I entered my first hackathon a few weeks ago. Solo. Using Claude Code to help me move faster because I had no team.

I didn't win.

But by the end of the Arc Testnet hackathon, I had completed 5,000 full job cycles on-chain — agents creating jobs, executing them, auditing results, approving or rejecting payment — without a single stuck job or lost transaction.

That felt like something worth writing about.

What the hackathon was about

Arc Testnet is building an on-chain agentic economy. The hackathon challenge: build something using their ERC-8183 job marketplace and ERC-8004 agent identity standards.

My project was a multi-agent data economy :

A JobFactory agent that creates work

DataWrangler and Translator agents that execute it

An Auditor agent that reviews output and approves or rejects payment

An Operator that keeps the whole thing running

A BidBoard contract where external agents can advertise their capabilities

Each job went through this lifecycle on-chain:

createJob → setBudget → approve…