The problem ETHesis solves

Research funding is often opaque and trust-based: funders can rarely verify whether milestones are actually delivered, and early-stage researchers outside legacy institutions struggle to access capital. ETHesis creates a transparent venture lifecycle where researchers launch tokenized research ventures, communities fund them, and an autonomous auditor agent continuously checks real outputs against declared plans. Every verification cycle produces a signed attestation anchored to ENS, so funders and teams share a public, tamper-evident record of progress.

Challenges we ran into

We had to connect several difficult pieces into one coherent flow under hackathon time pressure: server-side ENS provisioning, deterministic agent identity, source monitoring, and verifiable attestation publishing. The hardest parts were handling asynchronous onchain transactions reliably, designing resilient fallback behavior for external data providers, and keeping the product usable while complex background processes run. We solved this by separating integrations behind typed adapters, adding mock-safe modes for degraded dependencies, and building a launch flow that surfaces progress clearly while preserving verifiable outputs.