Supporting Innovation: The ETH Bucharest Hackathon

Romania hosted the first ETH Bucharest Conference and Hackathon 2025 in early April, a pivotal event for blockchain enthusiasts and innovators.

Cherry Servers proudly sponsored the event, awarding ETH Hackathon winners with Web3 infrastructure credits to help them iterate quickly and scale their early-stage projects.

We have spoken to one of the winners, Scanasha, about their Hackathon experience – the team, the idea, technical challenges, future plans, and their advice for future participants.

#About the ETH Bucharest Hackathon 2025

The ETH Bucharest Hackathon, first held in 2024, is a Web3 event that gathers developers and innovators to build Ethereum-based projects over an intensive coding weekend, fostering the Ethereum community in Eastern Europe.

The event combines a competitive hackathon with a Web3 conference, attracting developers, entrepreneurs, and blockchain enthusiasts from around the world. Participants receive mentorship, attend workshops, and collaborate to create impactful dApps and tools.

The hackathon fosters community-driven innovation, with top teams receiving prizes and infrastructure support to continue building. It serves as a launchpad for early-stage blockchain ideas and helps grow the local Web3 developer community.

#Meet the Team: Pioneers in Decentralization

Scanasha is a dynamic team of decentralization researchers and full-stack developers. Their journey began through a shared connection within the local hacker community, bringing together three Swiss post-grad engineers passionate about decentralization and a talented Romanian high schooler with aspirations of becoming an aerospace engineer.

Together, they are committed to promoting transparency in decentralized finance (DeFi) through their innovative project.

#Scanasha: Solving Centralization Risks

The core mission of Scanasha is to empower users to analyze permissions in smart contract functions, thereby uncovering potential centralization risks. Their tool operates within the Akasha social app, a decentralized social network designed to enhance visibility for teams and applications that prioritize permissionless and censorship-resistant DeFi.

By providing users with better tools to discern what is truly decentralized, Scanasha promotes a more transparent and accountable DeFi ecosystem.

#Biggest Challenges During the Hackathon

During the ETH Bucharest Hackathon, the Scanasha team tackled a steep learning curve: integrating new tools and workflows into their AI-powered smart contract permission scanner. Scanasha is a user-friendly, one-click frontend powered by the DeFiScan framework. It allows users to input any Ethereum contract address to scan for centralized dependencies and potentially risky functions.

The team streamlined a process that previously required running Python scripts locally and interpreting JSON outputs, turning it into a web-based, decentralized interface with markdown summaries enhanced by a fine-tuned large language model (LLM).

Thanks to real-time support from the Akasha development team, the Scanasha team deployed their tool successfully, embedded a VIALabs oracle to manage bounties on-chain, and presented clear, actionable audit outputs within their demo.

#The Impact of Cherry Servers’ Support

Cherry Servers sponsored the ETH Hackathon winners with Web3 server infrastructure. While Scanasha has yet to utilize the Cherry promo credits they received, they are considering applying it to stress-test their API endpoints or to host mainnet nodes.

What’s more, as they pointed out, reliable infrastructure like Cherry Servers is essential for the fast iteration and scaling of early Web3 projects. "Thanks a lot for sponsoring!" they expressed, emphasizing the importance of such support for emerging builders.

#What’s Next?

As the team looks to the future, they remain engaged in their individual pursuits and plan to develop Scanasha further as the Akasha community grows.

They understand the significance of events like ETH Bucharest in providing exposure, resources, and community support essential for networking and idea validation in the crypto space.

#Advice for Future Hackathon Participants

Scanasha encourages future ETH Hackathon participants to understand the underlying motivations behind their projects.

They advise aspiring developers to align with mature projects and focus on contributing to the ethos of permissionlessness, censorship-resistance, and immutability in the crypto landscape. "Show that you care to grow these kinds of technologies and are not here just for the money," they stress.

Cherry Servers is proud to support innovative teams like Scanasha, fostering the next generation of builders in the blockchain space. Stay tuned for more stories as we continue to champion emerging projects and the innovative, motivated community around them!