A few weeks ago the first Blockathon at Canary Wharf was hosted by Coinsilium, sponsored by venue hosts SILK Ventures.
The Blockathon signalled the end of Coinsilium’s inaugural Blockchain Tech Lab week, a week where over 30 developers had been taught by blockchain application experts from around the globe.
The Blockathon was an opportunity for Lab attendees (and those who also had coding and blockchain experience) to show off their new skills. The brains behind the event, Hakim Mamoni (Coinsilium CTO) had come up with some themed challenges, all giving attendees the chance to show what can be done with blockchain.
The challenges:
Coder's Challenge: What would you build?
Have you been thinking about an innovative way to use blockchain technology to address a real world challenge?
Pitch your idea during Friday evening. If you can form a team, we want to see what you can build.
Fintech Challenge: Innovate on private companies shares issuance and transfer
Objective: streamline the process of issuing shares for early stage companies during their funding cycles.
Problems to solve: issuance of shares to private investors can be an expensive and cumbersome process, overall lack of transparency and lack of liquidity for both investors and issuers.
Medtech: Innovate on medical record sharing
Objective: providing access of full medical history of patients to health care professionals.
Problems to solve: a variety of incompatible centralized legacy systems which prevents the creation of a full medical history; security , confidentiality and privacy are key issues.
InsureTech: Innovate on claims fraud prevention
Objective: increase fraud detection to decrease cost overall for insurance clients.
Problem to solve: solve the issue of multiple claims made fraudulently across disconnected systems separately maintained by insurance companies.
Other issues: data privacy, lack of transparency re. the claims process, auditability of claim paper trail.
Pitching for ideas
Hakim Mamoni, CTO lead the pitching session. It was slow going at first, with some wary to stand up and offer up their ideas. But with some encouragement they were off and the ideas kept coming late into the night as Dominos’ pizza and beers kept them in flow. From the sensible such as CVs on the blockchain to the downright wacky such as pets on the blockchain (or maybe not so wacky?) it was great to see so much potential for a technology that five years ago few had heard of.
Kick-off and demos
After selecting their challenges, their teams and their strategies coding began! From Friday evening until Sunday afternoon there seemed to be very little sleep. Before they knew it, the teams of wired blockchain enthusiasts were being asked to demo their projects to the judging panel.
The demos were entertaining and especially interesting when they came to show what their projects had ended up morphing into over the weekend.
OpenReference
Uses blockchain to store digital fingerprints of reference documents. It can reduce that pain caused by obsolete verification process and allow all of to easily keep and check all of the referenced with respect to safety and privacy.
DOAgalise
Were addressing the difficulty for a decentralised company to build momentum with many founders/participants collaborating in a decentralised manner.
Special mention goes to DAOgalise who managed to morph their own team member, Dean, into a polar bear as part of their presentation! Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bDs0_7hlQs
Accountable
Blockchain powered incentives to prevent politicians from vrekaing their election promises.
Hidentity
Presented by Oraclize. Looking at solving the KYC problem with Ethereum.
TresureHunt
Smart contracts often need access to data external to the blockchain. What do we do when this external data is a location, like a pair of latitude - longitude?
We had five brilliant demos, all of which lead to some great discussions in the judging room about which team had shown true innovation and application of blockchain technology, and which one really would make an impact?
We did emerge with a winner (see below) but ultimately we were so impressed by them all that all were awarded prizes on the day.