Develop Digitally Credibly Team Wins IBM Blockchain Hackathon
The Develop Digitally Credibly Team entered the biggest coding competition of the year on November 4–5, 2017, where over 21 teams and 90+ participants gathered in the first Caribbean “BlueHack” Hackathon(entitled ‘Jamaica AI Nation’) at the Jamaica Pegasus’ Talk of the Town ballroom. The main organizers were the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), in partnership with National Commercial Bank (NCB) and Flow Jamaica. The event was conceptualized by IBM research scientist Dr. Kala Fleming, and featured over 100 different innovators, entrepreneurs, developers, designers, executives, investors with the objective of co-inventing solutions towards:
- Next Generation Consumer Solutions: building loyalty in financial markets
- Blockchain Solutions: simplifying financial services
- Learning Experience Solutions: transforming learning using AI technology
The Credibly Team emerged the winners for both the Blockchain category and the overall competition for a business solution that assists unbanked farmers to gain easy access to loans and financing without them having to fill out any paperwork.
Worldwide 2.7 billion people are considered unbanked. 86% of Jamaica’s population is underbanked meaning they do not have access to full financial services such as loans.
Credibly simplifies financial services for unbanked farmers who are productive but want to be more productive. Credibly empowers creditors with the means to reduce risk in issuing loans and insurance to unbanked farmers by leveraging Blockchain technology.
The Blockchain for business is offered as an enterprise solution using IBM Blockchain and the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project. Blockchain is a shared immutable ledger for recording a history of transactions.
Develop Digitally’s Credibly brings together multiple entities within a farmer’s business network. By getting data from suppliers and distributors, a trusted and secure farmer profile is established. This allows banks and creditors to generate a credit score. Credibly leverages the following benefits of using the blockchain:
- Cost-effective
- Efficient
- Safe, Secure, private, and indelible
- Distributed and sustainable
- Transparent and auditable
- Consensus-based and transactional
Credibly completely removes the burden from the farmer of having to fill out any paperwork at all!
Blockchain technology can be used to solve business challenges. There is not always the need for cryptocurrency exchange when we talk about utilizing blockchain technology. Blockchain is great at solving supply chain challenges; it enables global business transactions with less friction and more trust.
Checkout our winning pitch from the event:
And also this radio interview for the Jamaica Information Service that goes into a bit more detail on how Credibly works:
The team is comprised of 5 members Varun Baker (Project Lead), Antoine Chung (Graphic Designer & Creative Director) http://antoinnechung.com], Jonathan Cooper (Information Security Consultant), Jordan Cooper (Software Developer) [http://jordancooper.me], and Phillip Llewellyn (Software Developer). Since November, the team has recruited talent from rival teams to build out a prototype of the Credibly [http://credibly.gitlab.io/homepage/] platform.
We look forward to sharing more news and updates as these developments unfold and of course, we’re really excited about the future.
Tags: Agriculture Blockchain NCB FLOW IBM Bluehack Jamaica Caribbean Hackathon BlueOpen
