- During Encode Club’s ETHLondon in 2023 and ETHGlobal in 2024, Pakistan born engineer turns complex blockchain ideas into products that feel practical and easy to grasp
Aqib Hassan, a UK-based engineer, has won major prizes at two global hackathons of Web3 – a concept for the internet’s next phase, focusing on decentralization, blockchain, and user ownership, in London, as strong teams from around the world joined the Encode Club’s ETHLondon in October 2023 and ETHGlobal in March 2024.
The projects of the Pakistan-born engineer were picked out by leading organizations, showing his rising profile in the Ethereum community. He first drew attention in 2023 with DEFIBank, a decentralised lending platform built at Encode ETHLondon. Traditional lending is often slow, rigid, and hard to use for people who hold assets on different blockchains. DEFIBank addresses this by letting users post assets from several chains as collateral and borrow across networks. It uses flexible interest terms, digital deposit receipts, and trusted price data so that borrowing feels clearer and safer for normal users, not only crypto experts.
Etherspot backed the project with a $1,500 bounty and a $150 voucher for his use of account-abstraction tools that made transactions smoother to send. Judges praised the way DEFIBank combines solid engineering with a simple, guided flow that hides much of the usual DeFi complexity. At ETHGlobal London, Aqib Hassan led the team behind 0xEstate, a decentralised real-estate investment platform. The company lowers the barrier to property investing by breaking assets into smaller, tradeable shares and showing key facts such as price, location, and growth potential.
The aim is to let users review and invest in property with more confidence and with smaller starting amounts than in the usual market. Built on the base blockchain, 0xEstate uses on-chain safeguards to protect funds and reliable data sources for market prices. The project finished third in the Uniswap Foundation Best Use of Hooks category and received a pool prize from Worldcoin – a strong result in a competitive hackathon. ETHGlobal hosted over one thousand in-person attendees in the presence of around 241 teams – all were building projects during a 36-hour hackathon. On the other hand, the three-day ETHLondon hackathon brought together participants from many countries.
Across both events, Aqib Hassan shows the same pattern: he turns complex blockchain ideas into products that feel practical and easy to grasp. His work focuses on widening access to lending and investment through decentralised, transparent, and secure platforms. The engineer is becoming a bridge between two growing tech scenes and a new voice in the future of global Web3 innovation that is aiming to shift power from large corporations back to individuals by giving users control over their data and digital assets for more transparent, secure, and community-driven online experiences.
