A lex Shelkovnikov, Deloitte Ventures & Blockchain Lead from Deloitte, who is also a judge on the hackathon, said “We are really pleased to be sponsoring the Ether.Camp online Hackathon. We are looking forward to seeing a lot of great ideas being worked on, and hope that some of these are going to become great start-ups in the future.”
The hackathon listed more than 1,000 registered hackers prior to its launch last week, with 53 active teams and 350 participating developers. Among the more popular projects by votes are Prezzo, a location based advertising platform that attempts to prevent spam by paying users to see adverts. Etherics further develops FlightDelay by allowing customers to share risks, represented by tokens, with investors, “with incentives aligned and balanced by self-adjusting smart contracts” according to the project’s presentation.
An interesting project is Solidifier which is concerned with raising the quality of smart contract code. According to their presentation, they aim to make “cutting edge program verification techniques” based on “significant amount of effort… invested in developing automatic methods for ensuring software correctness using formal reasoning” available to smart contracts.
A more fun project may be the eSports DAO, created by Justin Zheng, a 16-year-old. The team aims to create a DAO which funds eSports teams proposals using Gnosis and futarchy to govern the business. Blockchain plus video games plus futarchy equals love, their presentation says. Very ambitious, and we look forward to the end results.
A far more serious project is Decentralized Court. A smart contracts based system which uses reputation tokens to randomly select juries based on their reputation with arbitration and appeal to the jury system available to resolve disputes. It is about time someone tries to update the stuffy legal system, but whether Decentralized Court is it, remains to be seen.
There are many more projects as the biggest blockchain hackathon continues for another four weeks. Roman Mandeleil the CEO and founder of Ether Camp said “We’re very pleased to see so many innovative teams on the platform making real progress in the first week of the competition. Others are starting to see our vision and the potential of the Virtual Accelerator, Deloitte is a partner who understands that vision and we wholeheartedly welcome them on board.” He further told CCN:
“[W]e are still inviting everybody to take part in this unique celebration of innovative ideas. The live competition will run for 4 more weeks so there is plenty of time to show something really cool.”
The hackathon, uniquely for the blockchain space, is fully run online, with teams live writing the code during the five weeks. Moreover, everyone can participate either by joining a team or by voting, with even the judge’s votes available for anyone to see.
The winning team leaves with a prize of $50,000, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in this space, with judges from Skype, Bloomberg, Consensys, RSK, and much of the wider blockchain ecosystem, including judges from the gold sponsors.
Image from Shutterstock.
