From a Campus Lab to the Global Stage: How We Built BCC UKDW in 8 Months

On February 10, 2026, we crowded around a screen watching a livestream from Hong Kong.

It was the winner announcement of the Mantle Global Hackathon: five months of competition, more than 2,000 builders from around the world, broadcast live as part of the Consensus Hong Kong event.

Then the host read it out. First place, GameFi track: OwnaFarm. Our project. $8,000.

To understand what that moment meant, you have to see what the room looked like five months earlier.

February 10, 2026. The night the announcement came in.

Five months earlier: a lab and a lot of doubt

There was no grand vision at the beginning. Just a campus lab at Duta Wacana Christian University (UKDW), Yogyakarta, where a few of us hung out after class talking about technology.

I kept steering the conversation to one topic: web3. Almost nobody on campus was building on it. To me, that was not a warning sign. It was an open door. So I started inviting friends to learn together. No curriculum, no budget, just curiosity.

On September 29, 2025, we made it official. Blockchain Club UKDW (BCC UKDW) was born.

Where it started: the lab.

The skepticism came fast, and it was fair. Web3 is too new. There is no proven path. And who is leading this? Someone who has never run an organization and has zero wins in the space.

Every objection was true. I could not argue my way out of it. That is when I learned the rule I now live by: you cannot ask for belief. You can only show receipts.

The grind nobody saw

In October 2025, the Mantle Global Hackathon opened. It was a five-month international online competition, and I teamed up with Nicholas and Oktavianus, two friends from the lab. We committed to it quietly.

Our project, OwnaFarm, attacked a real problem from home. Farmers with valid contracts still choke on cash flow while waiting to get paid. We tokenized their invoice receivables and turned them into in-game assets, so investors fund real agriculture through a game and farmers get faster access to working capital.

Meanwhile, the club refused to stand still. In December 2025 we ran our first major event, a Base Campus collaboration with UGM's blockchain community. A months-old club standing next to a bigger, older one, and holding its own. In January we followed it with a seminar and workshop alongside the BlockDev community. The first results were also trickling in: a Top 50 finalist spot at Base's global hackathon and a finalist finish at the Arbitrum APAC Mini Hackathon.

Base Campus with UGM's blockchain community, December 2025.

Promising signs. But still no trophy to point at.

February 2026: the month everything flipped

Then came the livestream.

First place in GameFi was not even the whole story. The same night, zkPull, a solo project by Oktavianus, took 2nd place in the ZK & Privacy track. Two podiums and $13,000 combined, announced on a global stage, for a campus club people had laughed off five months earlier.

And February kept giving. Predictly won Best DeFi App at Movement's M1 Hackathon. Our two projects from Hedera's Hello Future Ascension hackathon, OneSafeBet and deQuest, both landed Top 3 in the intermediate DeFi track.

The psychology of the whole group flipped. One win can be dismissed as luck. Five podiums in a single month is a pattern. The unspoken sentence in everyone's head changed from "this probably won't work" to "why not us?"

The avalanche

What followed proved the point. In the months after, I won 1st place solo with Tessera at the Synthesis Hackathon, an online competition judged by AI agents. Our members kept stacking: 1st place at the Chainlink CRE hackathon, 1st at Synthesis's Lido track, 2nd at UniCode, the ETHGlobal community hackathon for Uniswap, Top 10 at Somnia, podiums at X Layer, Walrus Sessions, and Monad Blitz Jogja, plus monthly builder rewards from Celo's Proof of Ship.

Then in April, Yogyakarta was chosen as the first city of Coinvestasi's Web3 University Tour 2026, hosted at our campus together with Binance Academy and BNB Chain, with hundreds of students in the room. The club that started in a lab had become the reason the industry came to us.

Web3 University Tour 2026, first stop: our campus.

Eight months after founding, the scoreboard reads 21 podium and finalist results, 5 first-place wins, more than 15 global ecosystems, and over $35,000 in total prizes.

The build report, eight months in.

From a lab hangout. In one academic year.

The build log, September 2025 to June 2026.

Wins are not the finish line

Here is the part I am most proud of: the teams kept building after the announcements.

Seven banners, seven teams still shipping.

OwnaFarm, Trickle, Nuvia, ClaudeLance, and Tirai are all in active development today, alongside newer projects from our members like zer0Gig and Circlo. Some are already live on mainnet. For us, a hackathon win is not a trophy to put on a shelf. It is a signal that the product deserves to exist.

Follow their builds on X: OwnaFarm, Trickle, zer0Gig, Nuvia, ClaudeLance, Circlo, and Tirai.

What I would tell any student founder

Credibility is bought with proof, not promises. Nobody owed me belief, and nobody owes you any either. Go first, put a result on the table, and let it speak.
Build the receipt in parallel, quietly. We built the club and the winning project at the same time. Doubt does not need to be answered immediately. It needs to be interrupted by results.
One win rewires a group's psychology, and a winning month kills the fluke theory. Before February, every effort felt like a gamble. After it, every effort felt like a rep.
Borrow momentum through collaboration. Standing next to UGM's community, BlockDev, and Coinvestasi let a months-old club punch far above its weight. You do not need permission to share a stage, just something real to bring.

What's next

BCC UKDW is still young. The goal now is to turn a winning streak into a pipeline: more builders, more shipped products, and more Indonesian students competing and winning on the global web3 stage.

If you are a protocol, company, or community that wants to reach serious student builders in Indonesia, my DMs are open.

Follow the journey:

LinkedIn: BCC UKDW
X: @bcc_ukdw
Instagram: @dutawacana.web3
Threads: @dutawacana.web3

And if you are a student in some campus lab right now with an idea everyone doubts: stop arguing. Go build your receipt. The room will change.