We wrapped up our second hackathon of the year with our Smart Contract Hackathon in Chicago September 29-30. Teams had 24 hours to create a smart contract solution using the Factom blockchain.

Saturday started with a Smart Contract Summit discussion by the event sponsors. Panelists included (left to right) A. Michael Smith from PWC, Marcelo Halpern from Perkins Coie LLP, Paul Snow from Factom, Steve Hopkins from Medici Ventures and Moderator Zachary Lynde from Factom.

You can watch the whole 2 hour panel here: Watch now.

Throughout the event, the Factom team gave workshops on what a smart contract looks like built on Factom, how easy it is to access Factom API’s and walking through different solutions.

On Sunday, the remaining 10 teams presented their ideas to the panel of judges: Paul Snow from Factom, Sam Jo from Perkins Coie, and Lexy Prodromos from the Chicago Blockchain Center. Teams were given 10 minutes with the judges in a science fair style presentation concluding with a two minute lightning round presentation to the entire audience. Read on for high-level descriptions of their identified problem and their smart contract solution.

Team SmArt Share – 1st place and $5,000

Team SmArt Share built a smart contract solution allowing for group purchasing or investing. As they called it, it’s an “IoT-connected zip car for art, layered on top of an actual social-proofing platform.”

Team Chain of State – 2nd place and $3,000

Team Chain of State identified a need in Shanghai for efficient commercial real estate, including a more efficient lease market, and lower vacancy rates in office buildings. Their solution makes commercial real estate contracts execute efficiently.

Team Planet Express – 3rd place and $1,500

Team Planet Express presented a smart contract solution for car sharing, particularly where insurance agreements have been cumbersome. In their solution, drivers agree to insurance terms upfront, all data is tracked when someone else is driving your car, and insurance terms are executed based on the data recorded.

Team Factroll

Team Factroll (Factom+Payroll) presented a smart contract payroll system using Factom. Their solution uses two systems – Rescue Time and Factom to dispense payments automatically using tokens.

Team Solo

Team Solo’s smart contract solution is based on personal experience of bypassing his university’s class check-in system. The solution is a quick geolocation attendance check in app.

The Titans Team

Team Titans built an app called Olympus, allowing for chatting on Factom. All chat history can be queried and filtered, including immutable entries and timestamps. This would be useful in countries that may censor free speech.



Team Soundblock

Team Soundblock’s solution is an open source music player discovery tool. Utilizing the power of smart contracts, this tool supports P2P fan-to-artist payment without middle men, ensuring artists get 100% of their profits.

Team Ghosted

Team Ghosted created a blockchain-based app for assessing punctuality. The app assigns a score based on your punctuality (higher score for more punctual, lower score for less punctual) that employers can view to assess general trends. This score could be used for a plethora of situations in which you are meeting someone you don’t know well (job interview, first date, C2C selling) and need to gauge punctuality and reliability.

Team Chicago Block Hawks

Block Hawks’ solution is a data center commission application, which address a critical problem in the data center industry.

Team Stock.help

Stock.help’s solution is based on stock reviews you can trust. It is an open source, decentralized platform to track stock analyst performance.

Thank you to our sponsors and Hackathon participants!