GRC-20 Hackathon Recap: Building the Future of Decentralized Knowledge
The Graph is organizing the world’s public data, securely, transparently, and at scale. With the launch of GRC-20 and Geo, the protocol is taking the next big step: organizing public knowledge.
Earlier this year, The Graph hosted the inaugural GRC-20 Hackathon, a 5-week virtual challenge that invited builders to contribute to The Graph’s decentralized knowledge graph. The result? An emerging ecosystem of structured, shareable, and open-source knowledge, indexed onchain and built for a new generation of web3 and AI applications.
What is GRC-20?
is The Graph’s proposed standard for creating composable, decentralized knowledge graphs. Much like ERC-20 standardized tokens across Ethereum, GRC-20 aims to standardize how knowledge is structured, shared, and extended across apps and communities.
Using simple components like Spaces, Entities, and Relations, developers can now build flexible and richly interconnected datasets without relying on centralized servers or rigid schemas. This is more than just a data format. It’s a foundation for apps that reason, adapt, and evolve.
Geo Genesis: The First Onchain Knowledge Hub
To demonstrate GRC-20 in action, , core dev at The Graph, introduced : a decentralized web application built on The Graph and powered by Aragon OSx. Geo lets communities collaboratively curate and govern public knowledge through autonomous “Spaces.”
With Geo, developers and communities can:
- Publish verifiable, open-source data directly onchain
- Participate in knowledge creation with governance baked in
- Query structured knowledge via Substreams and Subgraphs on The Graph
It’s the first of its kind, a living, community-governed layer of structured information for the decentralized web.
Why Knowledge Graphs Matter
As AI and web3 converge, context is everything when it comes to data.
Search engines, agents, and recommendation systems will increasingly rely on knowledge graphs to understand the relationships between people, places, and ideas. GRC-20 brings that power to web3, enabling decentralized apps to build on structured public knowledge with transparency, interoperability, and control.
This isn’t about simply storing facts. It’s about making trustworthy knowledge accessible, composable, and verifiable without relying on any single gatekeeper.
Inside the GRC-20 Hackathon
The first GRC-20 Hackathon ran from February 3 to March 9, 2025, and challenged participants to build meaningful knowledge in one of three domains:
- Education: Organize learning materials, course metadata, and educational pathways
- Jobs: Structure employment data, career resources, and skills-based opportunities
- Regions: Map communities, demographics, local infrastructure, and governance
Backed by a 150,000 GRT bounty, hackers contributed open-source knowledge that populated the early layers of Geo Genesis to bootstrap a shared knowledge base for anyone to query and build on.
Winner Spotlight: Mapping Law & Courts
Among a range of creative and civic-minded submissions, one project stood out for its ambition and execution. The winning submission from focused on the legal system. His contribution mapped relationships between courts, judges, jurisdictions, and case law that will eventually be publicly queryable in the GRC-20 knowledge graph.
What made Preston’s project powerful is that it tackled real-world complexity through structured, explorable data and used spatial + entity relationships to model legal ecosystems. The project set a precedent for how GRC-20 can be applied to domains that benefit from transparency, interoperability, and long-term public stewardship.
One of the best parts of this story is what happened after the hackathon. The winning project didn’t just impress the judges; it caught the attention of the Geo team, who ended up hiring the builder. This is a clear reminder that in crypto, showing up, building in the open, and sharing your ideas can open real doors. Hackathons aren’t just about prizes. They can lead to life-changing opportunities
Winner Q&A: Mapping Law & Courts on Geo
Below is an interview with hackathon winner Preston Mantel
The Graph caught up with Preston Mantel, the creator of the winning project from the GRC-20 Hackathon, to learn what sparked the idea, what challenges were overcome, and what’s next for public knowledge in web3.
What motivated you to join the hackathon?
“Honestly, it was a right, place right time situation. I’m a PhD student and had some free time. I figured this was a good chance to learn. Any winnings would just be icing on top.”
What started as a casual dive quickly turned into something deeper:
“After getting started, I found myself diving in headfirst and investing a lot more time than I initially predicted!”
Why focus on law and courts?
“I figured most people would go after education or jobs. When I thought about ‘regions,’ the U.S. court system came to mind—there’s so much public data, and rulings vary across states…The Geo team encouraged the legal angle, and it turned out to be a winning direction.”
What problem does this project aim to solve?
The project goes beyond legal research or transparency—it’s about usability and utility.
“Having public court information could help with things like background checks or training legal AI assistants.”
Preston referenced Court Listener, a nonprofit that allows users to contribute to public legal archives via a browser extension:
“If you take this idea and add incentives for contributing to Geo, you could build something very powerful.”
What makes Geo Genesis + The Graph a good fit?
“Think of Geo Genesis as a mix between Wikipedia and Reddit. It’s flexible and community-governed. Then The Graph makes it accessible to any app that wants to tap into this data.”
Each Space in Geo Genesis gives contributors the ability to define rules and ontologies, combining governance with structure—something that’s rare in most open data ecosystems.
Any technical hurdles?
“Data modeling was the big one. Deciding what goes on an entity vs. a relationship—those decisions matter for usability and querying later on.”
What does success look like six months from now?
“Success means making it easy for anyone—tech-savvy or not—to create complex data structures in Geo without having to understand the full backend.”
And maybe the most telling line?
“At my roots, I am a data scientist, so this project has claimed a place close to my heart.”
What’s Coming Next from Geo?
Geo demonstrated what’s possible when data, identity, governance, and public infrastructure are approached spatially. From mapping the legal system to curating educational content and redefining employment graphs, this is only the beginning of what Geo and The Graph can enable. There's much more ahead.
The success of this first GRC-20 Hackathon shows that decentralized knowledge graphs aren’t just possible,they’re already underway. From education and jobs to local regions and legal infrastructure, builders are laying the foundation for an open, intelligent data layer on web3.
If you're thinking about what comes next in AI, search, identity, or public knowledge, this is where the groundwork is being laid.
This summer, Geo’s CEO, Yaniv Tal will be traveling across Europe, speaking at major ETH events including . It’s a big moment for the project and the ecosystem, with more eyes and energy than ever. The Summer of Truth is just getting started.
About The Graph
is the leading indexing and query protocol powering the decentralized internet. Since launching in 2018, it has empowered tens of thousands of developers to effortlessly build and leverage across countless blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Soneium, and Avalanche. With powerful tools like Substreams and Token API, The Graph delivers high-performance, real-time access to onchain data. From low-latency indexing to rapid token data, it serves as the premier solution for building composable, data drive dapps.
Discover more about how The Graph is shaping the future of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and stay connected with the community. Follow The Graph on , , , , , and . Join the community on The Graph’s , join technical discussions on The Graph’s .
oversees The Graph Network. , , , , and are seven of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.
