Announcing the Winners of the PayPal Dev Days 2025 Hackathon

The energy. The ideas. The code. PayPal Dev Days 2025 brought together some of the most creative minds in tech for an unforgettable Hackathon—and now it’s time to celebrate the teams that stood out and took home the top honors.  

In just under 24 hours of intense collaboration, innovation, and problem-solving, developers from around the globe gathered at the PayPal San Jose campus to tackle one of three unique challenges. From building agentic checkout flows to upgrading legacy applications and creating powerful apps on Replit, the competition was fierce and the creativity was next-level.

Hackathon Challenges Recap

Participants competed in one of the following categories:

Agentic Integrations – Develop an agent that addresses a business challenges that leverages MCP Server, Agent Toolkit or PayPal APIs. 

Vibe Coding with Replit – Build an application on Replit using PayPal integrations.

Upgrade Your Legacy Integration – Bring your existing use case and work with the PayPal team to upgrade using the latest SDKs and beta products.

And the Winners Are…

On Wednesday evening, a panel of PayPal engineering and product leaders selected the finalist teams who would compete live on stage during the closing keynote presentation.    

After a lightning-round of demos (think shark tank style!) and careful deliberation by a panel of three PayPal executives, we’re thrilled to announce the winning teams:  

1st Place – Team CrawlerPal

Jordi Montes and Neeraj Jhawar (who met onsite!), wowed the judges with their innovative project CrawlerPal—a paywall AI agent assistant built with PayPal APIs. The team took home $5,000 USD, $8,000 in Amazon AWS credits, and a subscription to Replit Core.

2nd Place – Team Codebusters

Team Codebusters  modernized the PayPal integration for Shopware 6—a flexible, open-source, self-hosted eCommerce platform—by upgrading from the old JavaScript SDK (v5) to the beta PayPal JS SDK (v6). This improves performance, maintainability, and aligns with PayPal’s latest standards. The team took home $3,000 USD, $5,000 in Amazon AWS credits, and a subscription to Replit Core.

3rd Place – Team Rosen

Congratulations to team Rosen, Sida Zhang and Xiaobin Gu. They upgraded on Rosen, a global social trading app powered by PYUSD. The team took home $2,000 USD, $2,000 in Amazon AWS credits, and a subscription to Replit Core.

Check out this behind the scenes look into the teams experience here.

Check out the full awards ceremony here.

A Huge Thank You

To every developer who participated: thank you for bringing your talent, your ideas, and your passion. Hackathons are always a reminder of what’s possible when we come together to build—and push the boundaries of what payments and fintech can do in this new age of agentic e-commerce.   

Feeling inspired? Sign up for the PayPal Developer Newsletter to stay in the know of upcoming events and hackathons in your city.   

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build!