This Spring kicked off with an awesome competition aimed at finding the most innovative Blockchain solutions and awarding the teams behind them with the Blockchain Oscar and a bunch of delightful prizes.

Blockchain Oscar is organized by your beloved Cointelegraph Events in partnership with Humaniq, which is building and providing an innovative model of banking for people not connected to the global financial system, and WINGS, a Blockchain platform that seeds and nurtures a community dedicated to the launching, backing and promotion of new project proposals through a fluid organizational model referred to as DAO.

What are the prizes?

The prize fund of Blockchain Oscar amounts to €13,000. “The Most Innovative Blockchain Startup” will get €5000 worth in BTC and “The Most Valuable for Humanity Startup” will be awarded €5000 in Humaniq tokens.

The first three startups leading in the “People’s Choice” nomination will get 2 BTC and 10,000 EUR of crowdfunding consulting services from the WINGS Foundation, 1 BTC and 5000 EUR of crowdfunding consulting services from the WINGS Foundation and 0.5 BTC and 2500 EUR of crowdfunding consulting services from the WINGS Foundation respectively.

Throwback to the first round

The first round of the competition took place online from March 2 to 4 through a number of webinars, with presentations of contestants and Q&A sessions.

Addy Crezee commented:

“The main idea behind webinars was to give startups a chance to mobilize their resources. For example, Status used this chance and leaped from outsiders to leaders. Besides, we spent time discussing our participants’ projects and cases, experts shared their experience and gave valuable advice. I was surprised that Bernstein dropped out, but that was the decision of our experts. We are looking forward to the finals in Munich.”

The final round will be held in Munich during BlockShow Europe 2017. Our respected board of jury, which includes Richard Kastelein, CMO at Humaniq, Tawanda Kembo, technical advisor at Humaniq, Anish Mohammed, lead security architect at Lloyds Banking Group, Dominik Zynis, head of communications at WINGS Foundation and advisor at Wings.ai and Jamie Burke, founder of Blockchain Angels and CEO at Outlier Ventures, have chosen six startups who are going to pitch their ideas at the stage of BlockShow Europe 2017 in Munich in less than a month.

Richard Kastelein shared his impressions:

“The level of submissions was excellent - it was really great to see some fresh ideas around what to do with Blockchain as well as some newer takes on older ideas that were way out of the box. It's looking more like 2017-2018 will be the year we see products coming to market if this array of ideas is any indication!"

So, who is going to Munich?

CoinDash is an operating system for crypto assets. Their goal is to make interacting, handling and trading crypto assets accessible, through a unified platform and UX, for mainstream users. CoinDash is the intersection between investor tools (like portfolio management), social network (where you can follow and copy trade top investors) and a marketplace (for discovery and investment in new opportunities).

Dominik Zynis says:

“This is eToro for crypto trading!”

WeTrust is a platform for Trusted Lending Circles, powered by people and Blockchain. WeTrust wants to leverage social capital and trust networks to create an alternative financial platform that improves financial inclusion on a global scale. Products that can be supported include Trusted Lending Circles, credit identity, direct lending and mutual insurance. It is built on the Ethereum Blockchain and our first product is deployed on Ethereum Mainnet.

Kastelein shared his opinion about the project:

“Killer team and advisory board! I have been aware of them for some time. They are a solid project, and I expect them to be one of the most successful Silicon Valley Blockchain projects.”

Shelf.Network is a solution for multichannel auctioning. Through distributed ledger technology, Shelf.Network is providing simultaneous real-time bidding and momentous exchange of information between multiple e-commerce Web pages.

Kastelein commented:

“Distributed Lab on the build is good. Pavel [Kravchenko, co-founder of Distributed Lab] is a crypto rockstar. Solid team. Idea? I like it. Novel and new. Fresh. Haven't seen anyone trying Blockchain and auction market online. Very good!”

Status.im is an open source project that combines a messenger, wallet and DApps browser for the mass market to begin using cryptocurrency and decentralized applications directly from their Android or iOS devices.

Dominik Zynis shared his opinion on the project:

“A lot of early adopters, this can be a leading platform, however, monetization will need to be figured out.”

SolarChange is a Blockchain-based platform that gathers a network of services and applications to improve and increase the use of solar energy worldwide and provide solar owners with more value from their systems. The SolarChange team is excited to make it to the finals.

Assaf Ben Or, co-founder and CEO, said to Cointelegraph:

“The SolarChange team is extremely excited to be part of BlockShow Europe 2017, as we believe that Blockchain technology is set to become part of daily life for every one of us. Making it to the final of the Blockchain Oscar is an incredible validation of our vision: the Blockchain community, a particularly vibrant, vocal and knowledgeable community, supports what we do. SolarChange demonstrates how Blockchain is an integral part of our lives as we all rely on energy, finance and trade. Moreover, this building block can be found in every home! Making it to the final round enables us to get this message across even more energetically (pardon the pun!), reach an amazing audience, and show our gratitude to the Blockchain community.”

Assaf continues by saying that during the last year his teammates put a lot of effort into streamlining their ideas into a cohesive and actionable business plan. They tried to tell a good and coherent story, get a solid business footing and be ready to scale.

So his advice to all startups is this:

“Every step is an opportunity to learn. Keep things simple, clear, focused and professional. Understand the market, your opportunity and have a solid plan. And of course, make sure that your technology is inherent to your solution!”

Etherisc is a company on a mission to build decentralized insurance applications, making the purchase and sale of insurance more efficient, enable lower operational costs, provide greater transparency to the industry of insurance compared to traditional operations and democratize access to reinsurance investments.

Community decides

While finalists are getting ready to pitch their ideas in front of BlockShow Europe 2017 guests, the community is called on to get involved in the competition. We welcome everyone to take part in an online vote and choose the teams that deserve to get the prize in the “People’s Choice” category. In addition to the six finalists selected by the jury board, the community can consider and nominate startups from the list below:

Educhain

Bancor

Mysterium Network

RSK

Aeternity

Quantoz

Food Blockchain XYZ

Ethan BIoT

Satoshi Fund

Chain Capital

Adahoy

Dominik Zynis from WINGS platform comments:

“We want to engage the cryptocurrency community because there is a lot of people with opinions and experience in this field, which has developed since Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin back in 2008. To achieve that we will be using the WINGS DAO crowd valuation system which is currently in alpha testing stage. Anyone who is a reader of Cointelegraph or our WINGS Foundation donors will be able to register using SMS and value the filtered list of companies which will be about 20+.”

In order to vote, please follow this link and choose your winners by forecasting the value of the startups listed there. Startups with the highest value forecasted will win. The names of the winners will be announced at BlockShow Europe 2017 in Munich on April 6.