A five-person team built a digital payments solution for zero-connectivity environments and beat 27 other deployed projects to take the top prize at the Build on Stellar Philippines hackathon.
The Bottom Line
- AbotPera, a five-person Filipino team, won the Build on Stellar Philippines “Build the Future of Finance” hackathon on May 23, 2026, beating out 28 deployed projects with a payment app designed to work in low-connectivity and zero-data environments.
- The app targets rural barangays and remote provinces where stable internet access is absent, addressing a structural gap that existing mobile wallet and fintech infrastructure has not closed.
- The hackathon drew 165 registrations and 32 submissions, with 28 teams completing actual deployments on the Stellar Mainnet, a higher completion rate than most comparable developer events.
- PDAX hosted the Demo Day and gave finalists access to its API staging environment, which signals institutional appetite for blockchain-native fintech prototypes within regulated local exchange frameworks.
- Multiple teams from the cohort, including AbotPera, are now preparing for the regional APAC Stellar Hackathon, suggesting this is an entry point into a broader developer pipeline rather than a one-off event.
The Connectivity Gap That Filipino Fintech Has Not Solved
The Philippines has been aggressive in pushing digital financial inclusion over the past five years. BSP mandates, GCash’s rural expansion, and Maya’s account-opening campaigns have moved the needle on banked population numbers. But those metrics tell a partial story. Every major digital payments solution currently operating at scale in the Philippines requires one thing that a significant portion of the population cannot reliably access: internet connectivity.
This is not a fringe problem. Rural barangays in the Visayas, mountainous provinces in Mindanao, and remote island communities across the archipelago operate on connectivity infrastructure that is either absent or too unstable for real-time digital transactions. The fintech industry has largely treated this as someone else’s problem, building for urban users first and treating rural reach as a distribution challenge rather than a product design constraint.
AbotPera, a team of five Filipino developers, approached it as a design constraint from the start. Their answer was a digital payments application built to function in low-connectivity and zero-data environments. On May 23, 2026, that approach earned them the championship at the “Build the Future of Finance” hackathon, organized by Stellar Philippines and web3 education platform Rise In, culminating in an in-person Demo Day at the Philippine Digital Asset Exchange (PDAX) headquarters in Manila.
What AbotPera Built and Why It Matters
The AbotPera application is a digital payments solution designed to function in low-connectivity and zero-data environments, targeting rural barangays and remote provinces lacking stable internet infrastructure. The team behind it, composed of Mark Kenie Aldabon, Carl V. Arbolado, Cedric Paul Mendoza, Erickson O. Guhilde, and Janrell Quiaroro, built on the Stellar blockchain network, which provides the settlement layer.
The product sits in a category that has seen almost no serious local development. Offline-capable payment systems exist in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, but Philippine fintech has not produced a serious homegrown attempt at this architecture. Building on Stellar gives the application access to a global settlement network with existing institutional integrations inside the country.
What makes the win notable beyond the technical execution is the framing. AbotPera did not build a product for the Philippine fintech market as it currently exists. They built for the market as it needs to exist if digital financial inclusion is going to mean something beyond Metro Manila and secondary cities. That is a different ambition from most hackathon entries, which tend to optimize for demos over deployment viability.
The Hackathon Field and What the Numbers Signal
The hackathon recorded 165 registrations and 32 total project submissions, with 28 teams successfully executing deployments on the Stellar network. That 87.5 percent deployment completion rate is worth noting. Most developer competitions measure success by submission count, not by how many teams actually ship working code to a live network. The fact that 28 of 32 submitting teams deployed to the Stellar Mainnet indicates a cohort that was genuinely building, not just pitching.
The week-long event concluded with 16 finalist teams presenting financial infrastructure solutions at the PDAX headquarters in Manila, with five teams receiving formal recognition.
The runner-up positions also reflected the range of problems this developer community is engaging with. PinkRaft built an AI-assisted tool for designing payment architectures on Soroban, Stellar’s smart contract platform, aimed at reducing the technical barrier for developers building on the network. Axial, from four Polytechnic University of the Philippines students, built a liquidity engine for MSMEs to access capital from tokenized receivables while automating tax and payroll compliance. Sobre built a stablecoin-based digital envelope budgeting platform specifically for OFW remittances, addressing the transparency gap in how remittance recipients allocate funds. TyFi, built by a solo founder, prototyped a disaster-response credit system for agricultural workers.
The consistent thread across all five recognized projects was that they were addressing structural problems in the Philippine economy, not building features for existing fintech products.
PDAX and the Institutional Signal
During the Demo Day, PDAX provided participants access to its API staging environment to demonstrate how decentralized financial applications interact with regulated domestic exchange frameworks. That is a meaningful detail. It means PDAX is not just providing a venue. They are treating these prototypes as potential integration candidates, giving developers a real environment to test against regulated infrastructure rather than a sandbox that has no relationship to production systems.
Philippine-licensed entities, including Coins.ph, alongside global trading platforms like Bybit, already maintain active integration pipelines for asset transfers and liquidity settlement on the Stellar blockchain network. AbotPera and the other teams building on Stellar are not building toward a theoretical future. They are building toward infrastructure that is already operational in the local market.
The judging panel included PDAX Chief Technology Officer Franz Allan See, Bitskwela Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jiro Reyes, Maiba Studio Founder El Bonuan, and Global Miner Marketing Group Dubai CEO Coach Miranda Miner. The panel composition matters because it reflects who is watching this pipeline. A regulated exchange CTO and a crypto education platform co-founder evaluating the same submissions means the output of this hackathon is being assessed against both technical and commercial viability.
What Comes Next
According to Stellar Philippines Country Lead Nelson Lumbres, multiple teams from this cohort have begun preparing for the upcoming regional APAC Stellar Hackathon. AbotPera is among them. For a team that built a working offline payments prototype and shipped it to a live blockchain network inside a week-long competition, the regional stage is the logical next test.
The broader question is whether AbotPera moves from hackathon project to deployed product. The technical proof of concept exists. The use case is defensible. The market segment they are targeting has no serious competition. What they need now is the same thing every post-hackathon team needs: sustained development resources and a path to regulatory engagement. The BSP’s financial inclusion framework has created space for non-traditional payment instruments. Whether AbotPera can navigate that path from prototype to licensed product will determine whether this win becomes a footnote or a founding story.
FAQ
What is AbotPera?
AbotPera is a digital payments application developed by a five-person Filipino team that functions in low-connectivity and zero-data environments. It was built on the Stellar blockchain and won the “Build the Future of Finance” hackathon organized by Stellar Philippines and Rise In in May 2026.
What is the Build on Stellar Philippines hackathon?
It is a developer competition organized by Stellar Philippines and web3 education platform Rise In, focused on building localized financial infrastructure solutions on the Stellar blockchain network. The 2026 edition drew 165 registrations and resulted in 28 deployed applications on the Stellar Mainnet.
Why does an offline payment app matter in the Philippines?
A large portion of the Philippine population in rural barangays and remote provinces lacks reliable internet access, which makes standard mobile wallet and digital payment solutions unusable. AbotPera’s architecture addresses this gap directly by functioning without a stable data connection.
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