🏆 My son won! A proud moment to share: Marat Sagdiiev and his team took a prize
By Sagdiiev Artem · October 27, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
🏆 My son won! A proud moment to share: Marat Sagdiiev and his team took a prize-winning place at Decode & Detect: The XRPL AI Hack, organised by UK Centre for Blockchain Technologies.
🔍 The brief: 40,000+ transactions on the XRP Ledger, money laundering hidden somewhere inside, and plenty of honest payments built to look just as suspicious.
⚖️ That second part is what makes it hard. Any model can flag a pattern - the real skill is knowing which patterns are harmless. Compliance teams face exactly this every day: alerts everywhere, and real risk easy to miss.
💡 What made the difference: looking at behaviour rather than wallets, teaching the model what decoys look like, and dropping dead ends quickly.
🙏 Thank you to Narmin Rahimli for organising such a well-run event, and to the UK Centre for Blockchain Technologies, Ripple Impact (Ripple) and XRPL Commons teams for a well-designed challenge and for backing students who take on real problems.
👏 Well done, Marat Sagdiiev, Manolo Chow and Tomas Balnionis - you worked brilliantly as a team! Teamwork really is the key to results like this, and for Marat Sagdiiev and Manolo Chow it is already their second hackathon win together!
#AML #Blockchain #XRPL #AI #FinTech #Compliance #Hackathon #UCL