By Michael Chen

Africa’s got (blockchain) talent

Fantom has had an incredible year when we’re talking about hackathons, developer acquisitions, and people building exciting technology. Our friends at CryptoBazar recently wrapped up their Serial Hacking Developer Competition in which Fantom had some amazing teams from all over Russia and Eastern-Europe build fantastic products on top of the technology, and we also recently had the pleasure to host a blockchain challenge together with our technology integrators from XAR Network at the AfricArena 2019 Summit in Cape Town. Today we discuss the latter, which had a lot of incredible submissions and participants who submitted their products to be presented to eyes from all over the world, but in the end we selected 3 finalists to dunk it out on stage.

The 3 finalists were: ChekkitApp, Lightency, and HouseAfrica whom fought for mind share of the audience filled with institutions and innovators. During this challenge all three teams did a pitch on stage about their products and how they are looking to disrupt the pan-African markets with blockchain technology, and they all demonstrated how far their technology was developed already which showed us the promise of Africa’s next potential blockchain titans.

What do our finalists do?

HouseAfrica is an innovative real estate investment platform powered by blockchain. By tokenizing properties they enable fractional ownership of exciting real estate projects across Africa, fully backed by their local Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) Licensed Trustee which holds and manages the property on behalf of all the share owners.

The properties are held under individual Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV’s) and are separated from the assets and liabilities of HouseAfrica.

Lightency is a blockchain-based solution for the democratization of green- and sustainable energy. It allows African households to exchange their excess electricity in peer-to-peer markets, and uses DLT to secure and reduce the costs of micropayments.

ChekkitApp is an anti-counterfeiting solution which tackles the counterfeiting market through tracking and authentication every product from producer to consumer.

Preparations for the big day

At the end of the day, we had to choose a single winner to take home a cash prize. And we’re incredibly excited to share that the lucky winner turned out to be HouseAfrica, which we are excited to collaborate with in the future.

But our excitement doesn’t end there, as Fantom is exploring collaborations with all three projects in terms of incubation and acceleration depending on the stage of the startup, with the ultimate goal of guiding them towards building on top of Fantom consensus. We’ll be sharing more details about our progress with each respective company as we move forward with the development of our ecosystem.

Check out their websites down below: