3 innovative distributed ledger based solutions come out on top as Hedera India Hackathon 2021 comes to an end

The Hedera India Hackathon 2021 announced the top three winners of the most recent hackathon. These solutions, Decentralised Email, MovieNix, and MySpace 3.0, will receive USD $5000, USD $3000, and USD $2000 respectively, in prizes and will also receive ecosystem support from Hedera Hashgraph. Three additional innovations, TrustTag, Hashmail,  and Content Streaming FTW,  stand to receive $200 each for their innovative solutions utilizing the Hedera network.

Launched in partnership with the HBAR Foundation, and  Lumos Labs, a leading technology innovation management firm, this hackathon witnessed 1000+ pan-India registrations and aimed to empower and scale up the developer talent pool of India with enterprise-grade problem-solving ideas. It featured various distributed ledger and blockchain-centric innovative ideas across numerous traditional sectors including entertainment, gaming, finance, data, content, etc.  From these, six creative solutions were selected to pitch their decentralised innovations LIVE at the Hedera India Hackathon Demo Day.  The hackathon focused on three tracks – entertainment, sustainability, and finance –  where developers were able to create solutions aimed at optimizing these sectors with distributed ledger technology.

“HBAR Foundation has been focusing on encouraging and facilitating innovation in India. With the Hedera India Hackathon, we were able to provide holistic support to talented developers by giving them a platform to turn visions into sustainable solutions. The winners of this Hackathon have presented us with futuristic startups that further motivate us to provide more such platforms where Indian developers can showcase their innovations.” mentioned Vignesh Raja, Director- Business development (Middle east and South Asia), the HBAR Foundation.

“The Hedera India Hackathon was a step towards penetrating the Indian developer ecosystem to encourage further adoption of  the Hedera network. India has been at the forefront of blockchain and distributed ledger technology and the talented developer pool has shown potential through its various innovative solutions and ideas – clearly evidenced by the level of technical depth and real-world applicability demonstrated in the solutions. This is not the end of the journey for the participants. We at the HBAR Foundation intend to support the winners on their journey to take their submissions to the next level – whatever that is – and hope to organize more such programs to encourage the budding developers and entrepreneurs further.”, Viv Diwakar, Director of Technology – Strategy, HBar Foundation.

The demo day featured six inventive solutions pitching their visions live. From these, three were announced as winners –

• Decentralised Email –  Decentralised email with no central servers and emails that can only be read by the Hedera account owner using private public-key encryption.

• MovieNix – A movie streaming platform built on Hedera Network where users can pay for their desired movies directly to the production companies.

• MySpace 3.0 – A decentralised social media platform that allows users to network with their peers and create their own NFTs in the Metaverse.

Furthermore, the other three solutions were rewarded with USD $200 each for their innovations –

• Hashmail – A decentralised email service built on Hedera.

• TrustTag – -TrustTag is a smart tag system that uses a mobile app to scan QR codes and fetch the history of a product/item stored on Hedera.

• Content Streaming FTW-  A decentralized content streaming platform that will allow users, companies, etc to stream any form of content and pay for the amount of content they have streamed

“The Hedera India Hackathon witnessed numerous ingenious ideas that were focused on enhancing existing traditional systems through decentralised solutions. India has been a global blockchain hub in recent years and has been positive about the potential of this technology. With the solutions that we witnessed in this hackathon, we can see the potential that lies in the budding developers of India and we will continue to provide them with more such opportunities to present their ideas to relevant and global stakeholders.” added Kaavya Prasad, Co-founder, Lumos Labs.

All six solutions will win from a collective pool of USD $12K along with ecosystem and go to market support. The two month long Hackathon was organized in partnership with Lumos Labs, a leading expert in running tech innovations programs in India.

The vast ecosystem of Hedera is further expanding its presence in India through its various arms to ensure the continued development of the Indian blockchain community.  The Hedera Governing Council has a robust presence in India and a strong commitment to the country, counting IIT Madras, Wipro, and Tata Communications as council members. The Hedera ecosystem has further expanded its Indian roots with a collaboration with veteran artist, A.R. Rahman to create content for a new NFT platform that will be focused on India’s independent music community.