We Turned a Train Into India's First Moving Ethereum Hackathon (And It Was Beautifully Chaotic)

Anshuman Singh -

Nobody would have believed us if we'd just told them. So we showed them instead.

For months, we'd been wrestling with a question that kept us up at night: What if we could create an environment where builders didn't have to hunt down mentors in forest-sized venues, where meaningful conversations didn't get lost between networking sessions, where the experience itself became the ROI?

The answer, as it turns out, was a 36-hour train ride from Bengaluru to New Delhi. Well one of the answer was this. 😛

Welcome to BlockTrain. On-chain, on-train. 🚂

Trying out something NEW!

The traditional hackathon format works. Invite builders to a venue, provide resources, announce prizes, everyone goes home. Rinse, repeat.

But here's what we noticed: builders rarely get enough time exploring and making the most out of hackathons while working on their projects. Mentors become scattered resources you need to track down. And that fundamental question -"What did I actually get out of this?" - often doesn't have a satisfying answer beyond a prize or a project submission. While on the other side, organizers think, plan and curate for a wholesome experience for everyone which only a fraction of people are able to enjoy or take part in.

We realized that despite all the effort that goes into organizing large-scale events with workspace, mentors, food, and talent, measuring the real fruitfulness of such gatherings is surprisingly difficult. The infrastructure is there, but the depth of connection? That's harder to guarantee.

So we asked ourselves: What if the venue itself forced valuable conversations? What if builders and mentors were locked in together - literally and metaphorically - with nowhere to go but deeper into their conversations and their code?

Inspired by Jagriti Yatra and The Hack Zypher, we had an idea: a blockchain hackathon on a moving train - Blocktrain!

Once we hit publish on the announcement, we honestly weren't sure what to expect. A hackathon on a moving train? It sounded either genius or completely unhinged - possibly both.

The announcemenet on twitter blew up with builders from everywhere asking how they could get on board. Creators like Caleb shared the initiative, and his reel on instagram crossed 900K impressions. For something that started as a wild idea scribbled during a late-night call, seeing it resonate like this felt surreal.

The People: Who We Had On Board

5,000+ applications. 120 shortlisted. 45 brave builders to rewrite the history of building on train!

This was our first experiment, and we had exactly one bogie on train to work with. The selection was intentional - we wanted builders who understood that this wasn't just about shipping a project. It was about being part of something unrepeatable.

Really glad we had sponsors including Base, Noice and Geode with whose help we were able to manage all the logistics for BlockTrain.

Alongside the builders, we had:

A handpicked crew of mentors who weren't just experienced—they'd walked the path. Folks who'd built proof of work at places like Noice.so, polynomial.fi, rath.finance, and BuidlGuidl. They weren't there to lecture. They were there to rotate through berths, sit down with teams, and actually jam on ideas.

Four creators roaming free across compartments, tasked with capturing this entire experiment through their lenses. Not assigned to any specific group, just there to document the beautiful chaos as it unfolded. The content they put out on Twitter? People absolutely loved it.

A train full of people who cared about building.

The Logistics (Or: How We Pulled Off Something Technically Hard)

With crazy ideas come crazy challenges. Sorry, Spiderman. 🦸 😬

Internet at 120 km/h

This was the big one. You can't exactly rely on mobile hotspots when you're barreling through railway tracks in India. So we set up an intranet system on BlockTrain with a simple concept: store all the npm packages locally and let builders chat with an onboard LLM to pull what they need for building up their projects.

Food that you love :D

It's crazy to go back and see how we co-ordinated across our vendors from stations to have food available to all the builders on train. While we did have IRCTC catering, we were recommend to order the famous idli, vada and sambhar from a beloved local spot from Hyderabad, with snacks and dinner from Bikanerwala at Nagpur junction. Three different sources, three different vibes, all of which people loved the food from all three locations

Permissions (The Bureaucratic Boss Battle)

As anyone would have guessed - hosting a hackathon on train would require good amount of permissions from the government bodies.

Getting bulk ticket bookings for builders? Manageable. Booking extra emergency tickets in case teams needed space to code in peace? Doable. Getting official permissions from railway authorities to run a full-blown hackathon on a moving train? That required trips from New Delhi to Bengaluru railways and back again. But we pulled through. Special thanks to our fren @Amogh - who helped us out in the planning and ops for the whole BlockTrain initiative. Couldn’t thank him enough. 🤝

A thoughtfully curated swag list

We realize swag is an important inclusion in any of the events we host.  For blocktrain - a ride worth 33 hours, We thought about what builders would genuinely need on a 36-hour train ride and thus had the following in the pipeline:

  • T-shirts (obviously)
  • Eye masks (for those who actually wanted to sleep)
  • Dental kits (hygiene is not negotiable)
  • Sponsor branded N95 Mask
  • A portable table specifically designed for coding on the train!
  • Sticker sheets (because builders love stickers)
  • An exclusive BlockTrain-branded keychain
  • And a memento for everyone who built on the train
  • Tote bags (to fit all of the above)

Initially we didn’t think we would have this many items but eventually the items made their way into the bag and I love the fact that people LOVED this and shared their love over social media about the swag bag!

