Author: bchainadmin

In February 2019 for again 3 days, hackers from all over the continent will have the chance to ignite their creativity using blockchain technology to disrupt traditional industries.

Under the motto “Converging the crypto Universe into Industrial IoT”, the 2019 edition explores the convergence of blockchain with other advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and the internet of things (IoT).

Three challenges will give the sparks for the creation of new and innovative solutions. Keynote speakers will serve as inspiration and mentors will support the teams in their development efforts.

A Marathon of development, which as usual, will reward the efforts and passion of all people involved with great networking opportunities and fabulous prizes. A total of 15.000 euro awaits the most visionary concepts selected by a jury of experts of the field. But even more surprises are yet to be disclosed!

This year the Blockchain Hackathon will join forces with the Blockchain Stuttgart Week, an umbrella event bringing together amazing conferences, meetups and industry events with the vision of making Stuttgart a leading global location for blockchain technology, crypto economy and digital value creation. For one week long, Stuttgart will be the headquarter of the Blockchain Revolution. Experts coming from all over Germany will discuss the potential of this technology and envision together its future application scenario. Night events will provide the perfect setting for networking among all people interested in blockchain and release some party mood among all of the week’s events. From the Blockchain Future Festival till the IHK Blockchain Campus – a wide variety of events and opportunities promise to dive deep in the blockchain universe. The full program of the Blockchain Stuttgart Week will be available soon. Check our pages for further updates!

The Blockchain Stuttgart Week is boosted by the Blockchain Community of South-West Germany. Tickets for each event need to be purchased individually.

NOTE: The registration for the 2^nd Blockchain Hackathon Stuttgart is already open. Participation is as usual free of charge for all hackers – food, drinks and night naps in the location are included. The Blockchain Hackathon is organized by bwcon and blockLAB and supported by many amazing sponsors. Challenges, speakers and supporters are going to be revealed soon!

17 teams, over 100 participants from all over the world and only three days to co-work and code – the first Blockchain Hackathon, taking place at Merz-Akademie Stuttgart, was all about finding ways of achieving higher transparency and efficiency in real-life cases through Blockchain technology.  The event organized by the business initiative bwcon, was aimed at sensitizing businesses in different industries for the innovative potential of the pioneering technology.

In the course of the event the participants were challenged to envision applications of Blockchain aside from the current hype – the crypto currencies. The decentralized database responsible for the breakthrough of bitcoin, ripple and co. is based on a network of independent servers where information is stored multiple times, while being accessible to every user at any time. As a result, transparency and integrity of the data is extremely high, making the technology applicable to challenges in a variety of different areas.

Hackathon 2018: A million and one possible applications in business and society

The 1^st Blockchain Hackathon Stuttgart was structured around the motto “Envision the Crypto Future” with a focus on linking the topics Fintech and Industry 4.0 with the vision of the Internet of Things. The three sponsors Daimler, LBBW and Bosch awarded prizes to the top ideas responding to challenges in the areas of mobility, finance and industry. Additionally, the most visionary concept, the best technical implementation, and the most promising business model were honored in the awards ceremony.

The expert jury was particularly fascinated by the great variety of fields with application potential. The team “TrustableCam” developed a model inhibiting digital manipulation of image and video material, which could increase reliability of criminal evidence and earned them the prize for the most visionary concept. “Best technical implementation” was awarded to “Transtrans” and their project focusing on the transparency of supply chains in the pharma industry, which has the potential to prevent counterfeit drugs from entering the market. The prototype of “mocence”, a concept focusing on creating incentives for a considerate use of car sharing-vehicles, was announced best business model.

Sponsor challenges: ideas for the mobility, finance and industry of tomorrow

The three sponsor challenges honored the most innovative ideas envisioning more efficient, secure and transparent processes in the relevant industries. One of the winning teams, “VLM-Platooning”, proposed a concept facilitating the communication between autonomous and conventional vehicles. “Decentralized Credit Pool” was able to persuade the sponsors with a decentralized model for bank lending based on a cooperative financing pool. The industry-challenge was awarded to “ChainReaction” and their prototype of an automatized process handling machine malfunctions.

