Over 100 developers will gather at the Bombay Stock Exchange building this weekend for ‘Hack-Coin’— a two-day hackathon organized by Zone Startups India, BitStreet and Block Chain University.
Unlike in other hackathonsA, the participants will work on the rarely-used blockchain— the technology behind bitcoin—to build new applications with use cases in three spaces: payments, big data and digital experience.
Microsoft, IBM and Citruspay are some of the event partners and will be providing the problem statements to solve, as well as choosing winners.
“There are three problem statements – one for each theme. There are possibilities for the winning outputs to be rolled out into full-scale projects,” said Ajay Ramasubramanian, project head of Zone Startups India.
While bitcoin has been considered controversial and viewed skeptically by many, blockchain has been attracting attention for its reliability.
However, the technology is rarely put to use outside the virtual currency space.
Tanish Thakker, who is organising it, said the event is expected to develop interest and learning, as well as a community that will actively engage in this space.
“What we are really excited about is not only that we are the first fintech hackathon in terms of blockchain usage, but also that we are getting a lot of bitcoin experts,” said Raunaq Vaisoha, partner of HackCoin, who facilitates the events.
Robert Schwentker, president of the Block Chain University, will present a session on block chain and its applications on Friday and guide the teams on the first day of the hackathon.
“This event is very important for the blockchain ecosystem. If you look at 2014, there was $400 million VC funding in the blockchain. Citibank, Barclays and IBM are looking at it,” said Vaisoha.
Benson Samuel, founder of Coinsecure, a bitcoin exchange startup in India, who has been involved in creating awareness about bitcoins and the blockchain technology for three years, said, “It (block chain) is definitely picking up, people are trying to understand it better. It can be used to make excellent products in banking and finance, contracts, exchange of tokens and many other things.”
Jatin Malhotra, head of a community of developers called Google Developers Group, in Mumbai, said, “I think it is a very good opportunity for developers to get on board early. Going ahead, the technology will have a great impact.” Malhotra is the founder of Freestore.in, an e-commerce site that accepts bitcoin payments.
Participation is free and open to members who register. The registration is open until July 31 and the number of participants is restricted.
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To read the bitcoin white paper, visit: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
