BEN Hacked the Netherlands
This recent February 10–12th the largest blockchain hackathon ever in Europe, the Dutch Blockchain Hackathon, was hosted in Groningen, Netherlands. Participants came from across the world to show the possibilities of blockchain in five track categories:
- Reinventing Government
- Energy
- Future of Pensions
- International Trade & Entrepreneurship
- Identity
The Blockchain Education Network (BEN) brought out two teams to the event, working on solutions for Energy and the Future of Pensions. By bringing out students with business, design, and development backgrounds — we developed workable prototypes addressing complicated problems set forth by the track sponsors.
To show the rest of BEN what we we’re doing in the Netherlands, we posted liberally to our organization snapchat (username: BlockchainEdu 👻). And after a busy 2 weeks since winning, I wanted to share my personal experience participating in this competition.
What’s it like to do a hackathon (as a non-coder)?
As the outgoing executive director of BEN, I’m no stranger to hackathons. This June 2016, BEN brought students from across the US, Canada, and Europe to attend the Distributed Trade Blockchain Hackathon in St. Louis, Missouri. Despite our kids meeting just the day before at our group Airbnb, our teams dominated, with one winning the $20,000 prize and another the runner-up cash prize.
Yet in St. Louis, I personally didn’t participate. I was under the belief that my business/marketing/graphic design skills were only useful for organizing this opportunity for developers. The name “hackathon” doesn’t sound like a competition that a business student would have much usefulness in for a 24-hour prototype competition. Despite this, students from BEN Netherlands invited me to join them at the Dutch Blockchain Hackathon and give my blockchain chops a run for it’s money. So with a bit of yolo, I decided to give it a shot and flew out from Baltimore to Schiphol a day before the event.
The working space was MASSIVE! With over 50 teams and 400+ people hacking away at blockchain, it was exhilarating to see the epic scope of enthusiasm in the room.
After the opening ceremonies (video above) we got right to work. Our team NestEgg had two developers (Haischel Dabian and Robin de Boer), two business students (Nathalie Drost and myself), and Jeroen Merks (who was a mix of both ) — so everyone had a role to play.
While I’m personally quite fascinated in basic income and ideas for sustainable economies for the 21st century, no one was an expert in pensions. Thus, Nathalie and I began our role by attending the 101 course by APG, the largest pension company in the Netherlands. To follow up, we asked questions and further interviews to help us narrow in on the specific problems they were facing. We knew that while the code was important, understanding the exact nature of the problem would help us create a more realistic implementation design than going about it alone.
Here’s our problem abstract for NestEgg.
Pensions are in need of updating to prepare for a transitioning economy from manufacturing based to service based. There is a decreasing ratio of working people:retirees because of an aging population and an increasing trend of independents (startups, freelancers, fast changing careers) that don’t add up/build a “second pillar” of retirement funds through a large employer. Also, the coverage ratio, as in the ratio between the total capital available and the pension pay-out, has been negative for the past two years. Individuals have a difficult time understanding their pension and what they can expect of their future, which indicates that either it is too complex to understand or there is a lack of transparency. This is seen in studies showing a lack of confidence in pensions, which also exacerbates individuals choosing not to invest money into them. These developments/changes ask for a new way of organizing pensions.
By the end of the first day we had the problem outlined and a prototype mapped out. Exhausted, our team went back late to the airbnb to get some much needed R&R — (I’m not like my coder friends who are able to stay up for the entire 48 hours. )
The second day was our time to shine. Judges came around the tables and we gave our first pitch, explaining our idea to the various judges who wished to hear more about our solution. Even though it was a 48 hour hackathon, it was spread over 3 days — from noon Friday to noon Sunday.
So on Friday we had outlined the problem and prototype, on Saturday we earned three balloons of recognition and on Sunday we were placed first, won 12 frisbees and gave presentation on stage.
Getting Hacked at a Hackathon
One caveat to this event started shortly before our first pitch on the 2nd day. Around 11am CEST, I got notifications on my phone logging me out of all my Google accounts. After not being able to quickly log back in, I tried again on my laptop to see that the password was recently changed.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to react because shortly after this happened, judges came around the table and asked for us to describe our idea in 15 minutes. Since this was the first round of judging to see if we continued to later rounds of recognition, I shut my phone off and focused on the future of saving the millennial generation’s looming problem of unsustainable pensions.
Phew, we nailed the first pitch. Back to trying to fix this problem and get back to work. Only I ran into another problem. My iCloud account was tied to my laptop and the hacker locked me out with a pleasant message of encouragement. Guess I won’t be using my laptop today. BEN members from both teams surrounded me trying to help me recover access to my accounts and devices, but the it was beyond a quick fix.
While I recently switched my number to Google Fi following up on mobile security advice from Kraken, I had not deactivated my old Verizon number in order to finish transferring over accounts to the new number. Despite planning to finish that process post-hackathon, my intentions were a just a few days late. I called up Verizon (costing serious international minutes) and found out they transferred my number early in the morning. Apparently someone kept calling to get in, and despite only knowing the account number (not my pin or social security number), Verizon had no issue giving away my number to the hacker. Textbook social engineering. Looking through logs later, the hooligan loaded up my digits on an iPhone 5s in Indiana (but assuming use of VPNs, who knows where they actually were).
What’s next for NestEgg?
Since winning, we began a partnership with APG to develop this 48 hour project into a 6 month pilot. Our goal is to rethink personal financial well-being, and design a solution for the 21st century, accommodating a culture or innovators and entrepreneurs who are shaping the transition from manufacturing economies into the knowledge economy.
If your interested in learning more about how our platform works, Nathalie Drost wrote a summary.
