Hackathons Benefit From Blockchain Voting, Rewards and Transparency

Hackathon management platform TAIKAI announced June 29 that it would be using Telos network to provide a fully transparent and auditable blockchain voting system, and as a token reward mechanism.

Telos is built on EOSIO technology, and TAIKAI had previously been using EOSIO for this functionality. It was even the subject of a feature on the EOS blog earlier this month.

Hacking isn’t always a bad thing

TAIKAI describes its platform as an open innovation social network, which facilitates the bringing together of corporates facing challenges, with a community of innovators to help solve them.

The hackathon format provides a cost effective way for companies to attract a wealth of highly specialized talent to focus on the problem at hand.

With such a focus on matching up challenges and solutions, finding the right blockchain network on which to run the platform was key. TAIKAI CEO Mário Ribeiro Alves explains:

“TAIKAI is a community-driven platform and we look for like-minded partners that can help us create a network effect. Fortunately, we’ve found TELOS, and we knew from the first meeting that we were completely aligned. I’m confident we’ll build a great future together as we connect companies with innovative teams to solve real-world challenges.”

Blockchain as enabler

Blockchain has been part of the TAIKAI vision from the start, with Alves realizing the value of “tokenization as a way to provide a transparent and auditable selection process for use in hackathons and other innovation challenges.”

However, it was important that a regular user would not notice any difference between using a blockchain-enabled platform and a non-blockchain platform.

Since launching in March 2019, the company has brought on board some of the largest businesses and universities in its native Portugal and is looking to expand globally.

The Telos network has been gaining traction in recent months, becoming the blockchain of choice for Transledger’s interoperability platform, the All_EBT food assistance program in the United States, and has announced support for Ethereum smart contracts following the launch of an Ethereum Virtual Machine.