Chris Spahr #SBHACK19 Interview
Hacking the Supply Chain at the Swiss Blockchain Hackathon #SBHACK19 with KORE Technologies
The Swiss Blockchain Hackathon #SBHACK19 is an excellent chance for young talent to prove their creativity and showcase their unorthodox approach to problems. I had the opportunity to catch Chris Spahr, who participates in the Supply Chain vertical.
Yannick Zehnder: Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to answer some questions about #SBHACK19. Please give us a short introduction about yourself and tell us what you do in between coffees Monday through Friday.
Chris Spahr: Between coffees? I’m usually in the bathroom, constantly being reminded that I can’t drink coffee! Jokes aside, I’m a Bitcoin and blockchain enthusiast. I started my journey into the rabbit hole, and I was hooked immediately. Since then, I have worked in the blockchain space as a trader and market maker, and together with a close friend, even created our own, fully automatic altcoin trading bot. We’re in the process of turning that into our own business right now, but we’ve recently been hired by KORE Technologies to work on smart contracts and other blockchain-related things part-time.
YZ: You chose to participate in #SBHACK19. What was your motivation?
CS: It’s mostly a learning experience for us as a team. None of us have ever worked with smart contracts before, but we still managed to deploy our very first, working smart contract on Ethereum. It’s basically a self-induced, high-speed crash course in a topic we think is gonna be crucial in the coming years!
YZ: What vertical do you tackle, and what challenges do you work on? Is there a real-life connection for you, or are you new to the verticals topic?
CS: We have tackled challenge #1 in the supply chain vertical. We are trying to create an API that communicates with both the Ethereum and Hyperledger blockchains to tokenize physical assets. The assets, in this case, are special containers that are used to transport delicate medical items, among other things. They’re equipped with temperature and pressure sensors on board to keep track of the physical environment for the payload continually. We plan to secure information about these containers on the two chosen blockchains: Information that should never be changed such as dimensions and serial numbers go on the Ethereum chain, where it can never be tampered with. Information that gets continuously updated such as location, and readings from the internal sensors, get put on the Hyperledger, which scales well for this type of data, to avoid congestion. This way, all crucial information to identify each container can be accessed globally on the Ethereum blockchain to ensure trustless transparency. At the same time, the company can still analyze all relevant data efficiently on their private Hyperledger chain. In essence, our idea can potentially bring the best of both worlds to any supply chain.
YZ: You created a bot for cryptocurrency portfolio rebalancing. How does your understanding of economics and technology help you solve the challenge? Do you think you can take home learnings that will have a positive impact on your everyday business?
CS: Understanding economics was entirely irrelevant for this topic, other than providing the small talk. Having experience in programming, however, definitely helped with understanding the languages of smart contracts and their corresponding API by themselves. But the way a blockchain works and how a user should interact with it was a completely new challenge for all of us. And now that we finally de-mystified the holy grail of blockchain-related programming — the smart contract — a little bit, we will definitely keep digging and improving our skills in this field. After all, this is all I’m supposed to be doing at KORE Technologies in the coming months, so I better learn fast!
YZ: What was your best experience at #SBHACK19 so far?
CS: Definitely the teamwork. Since I’m new to the company, it was my honor to lead this team as their captain. And judging by the experience we’ve had over the last few days, working with the very same people on coming projects in the future is going to be something to look forward to!
YZ: Chris, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I wish you and your team lots of success and lots of luck!
I wish you and all the other teams lots of stamina, great success, and of course the best of luck! Thank you for putting all that energy into the Swiss blockchain ecosystem.
