Masumi Pauses Hackathons as Sokusumi Shifts Focus to Paying Customers

Masumi is changing how it allocates resources across its AI agent ecosystem. During Cardano Developer Office Hours, Patrick Tobler said the team has paused hackathons and stepped back from broad developer acquisition, while Albina Nikitkova confirmed that both DevRel team members are now contributing to Sokusumi. The shift reflects Masumi’s view that stronger commercial demand should come before another major push to attract builders.

Masumi Pauses Hackathons After Limited Follow-Through

Masumi has spent much of the past two years trying to attract developers to build agents and applications around its infrastructure.

Hackathons were part of that strategy. Tobler said the team organized many of them and that some produced strong projects and introduced Masumi to capable developers. He specifically described Cardano-focused hackathons as some of the more productive events.

The difficulty came after the events ended.

According to Tobler, many participants built projects for the hackathon itself but did not continue deploying or developing them afterward. That reduced the value of repeatedly committing startup resources to short development competitions without sustained follow-through.

Masumi has therefore paused its hackathon activity for now.

Tobler said the team recently decided not to make developer acquisition a primary short-term priority. The infrastructure required to build on Masumi is already available, while the wider agent-to-agent market has not yet generated enough usage to create strong organic demand from developers.

He also said spending additional resources on developer acquisition is difficult to justify when those resources can instead be used to improve Sokusumi, build more useful agents and acquire paying customers.

DevRel Resources Move Into Sokusumi

The strategy change is already affecting the structure of the team.

Nikitkova said Masumi has temporarily reduced parts of its developer relations activity because both DevRel team members have moved into Sokusumi contributions. She added that those programs can return when the team increases its focus on protocol development again.

Sokusumi is Masumi’s business-facing workspace for interacting with AI coworkers. Its current product direction is concentrated on marketing, where agents can perform tasks such as research, strategy and customer journey work.

Tobler said approximately 90% of Sokusumi’s current users are marketing agencies, giving the team a defined customer group instead of requiring it to address the entire AI agent market at once.

The platform does not yet cover the full marketing lifecycle.

Research and strategy agents are already available, while Tobler identified content creation, campaign execution, ad publishing and ad monitoring as areas where additional agents are still needed. His longer-term description of Sokusumi is a workspace capable of supporting an entire marketing campaign, while agencies can also use individual AI coworkers for only selected stages of that process.

The platform has also added project and account memory for AI coworkers. Tobler said agents can retain context across interactions, while noting that long-term AI memory remains an unresolved technical challenge across the wider industry.

Cardano Builders Have Yet to Follow the Paying Customers

Sokusumi’s current customer base creates a notable split between the Cardano infrastructure underneath the product and the businesses using it.

Tobler said Sokusumi currently has no paying customer originating from within the Cardano ecosystem. He also said only a small number of external Cardano teams have built agents for Masumi so far.

That gap is shaping Masumi’s approach to future developer growth.

Rather than continuing to subsidize builder activity before clear demand exists, the team wants Sokusumi to demonstrate that developers can earn revenue by deploying useful agents to the platform. Tobler said a larger base of paying customers would make building an agent commercially attractive without requiring the same level of direct developer acquisition.

Nikitkova made a similar point during the discussion, saying Masumi does not yet have enough success stories to attract builders who will independently develop and maintain products without continuous support from the small DevRel team.

Masumi is therefore reversing the sequence it previously pursued. Instead of bringing in more developers first and waiting for demand to emerge, the team is prioritizing Sokusumi usage, commercial validation and paying customers as the mechanism that could later attract new builders.

The developer infrastructure remains available, but the immediate growth target has changed: Masumi is now trying to make customer demand the reason developers return to build the next generation of agents around its Cardano-based ecosystem.