JudgeBuddy
JudgeBuddy - agentic AI platform making hackathon judging faster and prizes trustless for builders.
Project Description
JudgeBuddy upgrades hackathons from manual chaos of hackathon judging to structured decisions and guaranteed payouts for hackers.
Judges get a dashboard where every submission is automatically analyzed for eligibility, track fit, and overall quality — with clear written reasoning for every score. Instead of reviewing hundreds of raw submissions, judges receive a structured shortlist and remain fully in control of final decisions. Just faster and fairer.
Prize pools lock onchain in escrow on Hedera the moment the hackathon starts. Every builder can verify that funds are secured before writing a single line of code.
Once winners are selected, payouts execute instantly. Ledger-secured signing ensures funds cannot move without explicit human approval, while Hedera records every step as a permanent audit trail.
Agentic assessment. Trustless prizes. JudgeBuddy.
How it's Made
We built JudgeBuddy with a optional escrow, verify and release payment as a full-stack TypeScript app: the frontend is React + Vite with Tailwind/shadcn-style UI, React Router, and Framer Motion, and the backend is an Express API. The core escrow logic lives in a Solidity smart contract, HederaTaskEscrow, deployed with Hardhat, OpenZeppelin, and ethers v6 on Hedera EVM. A client creates a task in the app, associates an HTS token, approves the contract, and calls fundTask; the verifier later signs release or refund, so payout is controlled by the verifier wallet rather than our backend. We used Hedera partner tech heavily: HTS lets us use tokenized payouts, HCS gives us an audit trail for task lifecycle events, and Mirror Node APIs let us map native 0.0.x Hedera accounts/tokens into EVM addresses so the same task can exist in both the off-chain app and on-chain escrow flow. We also integrated Reown AppKit/WalletConnect + HashPack for Hedera-native wallet actions like token association, while MetaMask handles EVM signing. The hackiest part was bridging Hedera’s native and EVM worlds: we added an onchain-sync endpoint to reconcile wallet-signed transactions back into the API.
