Building on Ethereum in the AI Era I Kevin Jones

Sun, Aug 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Kevin Jones from BuidlGuidl walks hackers through building on Ethereum in the AI era, tying together the tools and best practices that let developers learn and ship faster. Having worked in the Ethereum ecosystem for about six years alongside Austin Griffith and the Ethereum Foundation, he surveys what BuidlGuidl has produced for developer education and tooling. He gives a tour of SpeedRun Ethereum, the challenge-based curriculum that teaches core concepts through hands-on modules: minting an NFT, crowdfunding and staking, ERC-20 tokens and the approve pattern, a dice game on on-chain randomness, building a DEX with liquidity pools, oracles, overcollateralized lending, stablecoins, prediction markets, and zero knowledge, plus capture-the-flag security events and a new AI-guided learning mode. He also covers other BuidlGuidl products including Scaffold-ETH, ABI Ninja, Address Vision, and its full node client. Kevin then dives into AI-era building. He explains x402 (Coinbase's extension of the HTTP 402 status code) as a way to token-gate any API with an onchain payment instead of API keys, noting his work at Edge & Node (creators of The Graph) on a wallet that makes and accepts x402 payments with guardrails. He highlights ETH skills, an open source skill file encoding Ethereum best practices for editors like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, and ERC-8004, a registry giving AI agents a long-lived onchain reputation (with Agent0's SDK and a subgraph for querying agents). He shares his AI coding workflow: ideate in Claude Desktop to generate a prompt, bootstrap in Claude Code, then move to Cursor to review diffs. He runs a live Scaffold-ETH demo, spinning up a project with two commands, explaining the Hardhat and Next.js monorepo, burner wallet, auto-generated ABI-driven debug UI, hooks, and components (ENS resolution, balance checkers), then vibe-codes a basketball NFT contract that deploys and mints a LeBron card. He closes on OneClaw, his spotlight secrets-management platform storing keys in a Google Cloud HSM with multi-party computation, an LLM proxy running in a TEE that inspects prompts for injection and redacts secrets, and intent-based signing with guardrails so an agent can use a key that never leaves hardware, followed by Q&A. 00:00 Introduction 00:13 Nostalgia for ETHGlobal New York 00:32 About Kevin and BuidlGuidl 01:00 Why AI Accelerates Learning and Building 02:15 Introducing SpeedRun Ethereum 02:46 Scaffold-ETH as a Starter Kit 03:45 A Walk Through SpeedRun Challenges 04:40 ERC-20 Tokens and the Approve Pattern 05:09 The Dice Game and On-Chain Randomness 05:35 Building a DEX and Liquidity Pools 06:20 Oracles and Overcollateralized Lending 07:13 Stablecoins and Prediction Markets 08:28 Learning Zero Knowledge 08:58 The Tech Tree and Capture the Flag 10:15 The New AI-Guided Learning Mode 11:06 What Is x402 11:31 How x402 Token-Gates APIs 12:56 Building on x402 With Edge & Node 13:44 ETH Skills for Your Editor 15:06 ERC-8004: A Registry for AI Agents 16:05 Building Agent Reputation 16:42 Agent0 and the Subgraph 18:28 Kevin's AI Coding Workflow 19:12 Starting Ideation in Claude Desktop 21:18 Generating a Prompt for Claude Code 23:36 Moving to Cursor to Review Diffs 24:39 Starting a Scaffold-ETH Project 26:22 Choosing Hardhat or Foundry 29:18 Agent, Plan, and Ask Modes 30:45 Inside the Scaffold-ETH Monorepo 31:36 The AI-Friendly Files and MCP Server 34:00 The Burner Wallet and Debug UI 35:00 How the ABI Powers the Front End 35:58 Vibe-Coding a Basketball NFT Contract 40:19 Minting a LeBron NFT 41:27 The BuidlGuidl Full Node Client 42:20 Introducing OneClaw Secrets Management 43:18 The LLM Proxy in a TEE 44:36 Intent-Based Signing With Guardrails 45:39 Embedded Wallets, MCP, and SDK 46:30 Q&A: Signing Latency 47:49 Q&A: Git Integration for Agents 49:12 Q&A: How ERC-8004 Reputation Works 52:44 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _