Arbitrum Open House India Concludes With Bengaluru Hacker House: Full Recap
The Arbitrum Open House initiative launched with a bold mission: to spark a new wave of builders by offering hands-on, localized support and immersive experiences for talent from around the globe. As the first edition of Open House culminates in the high-energy Bengaluru Hacker House, we can proudly reflect on the tremendous strides made toward achieving that vision.
Bengaluru Hacker House
When the Arbitrum Foundation planned its next big push to onboard builders, the obvious stage to launch its inaugural hacker house was India, the fastest-growing hub for Web3 talent. Over four action-packed days, participants dived into technical and founder-focused workshops, tapped into mentorship sessions, pitched ideas, and pushed their limits in a grueling 55-hour hacker house that left no code untouched.
Set against Bengaluru’s calm, energizing monsoon backdrop, the Hacker House attracted top talent from across the country. From roughly 500 applications, over 100 teams and individuals were handpicked to compete for a $70K prize pool. The aim was to reward and nurture young founders who could go on to build world-class applications on Arbitrum, the very same tech that industry leaders like BlackRock and Robinhood rely on.
On the last day, 23 projects submitted their demos for the top three spots. Each project was evaluated by a panel of judges, both from within the Foundation and external, across key criteria, including team quality, alignment with Arbitrum, technical execution, product-market fit, and innovation.
Winners of Bengaluru Hacker House 2025
The Bengaluru Hacker House showcased an impressive range of projects spanning DeFi, privacy, gaming, onchain insurance, developer tooling, and innovative consumer applications that address region-specific challenges. On the ground, teams put Stylus and Orbit to full use, demonstrating both creativity and technical mastery.
First Place ($40,000): Orbital AMM Protocol
Stablecoins are taking over the financial landscape, and Orbital AMM Protocol is ready to ride the wave. The team of four from IIT Roorkee introduced a novel AMM that supports thousands of stablecoins within a single pool by extending concentrated liquidity into higher dimensions. Inspired by Paradigm’s Orbital model, Orbital combines the best of Uniswap and Curve protocols. The team implemented a high-precision math layer in Stylus to compute multi-asset invariants at lightning speed, then added trade segmentation to handle large orders without slippage spikes.
Second Place ($20,000): Shinobi.Cash
Onchain privacy is scaling rapidly. Shinobi.Cash is ready to lead the charge with its innovative cross-privacy pools that enable users to deposit on any EVM chain and withdraw privately on any other chain, all through a single Arbitrum deployment. By integrating account-abstraction paymasters on Arbitrum, the team reduced withdrawal costs and prototyped “deposit-anywhere, withdraw-anywhere” flows using a ZK circuit powered by the Open Intent Framework.
Third Place ($10,000): GuardChain.ai
GuardChain.ai tackles the region-specific challenge of insurance claims in India with Arbitrum. Their blockchain-native, community-led model combines AI-assisted claims with onchain transparency to help gig workers and self-help groups access insurance efficiently. The team scoped an Orbit-backed path for a dedicated insurance chain, enabling predictable costs for claims processing, jury votes, and surplus distribution as usage scales.
We congratulate all the winners and thank our sponsors, including Appwrite, Ethereum Foundation: Founder Success, Couchbase, and OpenZeppelin, for supporting ecosystem builders through Open House.
Arbitrum Open House Wrap Up
The Open House India program was structured as a three-stage journey—Learn, Build, and Hack—that meets builders where they are. Alongside the Hacker House, which concluded in Bengaluru, the Learn and Build tracks, which were open to a global pool of developers, also saw enthusiastic participation and strong results.
Open House Learn 2025
The Learn initiative introduced the Arbitrum stack through practical workshops, self-paced interactive courses, and Q&As, reducing time-to-first-commit for both new and experienced teams. The learn courses saw participation from more than 550 individuals, covering everything from dev tooling basics to writing high-performance smart contracts with Stylus.
Open House Build 2025
Following the Learn program, builders came together for a three-week online buildathon designed to help teams form, experiment, and iterate toward working prototypes. With mentor-led feedback, informal pitch sessions, and plenty of collaboration, the buildathon attracted 72 high-quality submissions competing for $33K in prizes. The winners were:
First Place ($15,000): Plexi
A next-gen composable ERC-4626 vault built on Arbitrum, Plexi simplifies on-chain yield farming with a transparent and capital-efficient approach.
Second Place ($5,000): Orbital
The eventual Hacker House champion first cut its teeth here. Orbital is a breakthrough AMM capable of supporting anywhere from 2, 3, or even 10,000 stablecoins in a single pool, scaling concentrated liquidity into higher dimensions. Their rapid progress from the online buildathon to the Hacker House win showcases their ambition and technical edge.
Third Place ($2,500): TriggerX
TriggerX is a decentralized automation protocol that enables smart contracts to execute tasks based on time, conditions, or external events in a fully automated and trustless manner.
What’s next for Builders?
With Open House India wrapped up, the journey is just beginning. The Open House model will now expand globally, with North America up next. Builders can also look forward to the upcoming Demo Day, where standout teams will showcase their projects to investors, mentors, and the broader community. Beyond that, the ecosystem is wide open from grant programs to accelerators for anyone ready to build the next wave of world-class applications on Arbitrum.
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