A hackathon entry demonstrates how BSV can simultaneously address several problems in an automated way.
MolDock Agent Swarm, built by Elas for BSV Association‘s Open Run Agentic Pay 2026 Hackathon, distributes drug simulation work to anyone with a web browser. It then pays them in BSV micropayments for every test they run. While automated payments for background work are useful, MolDock is also verifying the results on-chain.
Molecular docking is the computational backbone of modern drug discovery. It simulates how small molecules bind to target proteins, and it chews through enormous amounts of processing power. Elas’ system breaks that workload into pieces, distributes them across agents running in browsers and on local machines, and uses BSV blockchain not just to pay for the work, but to re-run and verify the math independently. In an industry where reproducibility and trust are everything, that matters.
The incentive structure is straightforward: every test pays 100 satoshis regardless of outcome, with an additional 10 sats per atom in the drug molecule for tests that pass. Given that between 50% and 75% of tests are expected to fail, the base reward ensures participants are compensated for their time and energy, even when the simulation doesn’t find a valid binding.
“I think it serves as a good demo of how you can validate a computation that requires a lot of searching for valid combinations,” Elas founder Brendan Lee told CoinGeek. “This allows us to publish all the combinations, capture which ones fail, and then for the ones which pass we capture the complete set of equations on the blockchain.”
The Open Run Agentic Pay 2026 Hackathon, organized by BSV Association, began on March 23 and enters its judging period on April 18. The online event is open to teams of 1-4 people, with the requirement that entries be open-source and produce 1.5 on-chain, verifiable transactions that are meaningful to the application’s functionality.
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Verification, not just payments
MolDock’s micropayment model is possible thanks to BSV’s low transaction fees, which would be prohibitively expensive on more limited proof-of-work chains like BTC. At 100 sats per test, a project generating hundreds of transactions per hour needs fees measured in fractions of a U.S. cent, not whole dollars. Only BSV offers that kind of economics at scale on a proof-of-work (PoW) base layer.
But its more interesting innovation is what happens when a test passes. Rather than simply trusting the agent’s reported result, MolDock’s smart contracts regenerate the computation on-chain. For a molecule with 20 atoms testing against a docking location with 30 atoms, that means 20 cycles of 30 rounds of mathematical verification. It’s all executed using Bitcoin Script primitives, so the result is cryptographically provable.
This creates something rare in distributed computing: a trustless verification layer. The agent can’t fake a successful result because the math gets re-run and checked on the blockchain. Failed tests are recorded too, building a public record of molecular interactions, whether they’re ultimately valid or invalid.
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Building agent trust mechanisms
Elas has also built a trust mechanism into the swarm. New agents are marked as “new” and tested with a small number of initial tasks before being given more work. This is a guard against agents that might try to fail everything quickly to collect the base reward, without doing real computation.
“We build trust in our agents by testing the first few failures, then once we know they aren’t just failing everything to collect the reward, we start to give them more work,” Lee said. “You can see this in the ‘new’ or ‘trusted’ tags next to the agents.”
Anyone can participate by visiting the MolDock site, creating a lightweight agent with a single click that runs directly in the user’s browser.
We tested this ourselves and verified the payouts on WhatsOnChain—each transaction matched the expected reward structure, with the base 100 sats for failed tests and higher amounts for successful docks, proportional to the molecule’s atom count (for the record, we successfully docked Aspirin molecules against COX-2).
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Bigger than one hackathon prototype
Lee said MolDock works as a proof of concept for a broader framework. The same model (distribute computation, verify on-chain, pay per result) could be applied to other scientific research workflows beyond molecular docking.
“The rewards are small for calculation as per my budget, but it allows people to build a wallet by doing real, useful work,” Lee said. “This framework could easily be extended to many other scientific discovery methods.”
With Lee aiming for 1.5 million on-chain transactions, MolDock is stress-testing both its own architecture and BSV’s capacity to handle a high volume of microtransactions. The project demonstrates something the wider blockchain industry has talked about for years but rarely delivered: a system where performing real work, verifying it trustlessly, and paying for it automatically all happen in a single, integrated workflow.
Elas built MolDock partly to demonstrate more of what’s possible inside Bitcoin Script, and Lee noted that developers are still scratching the surface of what the language can actually do.
“(They’re) not really seeing the big picture,” he said.
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Watch: Developers can propel the BSV blockchain forward
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Source: https://coingeek.com/moldock-agent-swarm-taps-bsv-for-molecular-docking-validation/