The overwhelming resonance and great variety of application potential envisioned during the first hackathon showed one thing above all else – Blockchain-technology can be a long-term perspective for industry and society. Therefore we give a huge shout out to all sponsors, mentors and participants for paving the way into a new crypto future – to be continued…

A guest blog post by Mr. Karsten Treiber, Director Digital Finance with targens GmbH: Last summer it became public – the cooperation between Daimler and the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW). Together the companies issued a corporate Schuldschein on the blockchain, in parallel to the classic way. Both companies have been dealing with this technology intensely and it is therefore not astonishing that both companies participate in the first Stuttgart Blockchain Hackathon as gold sponsors. This is a good reason to give a brief insight into the project.

The corporate Schuldschein

Simply put: The loanee needs money. Investors on the other hand are interested in investing their money to achieve maximum profits. The arranger helps both parties to reach their goal as fast and uncomplicatedly as possible. The process, however takes very long, because of all the steps concerning the conclusion of contract. One reason for that is the complex negotiation, contract and signature process. All participants, which might add up to hundreds quickly, have to exchange in classic contracts for different steps via mail before the business can come about. Furthermore, all participants have to trust the arranger, because he is responsible for the correctness of the contract data as well as the pre-negotiations.

The aim of the project, that was started in January 2017, was to make the process less complex, to carry it out via blockchain and to learn from all of it.

Why take blockchain and not go the classic route?

What is the use of blockchain at that point of the process after all? This question has to be asked during the conception and creation of a use case over and over again and question its meaningfulness. The actual added value is in the fact that the technology can be seen as some sort of interface between the participants or even as a commonly used system which is run independently by each participant. The participants can afterwards carry out the connection to their inventory system on their own.

The data are present with all participants equally. On the one hand this creates a high transparency and therefore trust, the question that arises on the other hand is whether or not this kind of transparency is wanted in the business policy. The matter that is even worse is: Does this kind of transparency comply with the current law.

During the pilot project phase that lasted half a year Daimler and LBBW tried to find answers to these and other questions. Most of them could be answered. Others were noted as findings and will be answered in the future. Questions unanswered are mostly the ones dealing with the law that cannot be tackled by a workaround or a clean solution.

Other important topics that justify the use of blockchain are the immutability of entries and their comprehensibility as well as the knowledge on the use of distributed systems, which might in the future be able to replace inventory systems in the single companies.

Join Forces for success

When two big players join forces in order to deepen blockchain for themselves and each other, there has to be a good reason. It is clear for both of them that this technology has a big potential for the future. But it is not before the opening to and cooperation with further parties interested that the actual potential is utilized. To achieve this level the experts of both companies were put together for a collaborative project. The goal was clear: a corporate Schuldschein transaction in summer of 2017. The team had full responsibility to achieve this goal: content-related and when it came to the occupation of resources and reporting channels.
In this interdisciplinary, cross-company team that was drafted as a swarm organization even the organizations was new ground. There had not been a project like this in either company before. Daimler as well as LBBW involved their IT specialists Daimler TSS and targens into the project.

Distributed Ledger vs. Blockchain

The first question the team had to face was the one what technology to choose. The question concerns the teams anew whenever they start a new project. With a technology as young as blockchain not all technological problems are solved, some of them are not even known yet. By the time six months have passed, new releases or technologies on at the market that promise to solve some more of the problems that we know of. The team then has to weigh the degree of maturity of the technology versus the disadvantages and advantages.

The bond team finally decided to take Ethereum. The visibility problems concerning bank secrecy have not been solved there, but the disruption potential a technology brings along that enables full transparency and distribution, can be judged better. Furthermore, Ethereum was by far at that point the most mature technology that allows the development of smart contracts.

