Earlier this year, we built a neobank in 9 hours.#
This was not a demo. It was one builder, working with Claude, on Dakota’s platform. By the end of the day, there was customer onboarding with KYB-gated flows, an account dashboard, USD and stablecoin balances, and a real outbound transfer over regulated rails. Claude wrote the integration code. The builder owned the product and shipped it.
Now we want to see someone beat that time. That is the whole idea behind The Agentic Build.
Starting today, and running through July 1, we are publishing the prompts we used, opening the same sandbox, and putting up a public leaderboard. Build a working financial product on real rails, agentically, and post your time. Under 9 hours is the number to beat.
For a build to count, it needs a working KYB flow, a sandbox transfer, a public repo, and a recording of the session. There are cash prizes and platform credits for the top finishers, though that is not really the point.
None of this would have worked two years ago. Two things had to change first:
Building changed. Builders are not writing code line by line anymore. They are orchestrating agents that do it for them. The product layer that used to take months now takes a workday.
And the rails changed. The hard part of finance was never the app. It is everything underneath: KYB, money transmitter licenses, custody, payment rail access, AML monitoring. None of that compresses just because you have an agent. You can build the neobank agentically. You can’t vibe code licenses.
That’s the part we built: regulated stablecoin infrastructure. We are a registered US Money Services Business with active state Money Transmitter Licenses, and EMI and CASP licenses in progress in Europe. Compliance, custody, and fiat and stablecoin rails sit behind a single API that an agent can call. Balances are fully reserved and GENIUS Act compliant. More than 500 business customers run on the same platform the build ran on, moving billions of dollars a year.
While The Agentic Build focuses on building products quickly, speed to market isn’t what’s so exciting here. It’s the shift in the math. When the cost of launching a regulated financial product drops from millions and months to a workday, the math changes for products that never made sense before. A neobank for a vertical no one serves. A payouts product for a small community. A treasury layer for an AI-native company. Those become worth building, and I think a lot of them will get built.
We did not build this to set a record. We built it to show what the next decade of finance looks like: smaller, faster, built by far more people. This is where that starts.
The clock starts at dakota.xyz/agentic-build.
The Agentic Build is a skill-based contest. Winners are decided by verified build time, not chance. Entry is free and open to builders 18+ where permitted. See the Official Rules for full details.