One of the more encouraging things this year is that CKB’s builder ecosystem kept expanding while much of the industry was doing the opposite. Teams were shrinking, budgets were being cut, and a lot of speculative activity disappeared. Meanwhile, more developers kept showing up to experiment on CKB. Today, over 100 are working on or exploring the network: - 70 formal CKBuilders working through a structured program - ~40 more coming in through Build on CKB, an open group for developers curious about the chain - 45 projects now listed on the CKBuilder tracker, with 23 added in a single quarter and 15 submitted for technical review by core CKB developers Claw & Order, a two-week AI Agent hackathon, closed with 22 open-source submissions; 16 came from CKBuilders, including the top two prize winners - The work spans a surprisingly wide range: ZK key recovery for AI agents, a Groth16 zkSNARK verifier, a Fiber desktop client, an ML-DSA post-quantum implementation, a DID reference dashboard, lending primitives, prediction pools, and more Some of these builders are now graduating from experimentation into independent projects. But the more important signal is that all of this happened during one of the bleakest periods for the industry. If this is what the builder pipeline looks like when capital and attention are scarce…what happens when they aren’t? 👀