Communications of the ACM
Hackathon Winners Put End to Paper Documents with Blockchain
The BlockGet team won the Dcube incubator prize at HackXLR8.
Team BlockGet was named the winner of DECENT's challenge at a hackathon event which concluded June 13 in London. The team secured second place overall and won DECENT's blockchain challenge by delivering a project that would ensure dematerialization and elimination of paper documents and storage on blockchain using IPFS via DECENT's DCore platform.
The hackathon, carrying the name HackXLR8 2019, was part of London Tech Week which opened on Monday, June 10. Contestants had the option to choose from three leading technological spheres: AI, Internet of Things, and blockchain.
Project BlockGet's solution exhibited an easy way to scan documents and avoid purposeless paper concentration. Thanks to DECENT DCore's native integration of the IPFS peer-to-peer file storage network and non-fungible tokens, the team conditioned the realization of the idea by using three simple steps: scanning a file via a template inside the Blockget mobile app, permanently storing the file through IPFS, and assigning a unique ID via DCore.
During the team's final pitch, which involved a real-time demo, developers Hellema Ibrahim, George McKinney, and designer Trevor Oakley explained the critical impetus that led to the conception of their project, stating that "seven million shareholders utilized physical paper documents throughout the whole year 2012." Through the process of "dematerialization," the move from physical to electronic documents, the project's principle is to convert information on an analog medium to digital formats and store them securely on the DCore blockchain.
BlockGet's earned reward was a cash prize of £1,000 (US$1,268) and project incubation as part of DECENT's recent launch of DCube, an open-source blockchain platform focused on supporting and guiding blockchain projects from technical, financial, and business perspectives.
From the overall prize pool, the main award of the hackathon went to Bloxis—a blockchain-based platform that allows users to view and interact with their dApps via interactive dashboards. The team claimed this would "avoid the frustration of trying to access each dApp through a 'special' mobile browser individually." The unified platform would, therefore, enable users to log in to full dApp experiences served via browsers, with no additional plugins required.
With Blockget winning DECENT's DCube incubation prize, the company plans to support the team and help to successfully realize BlockGet's project in the future.
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