'Tackling Real World Issues': Hackers at ETH New York Build Apps Geared Towards Social Change

gepubliceerd op by Coindesk | gepubliceerd op

If building decentralized financial applications was the motto topic of Ethereal, the ethereum hackathon ETH New York was all about discussing the social impact of such applications.

Speaking to a group of high school students at ETH New York, Mariano Conti - head of smart contracts at the MakerDAO Foundation - asked foundational questions surrounding decentralized financial applications like, "How do you protect your money?" and "What if banks decided you do not own your money?".

Specifically targeted towards a younger generation, Conti and the MakerDAO teamed up with children's non-profit UNICEF and ethereum startup Bounties Network to create the Surge track at ETH New York.

The Surge track features talks and bounties geared towards educating high-school students about the basic of blockchain.

Creating conversations about decentralized finance and blockchain more generally was not only the focus of programming at ETH New York but also the primary focus of several hacking teams this year.

Freelance developer Tal Zisckind put together an ethereum wallet application for the visually impaired in order to spark conversation around application accessibility.

ETH New York sponsors awarded those teams that had a strong focus on social impact and the greater good.

"I hope to see applications tackling real world issues," said Oskar Paolini at blockchain startup TORUS. TORUS sponsored a total of seven different bounties at ETH New York collectively totaling $8,000.

To Paolini's point, UNICEF France posted a 10 ETH bounty equivalent to roughly $2,300 for hacking teams that built an application to support the accountability and transparency of a real world project called Project Connect.

"We're testing the rails of how this would work in the real world and understanding conceptually what way we should approach" said Christina Lomazzo, blockchain lead at UNICEF Innovations.

x