JudgePass

JudgePass: Decentralized AI-Powered Judging System The Problem We Solve:** Traditional hackathon and competition judging suffers from critical flaws: human bias, inconsistent evaluation criteria, lack of transparency, time-consuming manual processes, and no way to verify or dispute results. Participants often feel judged unfairly, and organizers struggle with scalable, consistent evaluation across hundreds of submissions.

Our Solution: JudgePass is the world's first decentralized, AI-powered judging system that combines blockchain technology, verifiable AI computation, and encrypted smart contracts to deliver completely transparent, bias-free, and cryptographically verifiable judging results.

How It Works:

1. Intelligent NFTs (INFTs): Each judge is represented as an NFT containing encrypted metadata that defines specific judging rubrics, evaluation criteria, and scoring methodologies. These INFTs can be owned, transferred, or leased to authorized evaluators.

2. 0G Network Integration: We leverage the 0G Compute Network for AI inference, providing access to state-of-the-art models like Llama 3.3 70B and DeepSeek R1 70B running in Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) with cryptographic verification of every response.

3. Encrypted Metadata Storage: Judge configurations are encrypted using AES-GCM encryption and stored on the 0G Storage Network, ensuring tamper-proof preservation of evaluation criteria while maintaining confidentiality.

4. Verifiable AI Scoring: When projects are submitted for evaluation, our system automatically analyzes submissions against predefined rubrics using verifiable AI. Every score includes detailed justifications and cryptographic proofs of computation integrity.

Key Features:

• Bias Elimination: AI judges apply identical criteria to every submission, removing human prejudices and favoritism
• Complete Transparency: Every scoring decision includes detailed justifications explaining exactly why each score was assigned
• Cryptographic Verification: All AI responses are verified using TEE technology, ensuring results haven't been tampered with
• Scalable Evaluation: Process hundreds of submissions simultaneously with consistent quality
• Immutable Results: All scores and justifications are permanently recorded on blockchain
• Flexible Rubrics: Create custom evaluation criteria for different competition types (technical innovation, user experience, business potential, etc.)
• Authorization System: NFT owners can authorize specific wallets to use their judges while maintaining ownership

Technical Architecture:

• Smart Contracts: ERC-721 based INFTs with encrypted metadata and authorization mechanisms
• Frontend: React-based dashboard for judge management and submission evaluation
• Backend: Node.js API with 0G SDK integration for AI inference and storage
• Encryption: AES-GCM for metadata protection with symmetric key management
• Blockchain: Ethereum-compatible networks with 0G Network for compute and storage

Use Cases Beyond Hackathons:

• Grant application evaluation
• Academic peer review
• Startup pitch competitions
• Art and design contests
• Job candidate assessment
• Research proposal reviews

Impact: JudgePass transforms subjective evaluation processes into objective, verifiable systems. By eliminating human bias and providing complete transparency, we create fairer opportunities for participants while reducing evaluation burden on organizers. Every decision is auditable, disputable through cryptographic proof, and consistently applied.

Innovation: This is the first system to combine blockchain-based judge ownership, verifiable AI computation, and encrypted metadata management into a comprehensive judging platform. We're not just digitizing traditional judging—we're fundamentally reimagining how evaluation systems can work in a decentralized world.

The Future: We envision a world where every important decision—from funding allocation to academic assessment—can be made with transparent, verifiable, and bias-free AI systems while maintaining human oversight and customizable criteria. JudgePass is the foundation for this future of fair and transparent evaluation.

How JudgePass Was Built?

Core Technologies

1. Smart Contract Foundation

• Solidity (v0.8.20) for our INFT (Intelligent NFT) contract
• OpenZeppelin libraries for secure ERC-721 implementation, ownership, and reentrancy protection

Our INFT contract extends standard ERC-721 with specialized functionality for encrypted metadata storage and judge authorization, enabling token owners to authorize specific wallets to use their judge NFTs.

1. API Architecture

• Bun runtime for TypeScript execution
• Custom routing system with support for path parameters
• REST API endpoints for judge metadata, scoring, and scorecard management

We built a lightweight router that efficiently handles dynamic routes like /judge/:tokenId/metadata, giving us precise control over request handling and response formatting.

1. Frontend Implementation

• React with TypeScript for type safety
• TailwindCSS for responsive styling
• Wagmi for wallet connections

The frontend provides a complete judging workflow from loading an existing judge NFT to evaluating submissions and displaying AI-generated results.

0G Storage Network We integrated with the 0G Storage Network via the @0glabs/0g-ts-sdk to enable:

• Encrypted metadata storage with secure upload and retrieval
• Merkle tree verification of data integrity
• Permanent storage of judging results and scorecards

0G Compute Network We leveraged the 0G Compute Network via the @0glabs/0g-serving-broker for:

• AI service discovery - finding available providers on the network
• Verifiable AI inference - generating provably fair evaluation scores
• AI model access - utilizing Llama 3.3 70B and DeepSeek R1 70B models

Encryption System

For secure judge metadata storage, we implemented:

• AES-GCM encryption for symmetric key cryptography
• Web Crypto API for standards-compliant encryption/decryption
• Base64 encoding for transferable encrypted data

Smart Mock System One of our most innovative implementations is the Smart Mock System that ensures reliability during demos:

This system analyzes project descriptions for relevant keywords and generates realistic AI-like responses that provide detailed justifications while clearly marking them as simulations.

Architectural Challenges & Solutions

Challenge: BigInt JSON Serialization

The 0G SDK returns BigInt values which can't be directly serialized to JSON. We implemented a transformation layer:

Challenge: Judge Mint Workflow We created a specialized mint script that:

1. Encrypts judge metadata with AES-GCM
2. Uploads to 0G Storage
3. Mints an INFT with encrypted URI and hash

Current Limitations & Future Work

While our prototype demonstrates the core concept, several features are planned for future iterations:

1. Full marketplace implementation for judge NFT trading
2. Dispute resolution mechanism for challenging scores
3. Enhanced frontend visualization of judging results
4. Improved wallet integration with multiple providers

The most challenging aspect of the build was integrating with the 0G network while handling connectivity issues and ensuring our demo could proceed reliably with our smart mock system.

This combination of technologies enabled us to create a working prototype of a decentralized judging system with verifiable AI that solves real problems in hackathon evaluation.