In order to fulfill the legal and regulatory requirements that were mentioned above the project had to be carried out in a private chain. Despite that the project had to be as close to a public chain as possible. Therefore, each party involved in the business received a node of their on that they could work on.

Digital Asset

From a business perspective one of the most important aspects for the blockchain is to digitize any kind of assets. In this case it is the corporate Schuldschein itself. In order to do so, the tokenization based on the ERC20 standard was used. Each bonded loan is tokenized and depending on its size receives tokens based on the smallest denomination. The investors on the other hand then receive their respective subscribed share as tokens into their wallet. The conclusion of this is that in future a secondary downstream market is thinkable.

End of pilot project

If you think that the press release dated from summer 2017 was the end of the pilot project, you are mistaken. The duration will take up most of 2018. The payment of interest of the issuer that arises from that are also included in the blockchain. Accordingly, even long-standing findings resulting from the operation of such a technology can be observed.

Perspectives

The pilot project has shown which great opportunities the cooperation between industry and banks can have. The location in the Southwest of Germany is pre-destined for this topic based on a strong industry and all the global companies located here. With events as the Blockchain Hackathon in Stuttgart the entire region shows that it wants to maintain and even further expand this position. The opening and exchange of companies will make the region stronger and personally I am looking forward to the numerous exciting projects in this environment and especially the Blockchain Hackathon.

More Information:

https://www.daimler.com/investors/refinancing/blockchain.html
https://www.lbbw.de/en/presse/presseinformationen/presse_detail_71040.jsp

In this guest blog post Mr. Karsten Treiber, Director Digital Finance with targens GmbH, gives insights into tokens in the blockchain environment and the most mentioned one: the ERC20 Token. He sums up what it actually is and why tokenization changes the world.

Internet of Value

Whenever we talk about wallets or how much bitcoins are in a wallet, this statement is actually wrong. The crypto currency is rather held in a system, i.e. the chain, visibly for everyone. But what is it that is transferred if not the coin? It is the proof that a person indeed owns shares of the currency. The currency itself it is not transferred, just accounted for which is the task of the so-called ledger. The blockchain therefore indicates the ownership, e.g. just as some kind of distributed bank statement.

If we get rid of the concept that coins are only manageable in the blockchain as currency, we reach the digital asset, e.g. a digitized certificate. Each value can thus be digitized and traded. Examples of that are securitizations, just as it is the case with bonds, property, real estate, movables, art, jewelry, organizations (DAO) or company shares (ICO). Sky’s the limit!

The ERC20 Token

A special breakthrough was reached when the ERC20 token (Ethereum Request for Comments) was introduced. It is practically the standard when you create digital assets. That is what made it easy to create and trade these assets like coins. The ERC20 enabled ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) to break through. This ongoing process will affect the way we do business immensely. All kinds of administrational processes will be optimized and automatized. The security of digital and distributed documentation is lifted on a higher level.

ERC20 norms the names and amounts of assets, the administration of the respective possession as well as the kinds and terms for the transfer and requirements. This also means, that the behavior of a digital asset can be directed by the respective developer. He could, for example, determine the purpose or prerequisites for a transfer inside the actual digital asset.

We can only speculate the effects this future technology will have on the current use cases. I think that the tokenization will play one of the main roles in respect to blockchain.

The topic of tokenization will also play a major part at the Blockchain Hackathon. We are especially looking forward to any idea that helps combine and connect the challenges.

If you are interested to learn how to “Create your own Crypto-Currency with Ethereum” this ethereum Article will guide you through. Or just take a look to the “Ethereum Tokens Market Capitalization” to get a feeling about tokens in the market.

For German readers we recommend the blockNEWS “Anbruch der Tokenisierung” and the blockFUNK Podcast „Tokenisierung“, both from the blockLAB expert group.

