Introducing our Wave 1 Product Reviewers! A warm welcome to the 8 SoSoScholars from the SoSoValue research community who are joining us to find the gems. 💎 They’ll dig into the demos, review product logic, and surface the real value behind your ideas. May the best projects shine. ✨ Submit yours 👇 app.akindo.io/wave-hacks/JBE… #SoSoValue #SoSoScholar #Buildathon #OnChainFinance

🚨 Last Call for Wave 2 Builders Wave 2 of the SoSoValue AI Buildathon is almost closing. Our 8 Wave 2 Product Reviewers are now ready and excited to dive into your submissions — including 4 returning reviewers from Wave 1 and 4 new reviewers joining this round. Updated products, new ideas, stronger demos — we’re ready to see them. Submit before the deadline 👇 app.akindo.io/wave-hacks/JBE… #SoSoValue #SoDEX #Buildathon #AI #AIAgents #OnChainFinance #Web3 #Builder

🚨 Last Call for Wave 2 Builders Wave 2 of the SoSoValue AI Buildathon is almost closing. Our 8 Wave 2 Product Reviewers are now ready and excited to dive into your submissions — including 4 returning reviewers from Wave 1 and 4 new reviewers joining this round. Updated products, new ideas, stronger demos — we’re ready to see them. Submit before the deadline 👇 app.akindo.io/wave-hacks/JBE… #SoSoValue #SoDEX #Buildathon #AI #AIAgents #OnChainFinance #Web3 #Builder

I just reviewed 121products built on @SoSoValueCrypto Here is what that was actually like 👇 A lot of late nights. I didn't just read the descriptions, I opened every github repo, I clicked every demo link, I read the READMEs, I counted the commits, I checked if the code matched what was being claimed. some of those demo links were rickrolls.... Yes, Rick Astley, submitted as a demo video for a crypto trading product. 😂 that tells you everything about the range of what I reviewed. >>> The things that surprised me: some builders submitted a github link that literally still had "YOURUSERNAME" in the url, some READMEs still had the default next.js starter text you know, the one that says "this is a next.js project bootstrapped with create next app."...some submission forms had half the fields left blank. but on the complete other side of that, some builders blew me away. one guy built a trading bot that ran live on the blockchain for six weeks while he was working his day job as a doctor, It had over 3,000 real trades, It was currently losing money and he published that openly. He called it "a live system with scars." that stuck with me. one platform published a 27% win rate, not 90%, not 95%, and then explained honestly why that number with a clear method behind it, is worth more than every platform claiming 90% with no proof. that kind of honesty is rare. one solo developer had never written python before this competition started. by the end of wave1 they had a working tg bot with real market data, real API connections, and real fallback logic for when things break. they just showed up and figured it out. >>> What my reviewing actually looked like: I wasn't trying to be mean to anyone, but I also wasn't going to pretend a product was finished when it clearly wasn't. if your commit count was 2 and you claimed to have built a full AI trading system, I said so....if your demo required a login that nobody had access to, that affected your rating. If you described five API integrations in your submission but the only thing in your repo was a single HTML file, I noticed that too. but I also gave full credit when it was earned, when someone documented a real bug they found and fixed, that told me more about the quality of their work than any landing page could. when someone was honest about what wasn't done yet instead of pretending everything was perfect, I respected that more than a product with a beautiful UI and nothing real behind it. one builder told me they kept their README light on purpose to protect their ideas during a live competition. that's a smart and legitimate reason, I acknowledged it. >>> The thing that kept standing out: the best products weren't always the ones with the most features. they were the ones where you could tell the builder actually understood the problem they were solving. where the "challenges" section in their submission described real specific pain, not just "API integration was hard" but the actual bug they hit, what caused it, and how they fixed it. those details don't lie. >>> What 121 products taught me: builders came from Nigeria, Vietnam, China, the Philippines, the US, Europe, and everywhere in between. some had years of experience, some were learning as they went, some built for 5 days, some had been building for months before the wave even started. all of them submitted something, all of them showed up. most of them won't get a headline, some of them are building things that will genuinely matter. A few of them are clearly just getting started and that's exciting in a different way. wave2 is going to show us who was really building and who was just submitting. I already have a good idea of which is which.