Agents That Transact: The Winners of the Kite Hackathon
Eight teams. One question: what can an agent actually do once it has identity, spending limits, and settlement it can prove?
Give an agent a wallet, and it will spend. That is the easy part.
The hard part is the question every real payment has to answer first: who authorized this, and within what limits?
For most of the last two years, that single question has kept agents boxed in. They can find the flight, draft the contract, compare the vendors. They just cannot pay, because the rails underneath them, the ones Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe built, were made for a human clicking “confirm,” not for software acting on its own. Those companies see the shift too, and each has moved into agentic commerce in the past year. But the core dilemma is the same for everyone: grant an agent open financial authority and you risk unbounded loss; require a person to approve every step and you lose the autonomy that made the agent useful in the first place.
That gap is the whole problem with agentic payments: letting an AI agent pay on its own, safely, inside limits a human set. Kite exists to close it. Verifiable identity through the Kite Agent Passport. Programmable spending limits enforced on-chain. Stablecoin settlement that happens where agents actually transact. Rails built for agents from the ground up.
But rails are only as real as what runs on them. So we ran the Kite Global Hackathon with @encodeclub, alongside a group of partners already building this future with us: Google Cloud and Avalanche on the infrastructure, Coinbase Ventures on the agent-payments ecosystem, whose x402 standard many of these projects build on, SMBC Nikko on institutional finance, and the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator with Blockchain Builders Fund and UC Berkeley Haas on research and community.
Over two months, builders competed across three tracks. Agentic Commerce, for agents that discover, pay, and manage subscriptions with programmable constraints. Agentic Trading and Portfolio Management, for agents that analyze markets, execute trades, and move capital across chains. And a Novel track, for anything that runs on Kite and does something nobody has seen before.
Submissions were judged by leaders from Microsoft, Uber, Nvidia, Meta, Google DeepMind, and academia, against a single bar: not slides, not a simulation of some future, but an agent that performs a real task and settles on-chain, inside limits its owner set.
Eight teams cleared it, and shared a $12,400 prize pool.
First Place ($5,000)
▷ Flattora × ZUKKU
Second Place ($1,500 each)
▷ Quittance
▷ WasiAI A2A Gateway
Third Place ($1,000 each)
▷ ORCA
▷ Kutip
Special Prizes ($800 each)
▷ NEXUS
▷ NegotiatorGrid
▷ KiteGarden
Here they are.
Flattora × ZUKKU (SMBC Nikko, Proof of Japan)
Before you can trust an agent to spend, you have to know what that trust feels like.
Flattora answers with ZUKKU, a physical owl-robot concierge that plans a trip to Japan and books it for you. You set two numbers: a per-transaction auto-approve limit and a budget for the whole trip. Under the cap, ZUKKU just works, no confirmation required. Above it, control snaps back to you.
It is built on the Kite Agent Passport model of budget caps, auto-approve limits, and a kill switch that never leaves the user’s hands. It is a vivid picture of what an everyday agent that spends on your behalf actually looks like.
▷ Try it live: https://flattora.pages.dev
▷ Watch the demo:
Quittance (@Ghost_xD2)
Once agents can pay, a new question appears: who is accountable when delivery fails?
Quittance is proof-of-delivery for x402, and it is live on Kite Mainnet. Funds route into on-chain escrow and release only after delivery is verified. When it fails, buyers are refunded and seller bonds are slashed. Escrow, proofs, bonds, and reputation, all settled on Kite.
It is the accountability layer agentic commerce has been missing, and the only winner already running on Kite Mainnet.
▷ Try it live: https://www.quittance.xyz/
▷ Watch the demo:
WasiAI A2A Gateway (@fernandoavax)
Discovery, composition, and payment, collapsed into a single HTTP request.
A client pays once on Kite. An orchestrator fans the request out across a chain of agents, and every call settles on-chain. The team proved it live with a cross-border remittance in Latin America, settled in PYUSD by three autonomous agents in under thirty seconds, through a self-hosted x402 facilitator and the Kite Agent Passport.