In this guest blog post Dr. Christian Beckel, expert of IOT, Research, Venture and member of blockLAB Stuttgart, provides an overview over the Ethereum project, its community, and most importantly: Its blockchain.

Ethereum project

Ethereum was first heard of in 2013, when one of the founders Vitalik Buterin (who still acts as a figurehead of the project) published the initial version of the Ethereum Whitepaper together with his co-authors. The key contribution of Ethereum compared to existing projects such as Bitcoin was Ethereum’s focus on smart contracts and decentralized computing – subsequently being marketed as the World Computer. After a successful crowd sale and the foundation of the Ethereum Foundation, the project finally went live on 30 July 2015.

As of today, Ethereum is the second most valuable cryptocurrency (after Bitcoin) with a market capitalization of roughly $74bn. In other categories, Ethereum already outperforms Bitcoin.For instance, the Ethereum network processes roughly one million transactions per day, which is three times as much as the Bitcoin network. Also, the number of Ethereum nodes (30k) is 2.5 times higher than the number of Bitcoin nodes (12k). The Website Flippening Watch provides a live comparison of the two projects.

Difference to Bitcoin

The main difference to Bitcoin is that Ethereum supports a Turing-complete virtual machine for the execution of smart contracts: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). There are several programming languages available that compile into EVM such as Solidity, Serpent, LLL, Viper, and Mutan (deprecated). A detailed specification of the EVM is available in the infamous Yellow Paper. For beginners, the Documentation of Solidity is sufficient to develop the first smart contracts. While Bitcoin is perceived as a novel decentralized payment system or at the very least a store of value, the fact that Ethereum makes smart contracts first class citizens on the blockchain allows for a whole new set of applications beyond payments. Ethereum is hence often appraised of making the ‘middleman’ obsolete, which may lead to huge saving potentials for applications in different domains ranging from notary services to decentralized credit applications. While most of these applications still have to catch up with their promises, the first domain with real application seems to be the domain of prediction markets (e.g., Augur, Gnosis).

The Ethereum Blockchain

The Ethereum blockchain can be investigated online through Websites such as Etherchain.org or Etherscan.io. In Ethereum, each address specifies an account on the blockchain. Interestingly, an account can be of two types: A normal (or externally controlled) account is an account that holds ether and can be

used to fire transactions (e.g., send ether to another account). A contract account also has an ether balance. However, in contrast to an externally controlled account, a contract also contains code, which is executed through an explicit call (i.e., from an externally controlled account or from another contract). As a result of the call and the subsequent code execution, the contract changes its state, which is – like the balance of all accounts – stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

The execution of a smart contract induces a state transition on the Ethereum blockchain. Code execution (and hence the state transition) is being performed by all Ethereum nodes and should therefore used thriftily in order not to spam the network with unnecessary computations. To this end, accounts invoking a smart contract must pay a fee depending on the complexity of the contract. This fee is being paid for in gas, a derivative of ether. For each transaction, gas price must be set sufficiently high in order for miners to accept the transaction. While normally, clients take care about setting appropriate gas prices, developers can also employ tools such as ETH Gas Station to identify the right amount of gas that fuels the transaction.

The Ethereum Community

The community is extremely active and probably one of the most lively within the crypto ecosystem. A lot of the code developed is available on the Ethereum GitHub repository. Meetings of developer meetings as well as interesting presentations are being streamed live or are accessible afterwards on the project’s Youtube channel. A good source of news is the offical Ethereum blog and the reddit channel r/ethereum. For people that are more interested in trading than in the underlying technology, r/ethtrader is a good channel with lots of (more or less serious) discussions about price trends. All developers and likeminded people in the Ethereum community meet once a year on the Ethereum Foundation’s annual developer conference. This year’s event Devcon 3 took place in Cancun, Mexico, and has been attended by roughly 2000 people. Podcasts are a good source of news as well. In Ethereum, two of the most well-known podcasts with very interesting guests are The Ether Review and epicenter. Note that blockLAB Stuttgart recently started its own podcast: blockFUNK. If you are more interested in a summarized version of events, we can recommend weekly newsletters such as Evan van Ness’ Week in Ethereum News or our blockLABNewsletter.

