The Beyond Blockchain Hackathon By Gitcoin & ConsenSys Labs
Register today and get paid to launch your next blockchain startup.
The Beyond Blockchain hackathon is an Ethereum hackathon hosted by Gitcoin, a ConsenSys company, and sponsored by the firm’s venture capital arm, ConsenSys Labs.
What is The Beyond Blockchain Hackathon?
The Beyond Blockchain Hackathon is a three-week virtual hackathon where global developers and entrepreneurs will collaborate to push blockchain applications to new frontiers within the industries of finance, health, and media.
We are looking for projects that address an actual problem and teams that have shown the progress and entrepreneurial instincts to make something real and get it out in the world. This hackathon goes beyond the hype and dives into real-world use cases and adoption.
Why Start Virtual Hackathons?
Ethereum is a remote-first ecosystem, so naturally, it makes sense to create a remote-first hackathon. Virtual hackathons enable anyone to participate from around the world, opening up competitions and creating more diverse and unique teams. Hackers and entrepreneurs around the world have busy lives with demanding schedules making it difficult to plan an entire trip around a single hackathon. Virtual hackathons allow participants to stay in the context of their personal lives, compliment their schedules, and overall enables for more participants who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to join. More diverse teams naturally include contrasting perspectives and life experiences. Teams that have broader experiences will have an advantage to not only address unique problems, but approach them from multinational and multicultural viewpoints.
Operationally, virtual hackathons presented multiple benefits such as the ability to create longer events and therefore even better projects. It also enables companies to provide more prize money or grants because venues, air travel, and other accommodations which are very expensive aren’t required. The longer time frame opens up time to further iterate on ideas, consult with subject matter experts, and request project feedback from stakeholders or end users. The ability to obtain robust and pertinent feedback supports the development of actionable projects that have significant momentum by the end of the hackathon.
The Success of Our Previous Hackathon, The Ethereal Hackathon
Overall, the hackathon was a huge success with over 600 hackers and 81 amazing projects build across 16 different GitHub repos. The hackathon sponsors paid over $67,000 in bounties and prize money to the winning teams. We also received incredible feedback from participants, sponsors, and spectators, many of whom specifically commented that our unique, provocative bounties inspired them to get involved.
The winning team from the first Labs Relay remote hackathon, the completely global, decentralized, and inspirational Enable team, so thoroughly impressed us last time that we knew we wanted to publish another bounty to upend the finance industry as we know it today.
You can find a list of all the projects from the Microsoft + Gitcoin Ethereal Hackathon.
Our hope is that brilliant minds, be they designers, historians, developers, subject matter experts, or impassioned end users, are drawn to this provocation around reinventing the financial, health, and media infrastructure that makes the world go around.
Beyond Blockchain Hackathon Themes
The three broad categories that this hackathon will focus on are:
- Fintech
- Health
- Media
Whether or not we are willing to admit it, these three industries influence so much of our lives on a daily basis. Each of us has a role to play in transacting money, in participating in our health and wellness, and in living in a global society that is heavily influenced by media.
As a UX professional, I see this as an incredible opportunity because for once, we truly are our own users. We know our users because they’re our family, our friends, and our loved ones. By solving these problems, we make it possible to extend an olive branch to someone who thinks differently than we do, we make it possible to transact with someone on the other side of the world, and maybe, just maybe, we improve the quality of someone’s life.
Fintech for an Open Financial System
The rules of our economy were written for a different century. Individuals have gained access to move money easily within their own country, but communities are becoming more global and inter-continental transactions continue to increase. The current financial infrastructure is closed to many individuals or restricts open access.
Blockchain technology is able to create a more open, more equitable, and more effective banking and financial infrastructure as people, goods, and currency move throughout the world. We are looking for entrepreneurs and builders to design these new protocols and financial instruments for global financial activity.
We leave it to you to design the new conditions for global financial activity, and offer the following questions as a place to get started:
- How might we design custom financial solutions for individuals transacting in a global market?
- How might we reinvent the definition and evaluation of financial risk?
- How can we gamify the assessment of risk tolerance?
- What are ways to humanize the process of smaller sized financial risks under a certain dollar threshold?
- How can we leverage a combo of local experiences and ever-present technology to make educated bets around financial risk?
Making Healthcare Web 3.0 Compatible
In today’s world, data is everywhere. Our every move, search, message, and purchase, online and off, is tracked to make customized experiences. However, sometimes our data is manipulated, lost, stolen or used against us. This trend is set to increase as data generation is predicted to outpace the growth of big data overall, surging at a rate of 48% per year to 2.3 exabytes (2.3 billion gigabytes) by 2020.
Web3 is uniquely positioned to reinvent how healthcare works from the ground up. Blockchain technology can offer more clarity into and accountability for rising costs, more transparency into motivations and actions of different actors in the space. Furthermore, it stands to provide patients with self-sovereign ownership of the most personal and impactful data they’ll ever create.
We leave it to you to design the bold new systems of the future, and offer the following provocations as a place to get started:
- How might we humanize healthcare through incentivization?
- How can you reimagine medical situations as positive things to know instead of being incentivized to hide data, medication conditions, or illnesses.
- What are methods to structure medical costs to encourage “down payments” in health without compromising data capture?
- How might we shed light on healthcare costs, capabilities, and offerings through radical transparency?
- How can the system help individual policyholders to evaluate different doctors, surgeons, and hospitals through transparent pricing and clear reputation systems?
- How might we promote self-sovereignty of the truest nature of identity: health data?
- How can we enhance our ability to understand and control (including revocation of data) the use of sensitive data in medical studies?
Reinventing and Incentivizing the Media Landscape
To put it simply, we want you to rewrite the rules for how we experience media online. Content is being presented to us in new ways, faster than we understand the technology behind it. We still don’t understand how to navigate our own perception of reputation and the accuracy of information. When was the last time you looked at the source material of a news story? We believe there is an opportunity to produce a clearer form of credentialing and signaling.
Web3 has the opportunity to create a better media landscape through transparency, incentives, identity, and reputation.
We leave it to you to design the new conditions for trust in media, and offer the following incitements as a place to get started:
- How might we create trust in media through transparency in information and media systems?
- How can we galvanize fact-checking and quality to build verifiable credentialing from sources?
- How might we enable greater sharing and supporting of “quality” content instead of click-bait?
- How can we incentivize reputation, reading, and commenting on work outside the realm of our political environment?
- How might we track and share the identity of an organization, including makeup, motivations, and stakeholders so that a true, robust reputation can emerge over time?
How do I participate in the Beyond Blockchain Hackathon?
You can participate in 7 easy steps!
So please join us! Spend three weeks imagining a better world alongside our team and countless others we’ll meet along the way. Demonstrate what is truly possible when you unleash your genius on some of these antiquated industries. We can’t wait to see what you come up with this time.
If you have questions or comments, please reach out to us on the Discord chat (#consensys-labs).
This post was written by Katie Johnson, Lead Design Strategist and Researcher at Consensys.
Disclaimer. The views, information, and opinions expressed are solely those by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. They are meant for informational purposes only, are not intended to serve as a recommendation or investment advice to buy or sell any securities, cryptoassets, or other financial products.
