Scoop AI Hackathon Touches Down in Silicon Valley with $60,000+ in Prizes

The Scoop AI Hackathon is landing in Silicon Valley on November 22 and 23, bringing a two-day build sprint to the Shenzhen Bay Innovation Center in Santa Clara and tapping into one of the most active developer communities in the United States. Co-hosted with the Berkeley Emerging Technology Association, the Silicon Valley stop promises hands-on engineering, academic collaboration, and a chance for teams to win a share of more than $60,000 in local prizes while competing within a broader $100,000 global series.

Registration for the event is open through Luma, and organizers ask participants to sign up individually; builders may arrive solo, join as an existing team, or form a team on site. The hackathon is being presented as a hybrid experience that links academic research and classroom talent with real deployment challenges, and entrants will be invited into the event’s communication channels after registering so they can coordinate, recruit, and follow the schedule.

At the heart of the Silicon Valley edition is SpoonOS, an agentic operating system powered by Neo that aims to give developers the tools to build AI systems capable of reasoning, coordinating and interacting with decentralized infrastructure. Organizers say the SpoonOS track is designed to accelerate projects that combine advanced academic ideas with practical deployment, essentially a testbed where multi-agent AI, distributed systems, and Web3 infrastructure meet. Neo, the open-source Layer-1 blockchain backing SpoonOS, supplies the native Web3 elements and smart-contract plumbing that organizers see as critical to building the “sentient economy” of interoperable agents.

A wide range of infrastructure and tooling partners will participate to support finalists and workshop sessions. Google Cloud, ElevenLabs, AIOZ Network, TRAE, Antigma, Rialo, Boings.ai, Surf, Desearch, Manus, Gata and others are listed as contributors across inference, routing, multimodal generation, cloud compute and distributed systems; several partners have pledged to furnish teams with compute credits and platform access so promising prototypes can keep growing after demo day.

Streamlining Agentic AI and Web3 Projects

Beyond platform partners, industry contributors, including OnePiece Labs and members from the Ethereum Foundation, will be available to advise teams on architecture, security, and scaling, organizers say is intended to raise the technical maturity of submissions and improve their chances of evolving into deployable products. The Silicon Valley stop is expected to draw a large contingent from nearby campuses, with students and researchers from Berkeley and Stanford, including blockchain and systems-focused groups, bringing expertise in AI systems research, ML infrastructure, distributed engineering and early-stage venture building.

Competitors will vie across four core tracks: Agentic Infrastructure, which emphasizes interoperable, communicative AI systems; AI4Science, which focuses on accelerating scientific workflows with LLMs, simulations and knowledge graphs; Autonomous Finance and Quant AI, which seeks to blend AI reasoning with decentralized finance; and an Open Innovation track for experimental ideas that explore new models of AI-human interaction.

Local prize money of more than $60,000 will be awarded across these tracks, with winners also receiving cloud resources and compute credits to continue development beyond the event. The Silicon Valley stop is one leg of an eight-city tour running from October 2025 through January 2026, with a total $100,000 prize fund for the global series.

Organizers frame the entire series as an effort to surface talent that can bridge machine intelligence and decentralized trust. From Moscow to London and through Asian innovation hubs, the Scoop AI Hackathon aims to explore how blockchain primitives and autonomous AI agents might combine to produce more open, efficient and equitable digital systems. For Silicon Valley participants, the chance to work alongside academic researchers, industry mentors, and major cloud and AI vendors creates a rare, concentrated opportunity to move from prototype to pilot in a matter of days.

With registration still open, organizers are encouraging builders, researchers and students to sign up and take part in what they describe as a practical experiment in the future of agentic AI on Web3 foundations. For teams that want to keep building after the event, the combination of prize awards, infrastructure credits and partner support could make the Silicon Valley Bowl a springboard for projects that aim to operate at the intersection of AI autonomy and decentralized systems.