Announcing POA Prizes at WCEF Hackathon

On the weekend of the 12th of January, POA team were happy to be one of the sponsors and judges for the World Crypto Economic Forum Hackathon in San Fransisco. In total there were over 20 teams that have applied for the POA prizes which were $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 in POA tokens for first, second and third place respectively.

Roman Storm and Dr Jeff Flowers

Judging

The panel judges included Igor Barinov and Dr Jeff Flowers. The POA network team, led by Roman Storm, had a huge hand in helping the hackathon teams with any issues or questions they had. The decision was very difficult one to make as we have seen many amazing projects, but in the end we had to dwindle the decision down to just three finalists. If you have been following us in our forum or subscribed to our newsletter, you will know who the winners are. We talk to each of the teams that won to find out more about their projects, the challenges they sought to address, and most importantly why they chose POA Network.

The team is made up Sahaj Garg, Iris Li and Sunny Aggarwal. Sahaj tells us below about the project, the team and why they chose POA for their Hackathon project.

Tell us about the project and the problem you are trying to solve:

Flexible Trust Web seeks to solve the problem of decentralized reputation — one of the most challenging problems associated with the blockchain. Any blockchain technology that interacts with the world, for example online marketplaces like OpenBazaar, need some semblance of reputation. However, sellers can easily create fake buyer accounts (called a Sybil attack) and rate themselves highly.

To solve this problem, we personalize reputation: each person selects who they trust, and this creates a web of trust by which I trust people who my friends trust. Accordingly, we implemented a version of Google’s personalized pagerank algorithm to compute trust scores for every address in the network. We deployed this on the POA network, and constructed a 3d interactive visualization of the graph at FTWreputation.com.

What challenges did you come across and how did using POA solve your challenges?

The biggest challenges were surrounding making the reputation system Sybil-proof (resistant to fake identities). By personalizing rankings, we were able to largely circumvent this problem. However, thinking about how to solve other attacks, like bribing attacks, was especially challenging. In addition, incentivizing people to publish their trusted friends when there is an associated transaction cost was another big problem.

POA helps solve the issue of incentivizing people to publish the nodes they trust since transaction costs are so high. In addition, the speed of the POA network allows many more reputations to be submitted, and makes the application scalable.

Sunny Aggarwal accepting the prize for first place

The Token ID team is made up of Sarah Tulin and Konstan Tin. Below Sarah tells us more about the project.

Tell us about the project and the problem you are trying to solve:

Without a unique identifier, there is room for error in buying the wrong crypto-currency. For example with bitcoin and bitcoin cash, there have been several accounts of users purchasing one of the other mistakenly as their ticker symbols are quite similar. Today, crypto ticker symbols are up to 6 characters and many are identical or similar, with no description or information. TokenID creates a unique identifier for traded crypto-currencies to prevent users from making expensive mistakes.

What challenges did you come across and how did using POA solve your challenges?

POA already has the human layer — by creating a platform of humans that are validators. There are tons of use cases where this is applicable and we see Token ID as one of them. This is what helped us choose to work on your project and what excited us about the POA platform as you already have that experience set up.

Token ID app in action

Sarah Tulin

We spoke to Rafael Saavedra, one of the two developers, the other being Camilo Soto, who both created a coffee tracing platform based on the Blockchain.

Tell us about the project and the problem you are trying to solve:

We are connecting the coffee supply chain from the farm to the consumer using IoT, smartphones and blockchain to allow traceable and transparent coffee trading, reliable information flow, verification of production best practices and direct payment to the key players globally, starting with the coffee farmers. We are calling it Trace.Coffee.

For the WCEF Hackathon we decided to build a PoC of one important part of the platform: connected sensors that report data from the coffee farm using blockchain. We used a temperature and humidity sensor that reported its measurements using a LoRa wireless connection to a RaspberryPi-based gateway which contained a blockchain node and used a smart document events to report and store the data. In order to show the data being reported, we created a Telegram chatbot that listened to the smart document events and reported the updates in a Telegram chat.

What challenges did you come across and how did using POA solve your challenges?

We had challenges at different levels, from wholes in the knowledge we had of the libraries and APIs to the overcrowded network connection at the venue. But the main one was the fact that the Ethereum testnets available were awfully slow to setup, to get Ether from the faucet and didn’t seem like they were going to be able to process transactions fast enough for what we needed.

When we saw the presentation of POA Network and then checked out the documentation we realized that it would be a really good solution to the availability and speed issues we found in the testnet. We decided to try with the POA network testnet and in our initial tests we were able to get Ether quickly from its faucet and the transactions worked fast without any problems. Everything now depended on us and a little bit of luck, of course :-)

Camilo Soto showcasing his team’s project

The Hackathon winners with Igor Barinov in the middle and Dr Jeff Flowers on the right

At the end of it, the POA team was very impressed by the innovation and creativity of the projects it was great to see all teams use POA for its numerous advantages that include its speed, cost and efficiency. We are excited to see what comes out after the Hackathon as all teams have expressed interested in pursuing their projects further.

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