Future Of Blockchain: Winners
Late last year, we sponsored the Future of Blockchain hackathon, looking for projects that are built on, or integrate with, the Arweave permaweb.
Future of Blockchain is a long-form competition for students at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, London and Berlin to build a blockchain project over 3 months; drawing from the skills of students, researchers, alumni, leading developers, and entrepreneurial talent. This year, the competition also received participants from outside their core universities, with submissions from the Universities of ETH Zurich, Rome, Stirling, Waterloo, Cape Town and Paris. In total, there were 560 participants across 143 applying teams.
Overall, we awarded £7,250 and 1,500 AR in prizes across 8 teams/submissions, and welcomed submissions that make great use of the permaweb, and show potential for further development. Check out the winning projects:
Hyperaware 🥇
Prize: £3,000 + 150 AR
Hyperaware is a decentralised application for governing connected devices and their data based on their physical location. The platform fuses trusted IoT, enclave computing, cryptography and smart contracts to create a decentralised spatial asset tracking and governance system.
Hyperaware utilises Arweave by storing DID documents (decentralised identifiers), and both jurisdiction and zone data as GeoJSON polygons. Since Arweave is an open database, any government or manufacturer can upload data to a shared, decentralised, database, rather than a centrally-controlled one.
With the Hyperaware technology, users are able to reliably confirm whether a connected vehicle (maritime, aerial or terrestrial) has entered a specific area on Earth without the vehicle sharing its exact location.
The software runs inside an Intel SGX enclave, meaning encrypted location data is never visible to any unauthorised actors, including those controlling the enclaves. With Hyperaware we can produce simple “Yes / No” proofs as to whether a vessel or vehicle has entered a geometry, and configure who is alerted with what information per user requirements.
In addition to privacy-preserving location detection technology, Hyperaware has developed smart contracts that enable automated payments and alerts when a vehicle or vessel is detected within a geometry. With Hyperaware, everyone can be sure that everyone else is playing by the rules, while keeping strategic information secret.
ARRtistry 🏆
Prize: £1,500 + 150 AR
ARRtistry provides a distributed registry of artworks with automated artist royalty distribution, that art market professionals can finally embrace as they don’t have to trust one central entity with their data: the system automatically develops tamper-evident, tamper-resistant public provenance trails using a combination of smart contracts, Arweave Deploy and arweave.js.
Under ARRtistry, forgeries can be detected and traced; collectors are guaranteed to have the value of their piece preserved via the provenance trail; art market professionals have less paperwork and can signal reputability; regulators have a market they can finally collect data on; bureaucratic load is reduced; and artists are paid more money, more often.
Decentradocs 🏆
Prize: £1,500 + 150 AR
DecentraDocs is a decentralised open platform that enables people and organisations to store, share, market and manage all kinds of documents on the permaweb — it can be viewed as a world-wide library. DecentraDocs is built on top of the Arweave network, which provides the storage platform for documents, alongside Ethereum smart contracts which provide the document access control and subscription features. Main features include: version control, search engine, document certification, document access control, and subscription/monetisation services.
DeepVerse 🏆
Prize: £250 + 150 AR
DeepVerse is a platform that allows users to collaboratively train AI models on the blockchain, whilst maintaining their own data privacy, and outperforming standard models. User contribution to the performance will be rewarded accordingly via automated contracts. Instead of adopting the longest chain, DeepVerse adopts the best performing model stored on the chain for achieving consensus.
The smart contracts are built using Tezos, and the storage has been integrated with Arweave and IPFS, which allows it to run on almost any platform.
Puma Browser 🏆
Prize: £250 + 150 AR
Puma Browser is a privacy focused web browser that provides a new way to pay for content and services without ads and tracking. The browser integrates Arweave by adding native browser ability to store page contents on the permaweb. Taking inspiration from the likes of Brave, the long term goal of Puma Browser is to create an alternative to advertising as a main business model for the internet, and to help people transact and share freely, while also protecting their privacy online.
Sw4rtz.it 🏆
Prize: £250 + 150 AR
Sw4rtz.it is a platform that allows you to store scientific publications forever. With the interface, users can select an article they wish to save by entering its DOI, then proceed to ‘permifying’ the article, which saves it immutably to the Arweave permaweb. The current version relies on the peer review system provided by arXiv.org, but the project intends to integrate a fully decentralised content review system in the near future.
The permanent storage on Arweave combined with an open peer review of the contents now enables Sw4rtz.it to provide a brand new building block for Open Science, with the ultimate goal being to finally unleash the power of collective intelligence.
Lend271 🏆
Prize: £250 + 150 AR
LEND721 is a P2P ERC-721 token lending platform powered by smart contracts, which handle escrow between two parties. With the front-end UI hosted on the permaweb, any ERC-721 token holder can visit the platform to lend their tokens and earn interest from them, as borrowers pay collateral (in DAI) for lending the ERC-721 until the lending reaches the agreed deadline.
Datascian 🏆
Prize: £250 + 150 AR
https://arweave.net/C6Pgd6JfSPgDfnq7KYxt_o4gwvmUDRSNtRr8XDpznYM
Remembering a password can be a tedious task. There are a number of tools available that help users store important passwords, however many people are understandably cautious about confidentiality and security. Datascian is a permanent password storage manager tool which runs and stores passwords securely on the Arweave permaweb. By using Datascian, any user can store and retrieve passwords with ease.
A huge thanks to everybody who participated in the Future of Blockchain hackathon and congratulations to all the winners! We look forward to seeing future progress and development of the winning apps.
-arweave-team
