Consensys hosted its first ever Ethereal Hackathon in partnership with Blockchain @ Berkeley on Saturday, Oct. 21 and 22nd. Consensys is a venture production studio and software development consultancy that builds enterprise solutions, decentralized applications, and other tools for the blockchain environment mostly centered on Ethereum (an open source blockchain based platform.
Blockchain is a resistant technology that can be useful for identity, asset transformations, and voting. It can also be used to form governance systems that help individuals or groups of people to make decisions using these shared resources by keeping information transparent to participants. This rigorous two-day hackathon took place at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business where over 20 teams were challenged to design a blockchain governance system that takes advantage of such affordances.
One team from Blockchain @ Berkeley took home third place of the conference and included one of SCET’s visiting students from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Federico Kunze. Federico and his fellow teammates created a solution called Athena that implements a stake based voting scheme, where shareholders can vote their own preferences based on whatever stake they own. Athena awards those who participate and equitably picks the outcome that is favored by everyone. It also incentivizes honest reporting of the voter’s preference.
Athena (Back row from left to right: Avneet Saini, Kevin Chang, Jeremiah Andrews, Federico Kunze. Front row from left to right: Tammy Vu, Saroj Chintakrindi)
Everyone in the team that built Athena was able present their projects at Ethereal San Francisco on Oct. 27 in front of of Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys, along with many other leaders in the Blockchain space.