Kin Participates in LongHash Hackathon

Around a month ago, Nitzan, Kirill, and myself competed in the first ever Longhash Hackathon in Tokyo, and we took home the 3rd place prize on behalf of Kin!

Longhash is an incubator for blockchain technologies and startups based in multiple locations around the world.

The hackathon hosted teams from around the world — mainly from Japan and China — but also from the US, Canada, Israel, and more.

In the competition, each team had to choose from either a preset challenge or come up with their own blockchain idea. Our team chose Taxara’s challenge in the IoT field.

During the three days of the competition, we designed and implemented the project and protocol to query and acquire information held and owned by IoT devices over the blockchain in a secure manner.

In theory, the IoT devices collect data from sensors, such as location, speed, and acceleration acquired from driving a car.

We represented the IoT devices by an agent program running in a private network detached from incoming internet traffic. The data was stored encrypted and was searched using an encrypted search algorithm. The agent kept track of transactions with a smart contract deployed on Ethereum and wrote results back to the contract.

For the demo, we implemented a browser based client that communicates directly with the smart contract.

• The user inputs a search query;
• The client encrypts the query and submits it to the contract;
• The IoT agent listens and sees the query, performs the search, and writes encrypted results back to the contract;
• The user chooses a result and submits the purchase to the contract;
• The contract checks the purchase amount and can fail the transaction if the amount doesn’t match;
• The IoT agent receives the payment and writes the encrypted data to the contract.

A special thanks to our friends at Orbs who joined us at the hackathon. If you’re interested in learning more, the code is on GitHub, and the project description is hackx.