Juanita Jaramillo Builds CIL Market Bridge During Gimbalabs’ 12-Week Piece of Pie Hackathon

Juanita Jaramillo, creator of Cardano Insights Lab, completed CIL Market Bridge during Gimbalabs’ 12-week Piece of Pie hackathon after entering the program without a development background.

Her original goal was partly journalistic. Rather than interviewing developers about the hackathon experience from the outside, Jaramillo wanted to participate in the process herself. That experiment produced a tangible result: an application that is online, functional and now documented in the Piece of Pie Yearbook.

CIL Market Bridge Asks Whether Blockchain Is Needed

CIL Market Bridge was developed around a problem Jaramillo had identified through her work covering blockchain: technology can become the starting point of the conversation before the underlying problem has been clearly defined.

The application reverses that process.

It guides users through questions about the problem they are trying to solve, including who needs to trust whom, whether information needs independent verification, whether multiple parties are involved, whether records should be protected from unilateral alteration, and whether traceability is actually required.

The assessment can also lead away from blockchain entirely. If the problem can be adequately addressed with a traditional database, blockchain does not need to become the default solution.

CIL Market Bridge therefore operates as an early decision-support tool rather than a product designed to direct users toward a particular blockchain. It is intended to structure the assessment that comes before decisions about networks, architecture or implementation.

Twelve Weeks Inside Gimbalabs’ Piece of Pie

Piece of Pie gave Jaramillo 12 weeks to turn that concept into a working application while experiencing the development process she initially wanted to understand as a journalist.

Gimbalabs structured Piece of Pie 2026 around building in public, with participants documenting consistent and verifiable progress. The program included 33,000 ADA across four tracks, with the Cardano Foundation sponsoring the 20,000 ADA Cardano Pie track for projects building on Cardano mainnet.

Jaramillo’s account of the hackathon describes a development process shaped by debugging, changing technical approaches, reducing scope and learning when a planned feature was becoming an obstacle to shipping the product.

The experience also changed her position within the story she had originally intended to cover.

Instead of observing completed demos and asking developers to explain how they were made, she had to work through deployment, user flow, payment integration and the final demo herself. Features were postponed, solutions were replaced and mistakes became part of the development process.

“I joined Piece of Pie with the innocent intention of understanding what a hackathon was really like from the inside,” Jaramillo wrote after completing the program.

“The small detail is that I ended up building an app.”

Her project ultimately reached the outcome required to move beyond an experiment on her own computer. CIL Market Bridge went online, worked as an application and was included in the Piece of Pie Yearbook.

Cardano Insights Lab Moves From Analysis to Building

Cardano Insights Lab is an independent observatory created by Jaramillo around blockchain ecosystems, decentralized infrastructure, governance, digital trust and public-sector adoption.

Cardano is a core area of its research, alongside regulation, identity, payments, tokenization, DePIN and institutional adoption. Its work focuses on making these subjects understandable to non-technical audiences and examining blockchain beyond market speculation and promotional narratives.

CIL Market Bridge extends that approach into a product.

The available material does not establish that the application itself operates on Cardano mainnet or participated in the dedicated Cardano Pie track. It should therefore not be described as a Cardano dApp without additional technical confirmation.

Its connection to the Cardano ecosystem comes through its development inside Gimbalabs’ Piece of Pie program and through Cardano Insights Lab’s existing focus on Cardano and broader blockchain adoption.

After the hackathon, CIL Market Bridge received its own entry in the Piece of Pie Yearbook, including its description, application and repository links, with Jaramillo identified as its builder.

Jaramillo entered Piece of Pie intending to document what happens between an idea and a finished hackathon project. Twelve weeks later, Cardano Insights Lab had something it did not have when she started: a working application that turns its approach to blockchain adoption into a process another user can actually follow.

For Jaramillo, the result was the two things she originally went looking for.

An app and a story.