The first hackathon of the series kicked off in India on April 12, 2019. Open to all blockchain enthusiasts in the country, the event’s first phase consisted of 1,276 participants who competed in a virtual crowdsourcing process over the course of six weeks. It then culminated into a 36-hour, no sleep, on-site hackathon where 76 participants forming 27 teams created and presented their blockchain solution prototypes.

Shivam Singh, Rajat Rawat, Rohan Chougule and Swastik Shrivastava of team shivam2813_1716 from Lucknow earned the grand prize of INR 3,00,000 (3 lakh Indian rupees) and the title of ultimate winners of the Conduent Blockchain Hackathon India segment. The first runner up award went to Sudharshan Iyengar, Shankar Thyagarajan, Kiruba Karan and Magesh B of team HackerX from Chennai who received INR 2,00,000 (2 lakh Indian rupees) and, the second runner award was given to Anand Kumar Sinha, Sangat Das, Sairaj Sawant and Rohit Badre of team anandsinha07_adab from Pune who received INR 1,00,000 (1 lakh Indian rupees).

The focus of the Hackathon was to build a viable, decentralized application to share assets in the business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) contexts around the following themes:

  • Incentive systems for social behavioral change
  • Blockchain for a shared economy
  • Smart properties
  • Transparent interactions with the Government
  • Delegative voting systems

Participants could use any blockchain platform, technology stack, domain, or programming language of their choice. Applications were evaluated on the basis of their novelty and practicality.

“Blockchain is an evolving technology with abilities to support a wide range of uses in the commercial and public sectors, and Conduent is focused on fostering these types of emerging technology disciplines,” said Nikhil Nayab, Global Head, Payments Innovation and Blockchain, Conduent. “The level of enthusiasm and innovative ideas exhibited at the Hackathon was extremely impressive, and we’re excited to provide opportunities to the many talented developers and coders across India – a leader in blockchain research with one of the highest concentrations of blockchain developers in the world.”