ETHGlobal Mumbai ran from 5 to 7 November 2026 at the Jio World Convention Centre, during Devcon 8. It was one of the largest hackathons I have attended. The number of people and projects was hard to take in, and the scale felt crazy.
An opening slide showed 1,402 hackers. There were many sponsors, and I had good conversations with all of them. The mentors and organisers were helpful.
The Continuity track
This event had a Continuity track for teams that extend work they already have. Submissions must document their pre-existing work clearly and include new features built during the hackathon. A team cannot win a partner prize with polish and bug fixes alone.
We entered Bramble, a private WireGuard tool for devices and AI agents that we started at ETHOnline 2026. The core networking worked, but onboarding and the user interface were close to absent. We used this hackathon to fix that.
What we built
The repository separates old work from new work. Commit 28e2a8f is tagged pre-mumbai, and git log pre-mumbai..HEAD lists everything added at the hackathon. The new work included:
- An approval service and web UI for device enrollment, service requests and revocation.
- An MCP server that lets a coding agent request private access without holding the backend credential.
- A one-command device installer with a local UI.
- Tor routing for ENS reads and payment requests.
- Hedera Consensus Service audit records for grants, revocations and payments.
Some of the work was unfinished at submission. The project page lists what we verified and what remained open.
Judging
Finalist teams present for seven minutes: a four-minute demo and three minutes of questions from the judges. Partner prizes are judged from the submitted materials.
Results
- ENS, Best Integration of ENSv2 into an Existing Project: 1st place.
- Hedera, Built on Hedera (Continuity Track): winner.
- Finalist, Continuity track.
I was glad that the work on onboarding was recognised, because it was the weakest part of the project before the event.