VelesHack 2026: HYPER-AI Brings Agentic AI to a Three-Day Edge-to-Cloud Hackathon

What happens when students, developers, researchers and technology enthusiasts get direct access to some of the technologies being developed at the frontier of European Cloud, Edge and IoT research?

This October, they will have the chance to find out.

From 6 to 8 October 2026, HYPER-AI will join forces with fellow projects CoGNETs, ENACT and O-CEI for "VelesHack: Riding the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum", a three-day hybrid hackathon hosted at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Valencia, Spain, with remote participation also available.

Rather than simply hearing about emerging technologies, VelesHack will give participants the opportunity to work with them directly. Across four hands-on engineering challenges, teams will experiment with conversational AI, decentralised resource allocation, Kubernetes adaptation and distributed trust, turning ideas into working solutions with support from project experts.

From European research to hands-on experimentation

VelesHack brings together technologies developed across four European research projects working on different aspects of the computing continuum.

Participants will be able to choose the challenge that best matches their interests and skills. They can develop an LLM-powered assistant capable of interacting with a development environment, experiment with game-theory-inspired approaches to allocating Edge resources, deploy and dynamically adapt applications across Kubernetes clusters, or build tools for tracing trust information on the IOTA Tangle.

The aim is to make experimentation as accessible as possible. Participants will receive ready-to-use boilerplate, code skeletons and documentation, allowing them to spend less time setting up their environment and more time coding, testing and solving the challenge.

VelesHack is open to students, researchers, professional developers and hobbyists aged 18 or over. Participation is free, teams can include between one and three people, and solo hackers are also welcome.

🧠 HYPER-AI Challenge: Meet Hyperion

For HYPER-AI, VelesHack provides an exciting opportunity to open up part of the project’s technology to a wider developer community. The HYPER-AI challenge focuses on Hyperion, an LLM-powered agentic assistant for the HYPER-AI IDE.

The idea is to make interaction with the development environment more intuitive through natural language. Participants will be challenged to develop an agentic microservice that can answer questions about HYPER-AI while also interacting with the IDE on behalf of the user, including actions such as creating, editing and deleting files.

Through the challenge, participants will gain practical experience with technologies and approaches including Large Language Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Server-Sent Events (SSE), session memory, Python and Docker.

The challenge connects directly with HYPER-AI's broader ambition to make increasingly complex Cloud, Edge and IoT environments easier to manage and interact with through intelligent and autonomous technologies.

Four projects, four challenges

Alongside HYPER-AI's Hyperion challenge, participants can explore three other areas of the computing continuum.

CoGNETs will challenge hackers to explore smart Edge resource auctions, using game-theory-inspired bidding mechanisms to enable autonomous agents to compete for decentralised computing resources.

ENACT will focus on Kubernetes dynamic adaptation, giving participants the opportunity to deploy distributed applications and explore how runtime policies can be used to optimise their performance.

O-CEI will bring the dimension of trust and traceability, challenging teams to develop mechanisms for inspecting and auditing information recorded through Eclipse aeriOS and the IOTA Tangle.

Together, the four challenges offer different entry points into a common question: how can we build more intelligent, adaptive and trustworthy systems across the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum?

🏆 Code, compete and pitch your solution

VelesHack is not only about experimentation. It is also a competition.

A total of €3,000 in Amazon Gift Cards will be awarded across the four challenges. Each challenge will have its own winner, receiving €500, and runner-up, receiving €250.

The hacking activities will take place on 6 and 7 October, with on-site support available at UPV from 09:00 to 15:00. The final day, 8 October, will bring the teams together for pitches, judging and the award ceremony.

Participants who cannot travel to Valencia can still join. VelesHack is a hybrid event, with remote participation supported through Discord for mentoring, questions and team interaction.

🚀 Registration is now open. Ready to take on the challenge?

Registration for VelesHack 2026 is free and open until 5 October 2026 at 23:59 CEST. Participants can register individually or as part of a team of up to three people.

Whether you are interested in AI agents, Kubernetes, distributed systems, Edge computing, trust technologies or simply want to put your coding skills to work on a new challenge, VelesHack is an opportunity to experiment with technologies coming directly from European research.

📅 6 to 8 October 2026
📍 Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain + online
💻 Participation: Free
👥 Teams: 1 to 3 people
🏆 Prizes: €3,000 across four challenges

👉 Register for VelesHack 2026 and explore the full hackathon platform

The Edge-to-Cloud Continuum is becoming increasingly intelligent. At VelesHack, it is your turn to build what comes next.