Ideas that BUIDL: Why MentorGraph Won at Sub0 Argentina

[ ARKIV ] headed to Argentina for Devconnect, supporting hundreds of hackers at Sub0.

At Sub0, [ ARKIV ] ran a hackathon with an incredible 32 submissions from around 150 hackers. With $10k of bounties on offer, we were looking for teams who were interested in integrating Web3 databases into their project. Storing data on centralised platforms immediately negates the idea of decentralisation, and we are against that. We stand for Web3 databases!

MentorGraph were our winners from Sub0, with a simple thesis: infrastructure shapes culture; how knowledge itself is stored, shared, and owned. They created an on-chain, p2p mentorship and trust-graph layer built on Arkiv. Here is how it all went down:

[ ARKIV ] is Web3 Database

Arkiv is a Web3 database layer. Ethereum aligned and powered by the $GLM token, Arkiv is a L2 which allows builders to compose their own L3 DB-chains with Web3 guarantees.

Sub0 x [ ARKIV ] Hackathon

If you give builders neutral, shared data infrastructure, what do they choose to build?

This was the debut for Arkiv as a team. We were impressed with how many young hackers from across the Latam region participated, and their enthusiasm for Web3 data.

Among the 150 hackers came the 32 submissions, and it was MentorGraph, led by @vrneth and @kosmostasis that came through victorious.

Mentor Graph: Sub0 Winning Submission

We have all heard Ethereum described as an "infinite garden." What does that metaphor mean for education? For how humans actually learn, teach, and support each other? - @vrneth

MentorGraph is an on-chain, p2p mentorship and trust-graph layer built on Arkiv. Users create a wallet-owned profile, publish Asks (what they want help with) and Offers (how they can help). They can then explore a dynamic network graph to discover aligned mentors, mentees, and collaborators, and request meetings with each other for learning sessions.

Arkiv is the core data layer: profiles, asks, offers, and graph edges are stored as Arkiv entities. The app demonstrates how Arkiv can power real-time, low-cost, composable social data graphs. You can check out the docs here: https://github.com/understories/mentor-graph

Mentor Graph Becomes p2pmentor

The MentorGraph team put it best themselves:

Infrastructure choices shape culture, whether we admit it or not.

Built on Arkiv, their platform allows anyone to teach, learn, and mentor peer-to-peer, without intermediaries, while fully owning their data. It allows shared knowledge to light a path through the dark forest. From the winning submission, p2pmentor is being curated and built as we speak.

Arkiv stood out to them because it did not try to define outcomes. It did not treat data as leverage. It made data shared, user-owned, verifiable, and composable - the missing layer they needed to move from idea to execution.

The team are now opening a small beta for communities that care deeply about learning, public goods, and mechanism design.

Help shape p2pmentor:

• Follow Vero and Koss on X: @vrneth and @kosmostasis
• Website: p2pmentor.com

Learn more about [ ARKIV ]:

• Get started in 15 mins, build your own Web3 database: https://arkiv.network/