Hack The Future 2025: Aquatopia, and the Hackathon Next to a Zoo
After my time on staff at BruCON, I went to a very different kind of event: Hack The Future 2025. This time I wasn’t volunteering, I was just there to take part and enjoy it, and that turned out to be exactly what I needed. It’s a completely different energy from a security conference, and the location came with a bonus I did not expect.
What is Hack The Future?
Hack The Future is an experience-driven hackathon for students in IT, design, communication, marketing and business in Belgium. It’s powered by de Cronos Groep, one of the biggest tech players in the country, and it’s grown into the biggest hackathon in Belgium.
The concept is simple but really well executed. Every edition is built around a specific theme, and students work in teams of two to take on a series of tech and design challenges. Each challenge is designed by a different company from the Cronos Groep, so you’re not solving abstract textbook problems, you’re working on something a real company actually cares about. Past editions have thrown students into themes like nuclear fallout, the colonisation of Mars, a jungle expedition, and a heist.
It’s been running since 2014, and over the years it’s hosted thousands of students across hundreds of company-designed challenges. The whole thing is free to take part in, and they even feed you lunch and dinner across both days, which as a student I can tell you is not a small detail.
This Year: Aquatopia
The 2025 edition, the twelfth, was themed Aquatopia, taking everyone deep beneath the water’s surface into a mysterious world of hidden ecosystems and unknown life forms. The themes are always more than just decoration. The branding, the challenges, the whole atmosphere of the venue gets built around the story, and it genuinely pulls you in.
The format splits across two days. Day one leans toward the IT students and day two toward the creative students, but they actively encourage cross-disciplinary participation, so you’re free to jump into challenges on both days. You pick your challenges by preference when you register, get assigned one ahead of time, and on the day itself you get the full brief, the tools, and the judging criteria. Teams with the best solutions walk away with prizes.
What I liked most is that it doesn’t feel like an exam. It feels like being dropped into a real problem with a teammate, a deadline, and a room full of people doing the same thing. The pressure is there but so is the fun.
The Venue, and the Zoo
Here’s the part that made this edition unforgettable. The event was held at the Flanders Meeting & Convention Center on Koningin Astridplein in Antwerp, which is the building physically attached to the Antwerp Zoo. The event’s own tagline is literally “a room with a zoo,” and they mean it.
The Antwerp Zoo is one of the oldest zoos in the world, right in the centre of the city next to the central station, and it’s beautiful. Because the convention center is part of the same complex, attending the hackathon got us free entrance to the zoo, and we absolutely took advantage of it.
Taking a break from a challenge to go wander past elephants, big cats, and an aquarium that fit the Aquatopia theme a little too perfectly was surreal in the best way. Most hackathons give you a fluorescent-lit room and a coffee machine. This one gave us a world-famous zoo as the break room. We spent a good chunk of our downtime just exploring, and it completely reset our brains before diving back into the work. Honestly it was awesome, and it’s the kind of thing I’ll be telling people about for a long time. 
Why It Was Worth It
Beyond the novelty of the location, Hack The Future is a genuinely valuable event for any student in tech. You get to test yourself against real challenges set by real companies, you work shoulder to shoulder with people from other universities and other disciplines, and you get a direct line to the kind of companies you might end up working for. The networking happens naturally because everyone is there to build something.
Coming from a security background, it was good for me to step slightly outside my usual lane and work on broader tech and design problems with a teammate. It’s a reminder that the field is bigger than any one specialty, and that some of the best ideas come from mixing perspectives.
If you’re a student in Belgium in IT or a creative field, I can’t recommend this enough. It’s free, the food is good, the challenges are real, the atmosphere is built around an epic theme, and depending on the year you might just get a zoo thrown in.
Two days well spent. Already curious what next year’s theme will be.
Hack The Future 2025 (Aquatopia) was held at the Flanders Meeting & Convention Center in Antwerp. It’s powered by de Cronos Groep and is free for participating students. More at hackthefuture.be.