core pillars of the onchain world today; rather, they experiment a lot with fundamentally new apps using crypto rails, with Celestia powering these. Below are some of the top winners, a brief description of each and follow-up links for readers to dive deeper. We did a bit of ‘curation’ as we are personally not as interested in another pumpdotfun on XYZ chain or NFT platforms, so we have focused on some of the more unique projects or those that are more fitting for a scalable and abundant DA layer that we believe Celestia has a chance to become.

Hackathon Winners

Evolute

Evolute is an onchain strategy game of territorial conquest. Players compete to capture territories, with every move executed by smart contracts for a fast-paced, decentralized gameplay experience.

zkMedia

zkMedia is a zero-knowledge powered image editor that lets users prove an image’s authenticity and any edits without exposing private data. Aimed at journalists, artists, and content creators, it uses Succinct Labs technology so one can verify an image’s origin and modifications while preserving privacy. This has quite large real world applications as AI-generated content and constantly diluted media becomes ubiquitous.

Weave

Weave is a dashboard for managing your social profiles across platforms. It integrates with Prism to let users securely control multiple crypto based social accounts in one place, making it easier to handle a growing ecosystem of onchain identity and content. Check out the tool here.

Xora Social

Xora Social is a privacy focused, decentralized social network that puts control back in users’ hands. Built on the Chopin Framework, it allows you to share and connect on your own terms – with no central authority or middlemen mining your data.

PrivaCT

PrivaCT is a browser extension bringing trust-minimized Certificate Transparency (CT) to Web3. In practice, it verifies website security certificates on the blockchain (using Prism) so users can be sure TLS certificates are logged and valid without solely trusting centralized servers. This adds an extra layer of security to everyday browsing in an industry plagued by so many security incidents.

HAKATCHI

HAKATCHI is an onchain take on the classic Tamagotchi virtual pet. You nurture a “digital ghost” creature in a playful, strange, and oddly emotional game experience developed by Argus Labs. The twist is that every interaction (feeding, playing, etc.) is recorded onchain. More info can be found through the Argus (the team behind it) here.

XO Market

XO Market is a prediction market platform that allows anyone to create or participate in prediction markets without central gatekeepers. Users can make forecasts, place bets, and get rewarded, with all market resolution and rewards handled transparently by smart contracts and the community.

We Are Lazy Dev

We Are Lazy Dev is a reward-based system that gamifies open-source development. It incentivizes programmers to submit pull requests and fix bugs by automatically granting tokens (Lazy Tokens) when contributions are verified using zkTLS (a privacy-preserving attestation). The platform aims to make code contributions fun and secure, and includes features like issue bounties and leaderboards.

Ecosystem Wide Catalysts

On top of the recent hackathon, Celestia has continued to see broader adoption despite the negative price action.

• ZK Rollups based on Bitcoin, powered by Celestia DA
• Kinto exchange integrates Celestia for DA
• Initia launched their airdrop, which is a rollup framework that uses TIA for DA.
• Initia-based apps, with Celestia underneath.
• MEV mitigations on Celestia-native DeFi
• Abundance, a sovereign rollup framework built by the folks at Gelato Network, uses Celestia underneath the hood.
• Derive, derivatives protocol, continues to scale using Celestia as a DA layer.

Conclusion

In short, we surfaced some of the interesting developments to give our updated view on our original thesis stated back in Q1 2025. Given the current macro backdrop, we are not changing our positioning for TIA and for that of alts in general - either wait for confirmation of a trend or DCA slowly into high conviction alts. Despite being down 50% YTD and 88% from its ATH back in 2024, we would exercise caution and are not looking to call a bottom or knife catch this. Given the long timeframe of over 1 year, our positioning and strategy remain roughly the same, with DCAs slowly picking up more during large moves such as this week. Despite this, we are excited about the growing infrastructure and apps within the ecosystem we have seen so far into 2025 and will update further in the coming months.