Hedera AI Agent Bounty Awards $4,750 in HBAR to Five Winning Agents

Hedera has concluded its AI Agent Bounty, a five-week developer competition that awarded a total of $4,750 in HBAR across five weekly challenges and named one winner for each. Announced on July 13, the winning projects were all built with the Hedera Agent Kit and share a common theme: AI agents that carry out real transactions on a public network while keeping control of funds and an auditable record intact.

The program, which went live on May 18 and closed its final submission window on June 21, arrives as the wider industry examines how AI agents can hold and spend money without exposing users to loss. A new challenge opened each Monday, with prize amounts rising from $500 in the first week to $1,500 in the last. Payouts were calculated using the 30-day running average price of HBAR ahead of the announcement, and each entry was required to ship as a public GitHub repository using the Hedera Agent Kit in JavaScript or Python.

The opening bounty, for a basic Hedera agent, went to Hedera Court by Farouk Allani, a two-player application that turns a minor dispute into a recorded case. Both participants sign entry fees from their own wallets, an AI acting as judge issues a ruling, and a separate autonomous agent writes each stage of the case to a Hedera Consensus Service topic and pays the winner from a treasury. Because users sign their own transactions, the agent never controls their funds. A live version is available at hederacourt.site.

PromoProof, submitted by a developer identified as Nikodem, won the enterprise category for an agent that verifies whether an agreed retail promotion was actually carried out. It uses computer vision to check a proof image against the contract terms, then proposes a capped settlement structured as a scheduled transaction that executes only after both parties sign, with audit records anchored to the Hedera Consensus Service.

The third bounty, focused on MCP or x402 agents, went to AegisHBAR by UGOD, a smart-contract security auditor that charges per module through x402 micropayments, allowing developers to pay only for the checks they request. Findings are streamed with severity levels, anchored to the Hedera Consensus Service, and accompanied by an attestation issued through the Hedera Token Service.

POCU, by Marshal AM, won the commerce category with an agent that trains a machine-learning model entirely through smart contracts on the Hedera EVM. Each computation step is executed on the public ledger, and the finished model is issued to the user as a token via the Hedera Token Service, producing an auditable record of the training process.

The final and highest-value bounty, for a policy-constrained agent, went to Curb by Madhav. The project adds a policy layer that checks every agent payment against a budget, an approved-recipient list, and approval rules before funds move, recording each decision to the Hedera Consensus Service. In its strongest configuration, a smart contract enforces the limits, so a compromised agent key cannot exceed the budget or pay an address outside the list.

Taken together, the winning projects outline a template for autonomous agents that act without surrendering control of funds or auditability, drawing on the Hedera Consensus Service for tamper-evident records, the Hedera Token Service for verifiable artifacts, and scheduled transactions for multi-party approval. Curb has been packaged for reuse, and the patterns demonstrated during the bounty could resurface in future agent projects on the network.