The Opening: Setting the Stage

Before anyone boarded, we held an opening ceremony at PVR Yeshwanthpur - Vaishnavi Sapphire. Cinema hall. Big screen. The ADGM Deputy Railways Bengaluru joined us.

We briefed all 45 builders on what to expect: the format, the challenges, the vibe. Then we assembled everyone, lined them up, and marched them to the railway station together.

One line. One train. One shared experience about to begin.

Day 1: Departure and Immediate Chaos (The Good Kind)

What we planned: Keep the first night light. Let people settle in. No pressure to code immediately.

What actually happened: The train hadn't even left the platform before laptops started opening.

We thought builders would want to rest, ease into things, maybe chat and get comfortable. Instead, the moment the train departed Bengaluru, screens lit up across compartments where the IDEs launched terminals started and the builders fired up to code on train. Honestly, the energy was electric.

You just had to be there to see it. Builders weren't waiting for permission or a formal kickoff - they were already locked in.

The theme to build on train was open: build anything on-chain. No restrictions. No prescribed problem statements. It was just pure builder autonomy.

Day 2: A whole day on the Train!

If Day 1 was about finding rhythm, Day 2 was about controlled chaos turning into a really magical experience.

Morning: The Grind

Mentors began their rotations after the morning idli sambhar from Hyderabad, moving from berth to berth to discuss ideas, validate assumptions, and pressure-test early prototypes. It was quite fun to see everyone engaged in discussing their ideas and projects they were gonna build.

Teams dug deeper into their builds. We had two special tracks running in parallel:

Ethereum Speedrun Challenge sponsored by BuidlGuidl which required builders to Complete a Prediction Markets challenge for a shot at $300 prize pool.

The other prize was for the first three teams mentored by JesseGPT who posted on social media won $20 each.

Quadratic Voting with Anon Aadhar: A $1,500 prize pool where the community decided who deserved recognition. Every team that submitted a functional project on-train earned $20 per team member. You can check the leaderboard at https://blocktrain.devfolio.co/quadratic-voting.

Night: This was Crazyyy!

Here's where things got beautifully absurd.

Picture this: One compartment has builders hunched over keyboards, translating their thoughts into code or maybe debugging, well it goes in parallel at 11 PM. The next compartment? A full DJ setup with music projected onto the train's windows, people vibing to beats as the countryside blurs past. The compartment after that? A intense game of mafia where teams are trying to identify the murderer while murdering their own sleep schedules.

All of this. Simultaneously. In the same bogie.

Apart from this, we had our engineers engage Some folks broke into spontaneous on-train antakshri. Coffee was served at odd hours. Old-age cartoons played on someone's screen. The entire bogie had become a living, breathing organism of focused work and joyful chaos.

This was the night people would remember.

Day 3: Arrival and the Proof

8:00 AM sharp. New Delhi.

The train pulled into the station right on time. Everyone gathered for photos but before that we handed out mementos to every builder who'd completed the journey. Not for winning. Not for ranking. For doing it. For building something functional while traveling at 120 km/h. For being part of the world's first Ethereum train hackathon.

We had 21 submitted projects. Read that again. In 36 hours, on a moving train, with limited internet, builders shipped real functional work.

We waved goodbye to the creators and builders as they dispersed into Delhi, carrying momentum into the week ahead. BlockTrain being the prologue - the caravan that set everything in motion.

On-Chain, On-Train, On to the Next

BlockTrain happened. It was real, chaotic, and it was everything we hoped it would be.

To the 45 builders who took the leap: you're now part of something that didn't exist before. To the creators who captured it: your work made sure no one will forget. To the mentors who gave their time and wisdom in transit: you made this more than just a gimmick.

This was the ceremonial start to a week where Ethereum in India took center stage. But more than that, it was proof that the best gatherings aren't always the biggest ones - sometimes they're the ones where you can't escape each other, and you wouldn't want to anyway.

The train has reached its destination. But the journey? That's just getting started.

We tried to capture everything in this post, but some things just spill over. If you want to go deeper:

And here's the thing - so many people posted about BlockTrain that we couldn't possibly include it all above. Builders sharing their experience, strangers hyping us up, honest takes from everyone who was there (and many who wished they were).

We've gathered some of our favorites here:

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