On October 5 and 6, Infrachain held its annual blockchain hackathon: the Infrachain Challenge, sponsored by the Ministry for Digitalisation of Luxembourg. The winners of this year’s edition are the Let’sFixID team, which comprises members from the Digital Financial Services and Cross-Organisational Digital Transformations (FINATRAX) research group at SnT, namely doctoral researchers Linda Weigl and Egor Ermolaev.
“MEETS ID”, Let’sFixID’s project, is a decentralised management system for medical e-prescriptions. It aims for a simplified exchange between doctors, pharmacies and health insurances, and speeds up transactions. The team’s participants worked in an interdisciplinary environment, with areas of expertise ranging from computer science, information systems engineering to political science. Members from various institutions joined the competition, including experts from SnT, the Research Centre for Finance & Information Management (FIM), as well as the Project Group Business & Information Systems Engineering of the University of Bayreuth and Fraunhofer FIT.
“The FINATRAX group accompanies societal change through technology, and this hackathon was a great way to demonstrate it,” said Linda , doctoral candidate at SnT. The Weigl required teams to develop a ground-breaking solution based on public sector blockchain in two days, which included 30 hours of coding and the creation of a demo, followed by a ten-minute pitch in front of a jury. This year, six teams took part in the competition: Edda Luxembourg, InTech, Let’sFixID, Neofacto, The Backstreet Boys and the Infrachain Challenge (LIST). Each team was expected to develop a project that provided an innovative method of public data transfer, such as digital bank certificates or certificates of residence, through the use of a decentralised app (DApp), which relies on blockchain technology and runs on a peer-to-peer platform. Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology
Runners up in the competition were the LIST and Edda Luxembourg, ranking second and third respectively. LIST proposed an environmentally-friendly and blockchain-based solution for electronic waste management, while Edda Luxembourg focused on developing a consent control tool for citizens. The winner of the best public sector blockchain project received EUR 5,000 and the first and second runner-up received EUR 3,500 and EUR 2,000 respectively.
“Competing against long-established companies and research institutes added a lot of pressure on this 30-hour marathon, but I enjoyed every bit of it! We are very proud that we could represent SnT at this event, and we are looking for the next challenge,” Linda Weigl concluded.
The Ministry for Digitalisation will review every idea submitted during the hackathon and potentially offer candidates to turn their project into a public sector application. In today’s world, this type of challenge seems to be an important consideration as many public documents are still paper-based, and rely on scanning and manual encoding. Players like Infrachain, a local non-profit organisation, are therefore important to strengthen the digitalisation effort in Luxembourg and allow blockchain-based documents to become operational in the Luxembourgish economy.