The conference
Last Friday (14.09) in Sofia, Bulgaria at the National Palace of Culture was happening one of the biggest blockchain conferences — Next Block Conference, organised by KryptonEvents.
There were a lots of great speakers, some of the most influential people in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, presenting and participating in the discussion panels.
Some of the talks were about tokenisation in the entertainment business, digital assets vs physical assets and challenges in the crypto economy.
It was a great time to meet and network, and also create new friendships.
The hackathon
Parallel with the discussion and presentation panels there was a blockchain hackathon happening organised by Krypton Events and Paysafe.
hack’s CEO — Milen Radkov was invited to be one of the judges at the Hachathon.
In the early morning the teams start arriving and preparing for a day full of coding and fun.
There were two topics in which the teams could compete:
- Blockchain technology & smart contracts — a business enabler
Utilizе smart contracts and the blockchain technology for the transparent and seamless transfer of ownership, multi-parties transacting and communications and removing dependencies. Since ERC20 and ERC721 standards exist, there’s plenty of interesting use cases which could be tackled using the blockchain and smart contracts.
- Cryptocurrencies exchange & trading — infrastructure, automation, and tooling
Build tooling, trading bots and algorithms and trading infrastructure which would disrupt or enrich the cryptocurrencies exchange and trading ecosystem. The current state of the systems and tools, we use to exchange, and buy/sell cryptocurrencies is in a very early stage. The ecosystem misses the variety of the software needed.
In the end it was a tough call to select the winners, because there were lots of cool projects. But we’ve come to a consensus.
The winners
1st place — team Riders on the Chain. They were a team of 5 young, enthusiastic and skilled developers — Preslav Mihaylov, Nikolay Angelov, Rosen Krumov, Simeon Kotashki and Ivan Abazhiev.
They’ve created a blockchain based car tracking system uploading car data on the blockchain using an IOT device to track mileage and avoid fraud and guarantee trust between sellers and buyers. You could further read details about it in Nikolay Angelov’s blogpost.
2nd place — team BitBot. Team of two skilled developers — Samuil Georgiev and Victor Velev -(the youngest team in the hackathon). They’ve used ML and Genetic Algorithm to make Bot who buys and sales Bitcoin to make profit.
3rd place — team Blockchain Maniacs. They’ve created a Blockchain Asset Manager — managing your exchange assets, providing you a way to customise rules and conditions and execute buy/sell/withdraw operations.
Another great team was Automaton. They’ve been working on a project Automaton for a while and today they used it to create project Spacer — Reserve Your Space! (Scalable reservation system with custom consensus mechanism).
Traditional blockchains don’t scale. We’ve build Automaton to tackle this problem. Today we will prototype a scalable room booking system and a custom consensus mechanism from scratch using our tools.
Awards
Conclusion
We want to thank all the organizers and participants — it was awesome to be part of NextBlock Conference and Hackathon. We wish the teams all the best and encourage them not to stop developing, because they are the ones driving the whole blockchain community forward.
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Also published on Medium.
