CONNECT
Enter through a wallet and make the climate mechanism part of the play loop rather than a separate dashboard.
สนามบันทึก 02 / FIELD NOTE 02KRIS HAAMER / BANGKOK, THAILANDBKK · NOV 2024
ETHEREUM / CLIMATE × WEB3 / LIVE PROTOTYPE
ETHGLOBALBANGKOK2024
A record-scale hackathon at the end of Devcon week—and a three-day attempt to turn Bangkok’s climate risk into a playable, on-chain experience.
15—17 NOV36 hours of building
QSNCCQueen Sirikit National Convention Center
01THE EVENT AT SCALE
The final weekend of Devcon became a city-sized build room.
Bangkok brought together 1,950 hackers from 86 countries. Twenty-six percent were new to web3. Teams submitted 713 projects—more than double Tokyo 2023’s total—while competing for over $800,000 in prizes.
2,750+ATTENDEES
1,950HACKERS
86COUNTRIES
713PROJECTS
10FINALISTS
$800K+PRIZES
02THE HACKATHON BUILD
โครงการ / PROJECT
UNDER
WATER
A CLIMATE-ACTION GAME FOR BANGKOK
Connect a wallet, buy or retire on-chain carbon credits, and clear the flooded districts one by one.
CLIMATE × WEB3LIVE PROTOTYPEHACKATHON BUILD
DESKTOP PROTOTYPE / DISTRICT MAP + CLIMATE CHAT
HOW IT WORKS / วิธีเล่น
OFFSET
Buy or retire on-chain carbon credits through conversational actions inside the prototype.
UN-FLOOD
Clear Bangkok’s flooded districts one by one and turn an abstract climate action into visible map progress.
03FROM PROBLEM TO PROTOTYPE
A city shaped by water
Bangkok’s low elevation, dense canal system, intense rainfall, and urban growth make flooding a recurring and highly visible climate issue.
Make the system tangible
The prototype translates carbon markets into a map, a character, a chat, and a sequence of district-level actions that can be understood by playing.
Desktop first, mobile immediately
The team moved quickly from a large-screen map to live phone tests, checking whether the same core loop survived a smaller viewport.
04PROJECT TIMELINE / 36 HOURS
Frame the playable climate loop
Form the team, reduce the climate problem to one interaction, and choose what could realistically become usable by Sunday.
Build the map, wallet, and carbon flow
Connect district progress, wallet actions, carbon credits, the character, and the conversational interface.
Test, submit, and present
Run the prototype on desktop and phones, make the story legible, submit the build, and present it at ETHGlobal Bangkok.
05DEVCON WEEK / SELECTED
One venue. One week. Several overlapping communities.
ETHGlobal landed immediately after Devcon SEA, with its own happy hour and Pragma summit leading into the hackathon. The result was a continuous week rather than a standalone weekend.
CONFERENCE
Devcon SEA
Ethereum’s global community gathered at QSNCC for four days of talks, workshops, research, and ecosystem coordination.
QSNCCSOURCE ↗
COMMUNITY
ETHGlobal Happy Hour
A pre-hackathon gathering for reconnecting after Devcon days and meeting the builders who would form teams over the weekend.
BangkokSOURCE ↗
SUMMIT
Pragma Bangkok
ETHGlobal’s single-track summit closed its 2024 series with talks on wallets, protocols, privacy, scaling, and the future of crypto.
BangkokSOURCE ↗
HACKATHON
ETHGlobal Bangkok
The largest ETHGlobal event to date turned the convention center from conference venue into a 36-hour production floor.
QSNCCSOURCE ↗
AFTER HOURS
Bangkok after the build
Once judging ended, the week dispersed into smaller rooms, live music, late dinners, and conversations across the city.
BangkokWATCH ↓
06FIELD FILM / 17 NOV
The build ends. The city keeps moving.
Recorded late on Sunday after submissions and judging. The footage stays deliberately unassigned: a short fragment of Bangkok’s after-hours atmosphere, not a claim about a specific official event.
BANGKOK AFTER HOURS / 23:48 LOCAL TIME
07WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE HACKATHON
Prototype retained as a case study
Under Water remains a hackathon prototype rather than a production product in the current HAAM archive.
A documented interaction model
The project is preserved as a case study in translating climate systems into a playable interface.
The questions outlasted the prototype
Its lasting questions concern incentives, verification, and how climate action can become understandable outside a financial dashboard.
FIELD NOTE / 2024
Climate systems are hard to feel. Games give them a shape.
Under Water did not attempt to solve Bangkok’s flooding in a weekend. It used the hackathon honestly: to prototype a metaphor, test a mechanism, and see whether climate action could become understandable through interaction.
The useful artifact is the loop—connect, offset, un-flood—and the questions it exposes about incentives, verification, and what on-chain action means outside a financial interface.
08RESEARCH NOTES
Sources and archive
Event figures and the Devcon-week sequence come from ETHGlobal and the Ethereum Foundation. Project details come from the supplied field poster and prototype footage.