This was my second hackathon.
Coming from my first one, I felt much more comfortable. We had several days to build instead of just one afternoon, and our team already had a better idea of how to work together. I was still the only freshie, but that part didn’t really matter anymore.
The theme was elections. So, naturally, we built a blockchain voting system. On paper, it made perfect sense. Elections need transparency and trust. Blockchain gives you an immutable ledger.
We started learning Solidity, wiring up smart contracts, and getting everything to actually work. I spent most of my time on the frontend, trying to make the voting experience feel clean and straightforward.
The problem was that the blockchain itself became our project.
We spent so much time getting it to work that we forgot the obvious question: What makes ours different?
Presentation day answered that question for us.
Several teams also built blockchain voting systems. Different UI. Different smart contracts. Same product.
Looking back, I don’t think our mistake was choosing blockchain. I still think elections are one of the few areas where blockchain actually makes sense. Our mistake was assuming blockchain was already the innovation. It wasn’t. It’s just a database with different tradeoffs.
Nobody is going to clap because you used blockchain. Just like nobody is going to clap today because you used AI. Those are implementation details.
What people remember is what your product does that nobody else’s does.
Ironically, none of the blockchain projects ended up placing. The projects that did win happened to use AI instead. I don’t think that’s because AI automatically made them better. AI had simply become the new shiny thing. If this hackathon happened a few years later, everyone would probably be pitching AI agents instead.
The technology changes. The mistake doesn’t.
I think this is one of the biggest traps in hackathons.
Teams fall in love with a technology before they fall in love with a problem. They build “an AI app” or “a blockchain app” instead of building something that only needs them because that’s the best way to solve a specific problem.
When everyone reaches for the same shiny thing, nobody stands out anymore.
I’ve carried that lesson into every project since then. Whenever I catch myself saying, “This would be cool with AI,” or “We could put this on the blockchain,” I stop and ask a different question.
If I removed the shiny thing entirely, would anyone still care about the product?
If the answer is no, then I probably don’t have a product yet.