On October 7th and 8th, vechain, a leading enterprise-grade L1 public blockchain, will host a hackathon at Harvard in partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Web3 educational mobile app, EasyA. The event aims to foster the development of sustainable decentralized applications on VechainThor, vechain’s public network, as the teams work towards solving real-world enterprise use cases.
200 of the world’s best developers, selected from Meta, Google, and Coinbase, as well as elite universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Wharton, and Stanford, will participate. The developers were selected from a pool of over 10,000 candidates who participated in vechain’s #60Daysofvechain in-app campaign, carried out in collaboration with EasyA. The hackathon includes several different tracks, including a “Shark Tank” session, allowing business and sustainability club students to compete for smaller cash prizes. These tracks also encourage the use of vechain’s VORJ tool, which enables users to deploy smart contracts easily without knowing how to code or having to pay any transaction fees.
WHY:
Sunny Lu, CEO at vechain said: “Today’s developers are building technologies that are shaping the business environment of tomorrow. Sustainability is multi-faceted - vechain is helping enterprises achieve sustainable growth by unlocking new forms of value, while also furthering the global sustainability agenda in terms of individual, economic and environmental outcomes.
Web3 is the engine of collective change, with the power to tokenize and incentivize action at the individual level while facilitating collaboration at entirely new scales. By supporting developers with tools that make building out Web3 simple, vechain, in turn, further accelerates the pace of blockchain adoption, showcasing its viability as a tool for impactful change. I'm excited to collaborate with such high-caliber talent and showcase VechainThor as a platform for real innovation."
Dr. Bernhard Kronfellner, Partner and co-lead of the digital asset and blockchain group at Boston Consulting Group, said: “The vechain hackathon is further evidence of vechain’s commitment to bring real-world sustainability applications to large enterprises to enhance their operations. It is also a testament to vechain’s ability to bring meaningful ideas to life and make the world a better place thanks to blockchain technology—a mission BCG is proud to support.”
Felix Kwok, Harvard Research Labs President, commented: “All of our team have now completed the EasyA vechain challenges and we can’t wait to start building at the hackathon! vechain’s partnerships with world-class organizations such as BCG and UFC make it appealing to a wide range of developers, from students to professionals across the US, who are flying in for this two-day hackathon.
WHERE:
Harvard’s brand new $1.2 billion, 500,000 sq ft., Science and Engineering Complex.
HACKATHON DETAILS:
The event will feature keynotes from Sunny Lu, CEO at vechain, and Dr. Bernhard Kronfellner, Partner and co-lead of the digital asset and blockchain group at Boston Consulting Group, who will also judge the event.
The event schedule details are as follows:
△ EasyA: Prior to the hackathon, the event will kick off with a #60Daysofvechain challeges series on the EasyA mobile app, equipping developers with knowledge around vechain’s tools and ecosystem
△ Talks and workshops: the event will include three workshops and tracks.
- BCG’s track will discuss and provide challenges pertaining to areas where blockchain solutions stand to have a significant impact.
- vechain’s track will invite participants to explore and implement ideas using vechain’s highly sustainable and intuitive blockchain solutions.
△ BUIDL: The hacking period will last 36 hours, after which projects will be judged by a panel of industry veterans and academic leaders.
△ Prize pool: Developers will compete for a portion of the $40,000 in prize pool and the opportunity to access additional funding to develop their projects.
Past EasyA hackathon projects have been funded by the likes of a16z, YC, and other top VCs.
Vechain, headquartered in San Marino, Europe, is the curator of VechainThor, a world leading smart contract platform spearheading the real world adoption of blockchain technology. Through leveraging the capabilities of ‘trustless’ data (information without intermediaries), smart contracts and IoT technologies, VechainThor has enabled solutions across a wide array of fields. Vechain now turns its attention to the greatest challenge of all — building digital ecosystems to drive sustainability and digital transformation at global scale.