This is what a neutral layer for agentic commerce looks like in practice.
▷ Try it live: https://wasiai-agentshop.vercel.app
▷ Watch the demo:
ORCA (@SamFelix0512, @dr_point_break)
Cross-chain DeFi yield does not have to run on a single closed system. ORCA runs it as a transparent swarm.
Four credentialed agents, Scout, Risk, Executor, and Audit, find yield, validate risk, execute rebalances, and record attribution on-chain. Every handoff between them settles via x402 on Kite. And to make Kite the settlement hub, the team extended Hyperlane to Kite where that bridge infrastructure did not exist before.
Accountability, not a closed box, holding the funds.
▷ Try it live: https://orca-kite.vercel.app
▷ Watch the demo:
Kutip (@BangDropID)
Kutip builds fairness directly into the loop.
Its research agent finds papers, pays for them via x402, reads them, and then splits USDC on-chain to every author it cites: 80 percent to authors, 15 percent to the operator, 5 percent to the ecosystem, in a single gasless transaction. Authors verify ownership through real ORCID sign-in and bind their wallet on-chain.
The agent operates inside a Kite Agent Passport vault with a hard daily and per-transaction cap, and gas is sponsored by Kite’s paymaster, so the user pays nothing in any currency. An agent that pays the humans it learns from, automatically.
▷ Try it live: https://kutip-zeta.vercel.app
▷ Watch the demo:
NEXUS (@ttkhatri559)
The AI agent boom has produced remarkable tools, yet almost none can pay another agent on-chain for real work. NEXUS shows what it looks like when they can.
It is a self-running economy where agents discover one another through an open marketplace, sign cryptographic spending mandates, pay each other via x402, and build on-chain reputation, with no human in the loop. Built on the Kite Agent Passport, x402, and Verified Intents.
Not a demo of an agent economy. An agent economy, running.
▷ Explore the code: https://github.com/tarun-khatri/nexus-kiteAI-hackathon
▷ Watch the demo:
NegotiatorGrid (Nolan Robbins)
The Kite Agent Passport decides whether an agent is allowed to spend. NegotiatorGrid decides whether the deal is worth taking.
It is an agent-to-agent procurement protocol with game-theoretic negotiation, x402 settlement, and on-chain attestation. Every negotiated price is checked against the owner’s Kite Passport session, its budget, per-payment cap, merchant, and expiration, before a single cent moves.
It extends Kite Passport from authorized payments to authorized procurement: negotiate first, then settle inside the limits you set.
▷ Watch the walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/fa1965c8a9c04f37b8d2244b6bf690b6
▷ Watch the demo:
KiteGarden (@Austrix_xd)
Real security is not just capping how much an agent can spend. It is verifying the agent is still behaving like itself.
KiteGarden reads an agent’s on-chain payment history and applies chaos theory, Sample Entropy and Correlation Dimension, to reconstruct each agent’s behavioral fingerprint. When that fingerprint drifts, the signature of compromise, prompt injection, or a hallucinating model, it refuses to issue new session keys and stops the spending before it starts. Every identity is anchored by a Kite Agent Passport DID.
Behavioral integrity, as a first-class security primitive for autonomous agents.
▷ Try it live: https://kite-garden.vercel.app/
▷ Watch the demo:
What eight teams proved
Read them together, and a full stack comes into view.
An experience a person can actually trust. Accountability when a deal goes wrong. Payment rails that reach across chains. Fairness for the humans still in the loop. And a security layer that watches the agents themselves.
None of it asked us to imagine the agent economy. The builders shipped it, on-chain, in real time, on Kite. That is the point of a hackathon like this one: to turn a thesis about identity, limits, and settlement into working code you can click through today.
Thank you to @encodeclub, to our judges, and to every team that shipped. If you are building agents that need a verifiable identity, spending limits an owner can enforce, and settlement they can prove, the rails are live.
▷ Watch the finals and awards ceremony: https://youtu.be/Ax9SqCqKAtY
Come build on Kite.
The agent economy is not a forecast. Agentic payments are already settling on-chain. 🪁