As a general rule, anyone who makes an impression on hackathons can open further doors. Tseng took part in an Ernst & Young Startup Challenge, a six-week program that focused on blockchain applications this year. There he and his team won the award for the company with the „greatest investment potential“.
This is particularly exciting as it is currently still more of an obstacle than a help to be a professional blockchain software developer.
Into the future with Hackathons
„Distributed Ledger technology is still very early in the adoption cycle. Technologies that are very new tend to be less user-friendly and therefore have a higher entry barrier.“
The 18 year old founder of the Blockchain Startup Mesh has six years of experience with the Blockchain at his young age. According to him, Blockchain technology has many strengths, but usability is not one of them.
Since he was twelve, Mate Bitcoin has mined on graphics cards and built several online wallets. In general, he came into contact with computers and programming early on: The computer on which he started mienne Bitcoin was built when he was nine. He played games that were still in the beta phase, debugged them and learned to reproduce the mistakes they had.
But working on video games is easy compared to working on the blockchain: there is no developer toolkit for the blockchain. The infrastructure that would allow a large adoption of the blockchain in the developer scene still needs to be developed.
Some blockchain APIs do exist, but according to him they are not exactly flexible
However, Tseng believes that this will change: The blockchain technology is being accepted by banks and financial institutions like Hyperledger or R3. Just this week Richard Glendal Brown, CTO of R3, wrote a blog post about Corda, the smart contract platform of R3.
The blockchain will continue to take big steps into the future – as it has done since 2008. Blockchain enthusiasts will continue to start businesses and spend their free time on hackathons.
The industry will catch up now that the first links between startups and large companies have been established; according to Mate, this will lead to the „blockchain revolution“ in which these large companies will fully adopt the blockchain. Hackathons are the ideal way to find real use cases.
Hackathons, incubators and accelerators „very quickly show whether an idea makes sense for large companies,“ says Plug and Play’s Robinson.
Dr. Philipp GieseDr. Philipp Giese works as Chief Analyst for BTC-ECHO and specializes in chart analysis and technology. The doctor of physics has many years of professional experience as a technological consultant at his disposal. In addition, he is the central contact person in the BTC-ECHO Discord Channel and, as a speaker and interviewer, maintains an exchange with startups, developers and visionaries.