Announcing: Kryha Wins the Odyssey Hackathon with Project Horizon 🌎
One of our favorite things about being active in the blockchain community is the tremendous amount of positive energy and collaboration that it encompasses. Last weekend was no different when we spent multiple days (and nights!) working our ass off building the digital infrastructure and applications of tomorrow. Together with 100 highly skilled teams, we participated in Odyssey — the biggest blockchain & AI hackathon in the world.
This year, we participated in the Nature 2.0 track. We’re very proud to announce that Team Kryha won the Odyssey hackathon for the second year in a row!
Here’s what we’ve built.
The WHY // Ownerless Problems
Humanity is facing some big problems (eg. poverty, climate change) that cannot be addressed by a single company or nation. These problems require all of humanity to collaborate in a coordinated effort.
The UN took a shot at this coordination problem by setting 17 Sustainable Development Goals that need to be met by 2030 in order to address these global issues. Unfortunately, recent reports point out that we’re not moving fast enough. We believe ownership to be the main cause for this.
These global issues are ownerless problems; problems that we all have in common. In order to solve ownerless problems, we need an ownerless solution. A solution that benefits the commons.
We regard autonomous machines — running on an ownerless digital infrastructure — to be the solution.
Autonomous machines can carry out missions based on our collective human needs. Our needs can be as arbitrary as urban mobility (facilitated by a decentralized network of self-driving vehicles), as specific as search & rescue missions in the wake of disaster and as futuristic as terraforming Mars.
In order for machines to take on these missions, they need digital infrastructure that enables them to collaborate, learn and optimize.
At last year’s Odyssey hackathon, we planted the initial seed by building Grex: A Machine-to-Machine communication and collaboration platform. This platform enabled machines to make decisions as a collective and operate in a truly autonomous manner.
At this year’s hackathon, we took it a step further by focussing on machine optimization. We wanted to build a solution related to “Darwinism for machines”.
The WHAT // Project HORIZON
Horizon is a protocol for decentralized machine optimization. We found a great deal of inspiration in the most optimized and efficient system that we know: Mother Nature.
Regarding software, we were inspired by the way particular single-cell organisms share genetic information. These organisms are able to share genetic information through DNA directly with their peers, without the need for breeding. This enables them to improve their current population through information, as opposed to being limited to improving the next generations. Federated learning allows the machines to instantaneously share learning and mistakes, to ensure that the learnings are institutionalized/implemented and the mistakes are never repeated again.
Regarding hardware, we took inspiration from evolutionary theory. Just like nature has natural selection, we are creating an artificial selection algorithm for machines. Unfit machines are decomposed and the fit machines replicate. The replication process reuses the materials and components of the unfit machines, creating a zero-waste solution.
For the hackathon, we wanted to build a crazy Proof-of-Concept on top of the Horizon infrastructure as a showcase. We decided on simulating a utopic planet, powered by decentralized infrastructure. We deployed an initial population of 100 autonomous drones, that started terraforming the planet. After a set amount of time (1000 blocks), a recurring event occurs in which all drones send their fitness scores to each other. As a result, a fitness ranking is formed and only the best ones get to reproduce. The lowest ranked drones are decomposed. The drone population is constantly adapting to its environment, evolving into a species unknown to us today.
This is obviously just a Proof-of-Concept, but this application could get really interesting once we leverage existing technology from teams like Singularity.Net and Ocean protocol.
The HOW // A Decentralized Compute Layer for Ethereum
To really understand why we’ve won and why we’re so excited about Horizon, you have to see how it works. From a technical perspective, we’ve created a decentralized compute layer for the Ethereum blockchain, using Kubernetes. When building certain types of decentralized applications (or DApps in short), your application might need access to compute services. Instead of using cloud solutions like AWS or Google Cloud and dealing with vendor lock-in, your DApp could tap into Horizon. Horizon sources the best compute service providers for your tasks and automatically handles container orchestration and payment, fully decentralized. Horizon is our push for Web3 infrastructure.
To put this into perspective: Horizon could literally run all of the Ethereum-compatible projects presented at the hackathon.
Call To Action // Let’s Get To Work
Over the past 12 months, Kryha has doubled in size and we’re currently on the lookout for bright minds to join our development team. We have a ton of projects to work on and we only expect this number to grow.
Are you a developer, eager to learn about and work with bleeding-edge protocols? Do you want to work on projects like Horizon & Grex, as well as for companies like KLM, Shell and BASF? Then shoot us an email at jobs@kryha.io
Are you working for an enterprise, eager to explore the potential of blockchain for your business? Then get in touch via info@kryha.io
