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.
04THE 36-HOUR RHYTHM
FRAME
Form the team, reduce the climate problem to one playable loop, and choose what can realistically become interactive by Sunday.
BUILD
Connect the map, wallet actions, carbon-credit flow, character, and interface while workshops and mentor sessions continue around the room.
TEST + SHIP
Run the prototype on desktop and phones, make the story legible, submit, and present alongside 712 other projects.
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
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.
07RESEARCH 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.