An app that spots a cycle top before it hits, tracks which KOLs actually make their followers money, and goes viral on X with ~50k impressions. Others scanned old wallets for forgotten tokens, and ranked 203 airdrops by real funding data, not hype.

All prompted into existence on Surf Studio — no code, no setup — by people who needed something specific and got it live in minutes.

We opened the Studio Build Challenge on April 21: $12K in prizes, five categories, two weeks. 819 builders showed up, deployed 1,234 apps, and submitted 582 to the gallery. Here's what happened.

Five categories. Ten winners.

The brief was open: build anything on Studio — a tracker, a dashboard, a game, a trading tool, a meme generator — and submit it to the gallery.

Zero code required. No SDK, no local setup. Describe what you want, Studio builds it, wired to Surf's live data layer from day one.

The categories:

- Most Useful — solves a real problem someone has today
- Most Creative — unexpected use of Studio or Surf's data
- Most Viral — highest impressions and engagement on X
- Best Design — most polished look and feel
- Ryan's Choice — personally stood out to our CEO

Builders had from April 21 through May 7 to submit.

Most Viral
@nabulines — CT Soul Age App

20.5K views, 293 likes, 128 retweets on X. 30 gallery likes, 8 remixes. Give someone a personalized result tied to their crypto identity, and they'll screenshot it without being asked. The app pulls from Surf's social intelligence layer — 40M+ parsed tweets and account history — to generate each result. Building that data pipeline from scratch would be its own project. Here it's just the backend that came free with the prompt.

Most Useful
@zhngtiz08266591 — TopSignal (逃顶信号)

12 on-chain and cycle indicators with live risk scoring, trading posture recommendations, and data export. 68 gallery likes, 48 remixes — the most-remixed app in the challenge. Each indicator pulls live from Surf's 80+ onchain tables and market data feeds. Without that, you'd be stitching together multiple blockchain RPCs and exchange APIs yourself. 48 people forked this and customized it for their own workflow — that's infrastructure, not just an app.

Most Creative
@Syu990 — Wallet Forgotten Assets Analyzer

A DeBank-style interface that scans wallets for forgotten tokens, dormant positions, and unclaimed assets. It works because Surf's address intelligence covers 100M+ labeled addresses across 13 networks — the kind of cross-chain coverage you'd normally need a dedicated indexer to get. One prompt, and it's a working multi-chain wallet scanner.

Best Design
@magicianafk — KOL Shill Analyzer

Tracks KOL token mentions against actual price performance — did the call make money or not? Surf's social layer monitors 12K+ crypto accounts and cross-references with live price data, so the app can answer that question without the builder wiring up a single API. Clean UI, smart scan history, and polished enough that you'd forget it was built with a prompt.

Ryan's Choice
@onehopeA9 — Narrative Conviction Radar

Scores narratives across six dimensions — social buzz, price lag, smart money, onchain activity, prediction markets, and risk crowding — to tell you if a narrative has real conviction or is just noise. Pulls from five Surf data domains at once. That's five different providers replaced by one prompt.

Onchain tools — 39% (Rank 1)
Price & volume — 15% (Rank 2)
Other — 14% (Rank 3)
Social — 12% (Rank 4)
Prediction markets — 7% (Rank 5)
DeFi — 7% (Rank 6)
Project fundamentals — 6% (Rank 7)

Nearly 4 in 10 apps built were onchain tools — wallet trackers, whale alerts, signal dashboards. That's the clearest sign of what crypto users want but don't have good options for yet. The apps that told you what the data means, not just showed you numbers, got the most likes.

To every one of the 819 builders who showed up and shipped — thank you.

The Build Challenge is over. Studio isn't.

Every submission lives in Studio Gallery. You can browse them, use them, remix them.

What would you build?