The energy in the room was palpable. A diverse group of college students, each bringing unique experiences, came together with a shared mission: to innovate, collaborate, and push the boundaries of what blockchain can achieve.
The $15k in prizes may have attracted some participants, but what kept them engaged was the experience. Students immersed themselves in solving real-world problems, thinking critically, and developing ideas with the potential for lasting impact. As teams worked through late-night brainstorming sessions and spontaneous collaborations, a clear pattern emerged—this was about purpose-driven creation.
Rather than centering discussions on speculative trends or token prices, participants explored how blockchain could address real and pressing challenges. That practical focus, especially with Avalanche as the foundation, is what made the event distinctive. It also reflects the Boston Blockchain Association’s commitment to advancing blockchain as a tool for meaningful innovation.
Mentors, judges, and industry leaders played a crucial role throughout the weekend. They showed up to engage—leading with curiosity and generosity. The guidance they offered helped students refine their thinking, stretch their ideas, and imagine new possibilities.
Although competition was part of the format, the most enduring outcomes transcended the rankings and awards. Attendees left with new skills, expanded networks, and fresh momentum. Many of the relationships sparked during the event are likely to evolve into long-term collaborations, career opportunities, or even startups.
This wasn’t a one-off event—it was a launchpad.
Looking ahead, this event will be remembered as a milestone in the blockchain journey—where students planted the seeds for the next wave of innovation.As blockchain continues to evolve and reshape industries, moments like this will be seen as the beginning of something much bigger.
A special thank you to our sponsors and volunteers, whose support made it all possible:
Lastly, we extend our thanks to the University Working Group—including the teams from BBA, Digital Business Institute BU, Ava Labs, and MassTech—whose vision and execution brought it all together.
Stay tuned for the next two events in the 2025 University Series!
Highlights of the winning submissions are listed below.
Winning Submissions
Business Case Competition
1st Place - $4,000 – Proxima
Proxima is a solution for the ongoing cost, risk and inefficiencies in property ownership transfer. Working with municipal registries to digitize records on a blockchain platform will eliminate the complexity and overhead of title insurance by establishing a federal ledger with fixed costs for validation of claims for all types of real estate transaction models.
Erebor is platform leveraging a DAO participation model to incentivize and streamline evaluation of conflicting escrow claims. By leveraging tokenomics models designed to prevent bias in digital arbitration, participants evaluate predefined contractual conditions and data sources to streamline conflict resolution over financial agreements.
AlphaCoin is a platform model for bond issuance and trading. With a focus on programmatic issuance of digitally native bonds and redefining investor incentives for long term asset holding, greater flexibility is provided to small and medium enterprises for debt financing.
Snowball is a crowdfunding platform that addresses the challenges in collective rights and capital controls funders lack on web2 equivalents. Fundraising campaigns can establish milestone requirements and financial participants can vote on approving each successive disbursement to ensure greater transparency and accountability.
AidDrop is eliminating logistical challenges of traditional financial infrastructure in addressing immediate crisis funding needs. The blockchain-based claims processing system enables campaigns to target and securely disburse economic relief to individuals and organizations in impacted geographies via phone numbers.
AvaLook is a content aggregator and analytics dashboard that merges real-time blockchain statistics, financial market and trading metrics, and news feeds to enable AI assisted data engagement and automation, both on chain - and off.
LuxToken is a blockchain powered service for luxury brands that tightly couples Proof-of-Ownership NFTs and physical NFC devices, embedded during manufacturing, to enable tamper-evident verification of authenticity and Chain-of-Ownership for re-sale markets.
MediTrail utilizes a blockchain ledger to unify changelogs across existing healthcare EDI workflows. In augmenting FHIR standards - records, claims and billing are streamlined and verifiable for real-time reconciliation and auditing.
SafePool is a blockchain native ROSCA platform for savings circles that combines cross-border remittances and origin currency investments with programmatic governance of loans and disbursements among collaborative communities of underbanked participants. These social DAOs drastically increase the transparency and accountability of collective fiscal planning and management to improve local economies through the democratization of foundational financial services, and by enabling access to asset markets for stable growth of reserve funds.
TrueLabel establishes verifiable authenticity in social media representation of luxury brand products. By leveraging cross-chain NFTs for transparency of purchase and ownership, products featured in social media content through the embedding of dynamic-bound tokens in influencer profiles.
Thank you to BBA Volunteer and Corporate partner Trevor Talley, Director of Strategic Partnerships, The Crypto Recruiters for major contribution to this recap.
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