Finally, Ethereum recently initiated a partnership network through the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, which “connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts“. Killer app(s) and ongoing projects. New technologies are often being judged based on their potential to provide a killer app. In case of Ethereum, the (first) killer app seems to be the ERC20 Token Standard. While the standard simply describes the functions and events that an Ethereum token contract has to implement, it paves the way for compatibility of many different tokens, each of which can be bought, sold, and traded on the Ethereum blockchain. This feature has already been used by many different projects and lead to a completely new way of funding called Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). ICOs are already seen as the disruption to traditional venture capital funding. Beyond contracts for token creation, there are numerous decentralized apps (dApps) in the making or even already live. The Website State of the dApps provides an overview of many different dApps as well as their current status. Despite (or because of) the emergence of all these projects, novel applications, and the significant Ethereum price rise in 2017, one problem remains: In the current form, each smart contract is being executed by all Ethereum nodes (i.e., validators), which is – frankly speaking – the opposite of scalable. There are however different ongoing scaling activities on different levels such as Sharding, Plasma, and the Raiden network.

In a recent blogpost, Can Blockchains Scale?, we provided an overview of the scaling problem and different solutions proposed and developed by the extremely active community. Read more about it!

During the 2^nd-4^th February the first Blockchain Hackathon in Stuttgart takes place. What started in summer 2017 as a small idea from blockchain enthusiasts rapidly and constantly grows into a thrilling project which finds widespread support within the regional hacker community and the established economy.

The idea behind Stuttgart’s 1^st Blockchain Hackathon

Bitcoin and blockchain technology is a global success story. What began with Satoshi Nakamotos Whitepaper in 2008 has inspired many people worldwide to innovate and build new digital infrastructures. From crypto currencies to smart contracts on public blockchains to a new way of project funding via initial coin offerings (ICO) – the blockchain technology has a big impact already. We believe this impact will grow even stronger in the years to come. As the blockchain community in the Stuttgart Region we also believe that blockchain technology is here to stay. With our first blockchain hackathon we want to bring people together to think about the blockchain future in combination with IoT. Since our region is globally one of the leading high-tech manufacturing, we are especially interested to combine blockchain and the internet of things. In doing so we intend to strengthen our community, expand our network to established companies and spark new ideas and innovation.

The flame as a symbol of progress

Our design and logo are inspired by the ancient Greek mythology figure Prometheus. According to legend Prometheus once stole the fire from the gods and brought it to the humans as an act that should enable progress and civilization. For us blockchain technology can be seen as a new fire that will support progress in development for both technology and civilization. While the hackathon logo symbolizes the Prometheus flame in an abstract manner, a more real representation can be found as picture on our website.

Stuttgart’s corporates and institutions support

blockchain technology innovation

We first talked about the idea to organize a blockchain hackathon in the summer of 2017. What would it take to do so? Would we find adequate sponsors? Would we find enough people to participate? Now, half a year later, all our questions are answered. bwcon , the leading network of high-tech companies in Baden-Württemberg, provides the necessary support with an experienced project team who has already promoted and organized many hackathons in the regions. Members of the special interest group blockchain of bwcon put in additional effort in terms of event content, technical aspects and finding and serving our sponsors. The event is also supported by blockLAB Stuttgart – a non-profit organization of blockchain experts and enthusiasts – and many more.

At the Blockchain Hackathon we pay attention that there will be an inspriring atmosphere for knowledge exchange and networking. Therefore you will have the chance to connect with representors of our sponsors and supporters in person.

There is good reason to be excited! We are looking forward working with all participants on the future of crypto economy. Stay tuned!