Cam Pham from TomoChain awards the grand prize to Team Ohmnislash for their exam management solution

In 2018, the biggest barrier to blockchain adoption was the technology itself — it needed to be faster, have lower costs, and be easier to use. In 2019 a lot of progress has been made in those areas by projects like TomoChain that have launched their own blockchains, and the challenge has shifted to a new area: a shortage of developers trained to use these faster, better blockchain technologies.

To help remedy that, TomoChain sponsored a training workshop and hackathon in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam together with Kambria, Intek Institute and CoinGecko. Alpha Blockchain was the main organizer for the 2-day hackathon that was held at the Intek Institute campus.

Eight teams and 33 total participants competed for prizes totaling the equivalent of USD 1,200 in TOMO tokens. Teams were given a choice between solving an existing problem in Vietnam using blockchain, or building a game that utilizes blockchain in a meaningful way.

Intek’s spacious campus had plenty of room for the teams and mentors to work

Mentors Trang Tran (Share Ring), Robert Vong (Elefos) and Sean Boyce (Alpha Blockchain) guided the teams in smart contract development, UI/UX development, and business viability. Judges for this event include Tom Howard, Lynn Hoang, Fedor Bushnalov, Daniel Caune, Cam Pham, and Jeffrey Zirlin. All judges and mentors were accomplished in the fields of blockchain or full-stack development.

A big thank you goes out to our judges, who had their job cut out for them with many interesting Dapps!

At the end of the second day, three teams won a total of four prizes.

• First prize — Ohmnislash (Blockchain exam management solution)
• Second prize — Nairbmak (Secure pharmaceutical adverse event reporting solution)
• Third prize — State of Art (Blockchain based peer-to-peer parking spot rental platform)
• Special prize — State of Art (best use of Coingecko’s API)

2019 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the blockchain industry. Dominated by speculation in the past, the industry is beginning to shift to different (less rocky) road — education and training centered on higher performance infrastructure as a mechanism to drive technology adoption.

Tomochain is a fast, low-cost blockchain that uses a Proof of Stake Voting (POSV) consensus model and Solidity-compatible smart contracts. They are active on Github where they publish most of their code, and were named among the top 5 FinTech startups in Vietnam by FinTech Singapore.

Kambria is an open innovation platform for frontier technologies such as robotics, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. By connecting developers to market needs, they are committed to driving innovation more efficiently in Vietnam and globally.