Hackcoin, Hong Kong’s First Blockchain Hackathon

10 young coders arrived early in the morning of May 23 at Paperclip Startup Campus to come up with ideas, experiments and applications that only a blockchain could make happen. While Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, collected entrance nearby from people who wanted to hear what made him rich trying to overturn the existing financial system, we took matters into our own hands to enhance the ecosystem around what we believe is the future of money.

Adam Vaziri, founder of Diacle gave a quick introduction to the systems and APIs that were attractive for the participants to use. Two developers from NXT and Counterparty even agreed to be available for remote support calls from Israel and Taiwan. Four teams were formed, and everyone quickly stuck their heads together to get working, only interrupted for lunch from a local Cha Chaan Teng, which was sponsored by local Bitcoin exchange Gatecoin, who also heavily contributed to publicizing the event (read a great post by +iyonata here).

At 5pm, joined by a few curious guests the teams presented their projects, which were judged by Eddy Travia (Seedcoin) Adam Vaziri (Diacle) and me, +liongrass (Bitcoin Association).

1. Value Distribution Protocol

Filipe, Marco, Gene, Serina

Many for-profit projects, especially software, depend on a variety of open source projects. The creators of these businesses and projects know this, yet cannot identify who they should donate to, given the huge variety of projects and their contributors. The Value Distribution Protocol aims at analyzing the open source software used in a particular project, and makes small donations out of the total revenue of the company directly towards the contributors of that software.

This project raised the most attention in the judges, who were impressed by how easily implementable this already would be today with Bitcoin. The microtransactions and global direct payments would not be possible without the use of cryptocurrency, which makes this process quick and transparent. The idea won first prize, which included 1 Bitcoin worth of NXT and a Trezor.

2. Currency Market for Universities

Johannes, Long, Oliver

University students travel a lot, live on cash and are always short of it. Except for the cash that they cant spend, of course. This project aims to connect those students with a need or excell supply for foreign currency, including Bitcoin with each other.

3. Smart Contracts

Joseph, Jerry

Currently many small businesses are not served by banks, as the compliance costs for small loans are too high for them. Individuals are often willing to cover these loans and have an easier time doing their due diligence, but have trouble creating a legally sound and yet adaptable contract. This project creates easily customizable contracts with javascript which the consignees can sign cryptographically and manually. Later on this project aims to build rails for these smart contracts to become tradable, hedgeable and automizable.

4. Up Side Chain

Doug

It is common and popular for startups to promise stock options to their early employees, even when a possible IPO is still far away. These promises are often only tracked using spreadsheets, which are prone to human error, malice and conflicts that can stay undetected for years. Up Side Chain lets startups create their options as digital tokens on top of the blockchain, making their allocation, auditing and proof of ownership easy and transparent. Once they are vested, owners can even trade them or turn them into stocks at the IPO.

We were very impressed with the feasibility of all projects. All had clearly thought out not only technical implications, but also taken into account legal barriers and possible markets and revenue models. Thank you very much, see you soon!

Awards Video