ETHGlobal NYC: HouseHodl

Back in March, we walked away from the Web3NZ Hackathon with flights and accommodation to attend an ETHGlobal event of our choice. August rolled around, and we found ourselves on a plane to New York City. Connor, Walt, Jasper, Danuka, and myself — the same crew that built LoanMarket — ready to take on a much bigger stage.

The Hostel Life

To stretch our prize money further, we opted for a hostel. "How bad could it be?" we thought. The answer: a room barely bigger than the beds crammed into it. Five grown adults navigating around each other like some sort of sardine-themed team building exercise. Not ideal for rest, but perfect for forced camaraderie.

The Idea: HouseHodl

Managing shared expenses is painful. The messy receipts, the group chats, the passive-aggressive "who still owes me?" messages. We've all been there. HouseHodl was our attempt to solve this using crypto.

The pitch was simple: groups pool money into a shared wallet, and those funds automatically earn yield through DeFi protocols while sitting idle. When someone submits an expense, the group votes, and payments are handled automatically.

But the real sell? Trustless settlement. In HouseHodl, you can't withdraw unless you've settled your debts. Your flatmate can't ghost you and disappear with money owed — the smart contract won't let them. Your spend is always guaranteed.

The Architecture (and its Downfall)

The original vision was ambitious. An omnichain solution with a "master contract" on Ethereum tracking all cross-chain data, and satellite contracts on other chains where users could stake tokens of their choice. LayerZero for cross-chain messaging. AAVE for yield. CCTP for USDC transfers. It was elegant on the whiteboard.

In practice? Cross-chain didn't work.

Much like the Web3NZ hack, I found myself in a product owner adjacent role — keeping track of the sprawling architecture, making sure we weren't building features that depended on other features that didn't exist yet. The complexity was a beast to wrangle, and with the clock ticking, we had to scope down hard.

The Scale of ETHGlobal

This was not a New Zealand hackathon. The sponsor presence was excellent — booths everywhere, swag flowing freely, mentors available from every major protocol. The attendance was larger, the budget higher, the energy different. You could feel the stakes.

And the competition? Fierce. These events attract Web3 specialists — people who travel from ETHGlobal to ETHGlobal, honing their craft across continents. Teams with members who've deployed more smart contracts than I've written unit tests. We were playing in the big leagues now.

The Sleepless Weekend

I'm not built for all-nighters. I know this about myself, and yet I did it anyway. The weekend blurred into a haze of code, coffee, and questionable architectural decisions. By the time demos wrapped up, I was running on fumes.

The moment the hack officially ended, I found myself napping on the floor of the event hall. Dignity? Gone. Energy? Also gone. But we'd shipped something.

The Result

We didn't place. Honestly, it wasn't a surprise. With so much up for grabs and so many capable teams, landing a prize was always going to be a long shot. The cross-chain functionality we'd envisioned remained aspirational. What we demoed worked, but it wasn't the full vision.

Still, there's no regret. We built something real, learned a tremendous amount about DeFi primitives, and got to experience a world-class hackathon in New York City.

Beyond the Hack

I managed to catch Hadestown while in the city — not during or after the hack, obviously, I was too busy sleeping on the floor for that. But seeing a Broadway show in NYC felt like a proper "we made it here" moment.

Conclusion

ETHGlobal NYC was exhausting, humbling, and genuinely cool. We didn't win, but we flew halfway around the world on someone else's dime, built something ambitious, and got a taste of what the global Web3 scene looks like. Not bad for a bunch of Kiwis who barely knew what a smart contract was six months earlier.

You can check out the project on ETHGlobal's showcase, or dive into the source code on GitHub.