Eximchain Global Hackathon Tour 2018: Seattle Edition
We want to say a big thank you to the 200+ hackers who participated this past weekend (21–22 July) in the Seattle edition of our Global Hackathon Tour with us! Our attending team members really enjoyed meeting so many people interested in the future of blockchain, and were especially excited to help people learn to use our automagical integration libraries: abi2lib, abi2oas, abi2api. We were sponsoring this AngelHack event (big shout-out for running a top-notch hackathon!) alongside organizations like AWS and Agora.io.
The day began with a short burst of presentations from AngelHack and all of the sponsors, explaining the event’s theme and all of the available challenges.
Our challenge and prize reward were consistent as our previous hackathons: 3 ETH for the team which builds a technology that solves a social or environmental problem and positively impacts the global supply chain.
Once all the challenges were set, the teams dug into development! Fransheska and John spent some time working closely with a couple of teams, but especially with Bike Blockchain. They were previously interested in blockchain, but this was their first time really digging in and writing their own smart contracts. While the rest of his team focused on building a web front-end, we worked with one team member to get him up and running with a local testchain.
We were particularly excited that he was able to leverage abi2lib, one of our developer tools for integrating blockchains with the rest of the internet. Our library uses a compiled smart contract to auto-generate a JS library which makes the web3.js calls required for a Javascript app to interact with Ethereum. Auto-generating this boilerplate code eliminated a key step between their team and a working application — as any hackathon-er knows, every minute counts!
After a day of frantic coding and some presentation practice, it was time for each team to come up and explain what they had been working on. Many of these projects targeted multiple challenges: AWS’s challenge was a popular choice, giving out free Amazon Echos for ideas which address the bike share oversupply problem.
Our winning team was no exception: Bike Blockchain aimed to stabilize the supply of bikes by using a public blockchain to store all bike positions. Each bikeshare vendor would plug their own supply into the chain, letting them all easily determine which areas are over or under-served by existing fleets. Consumers would also be able to use this chain to determine the best place to grab a bike near them.
Big congratulations to all three team members — they are each receiving 1 ETH for their efforts over the weekend!
Thanks again to all of the participants who came by to chat at our booth, all the other contestants with great ideas, and to AngelHack for organizing such a smooth event. Our team is hard at work getting our SDK ready to share — looking forward to running more events in the near future!
About Eximchain
Eximchain enables businesses to connect, transact, and share information more efficiently and securely through our blockchain utility infrastructure. Using Eximchain blockchain technology, enterprises can eliminate traditional supply chain barriers and integrates actors big and small into an efficient, transparent, and secure global network.
