IOTA becomes Co-Sponsor of Climate Change Blockchain UN Hackathon
IOTA becomes Co-Sponsor of Climate Change Blockchain UN Hackathon
The IOTA Foundation has announced it will co-host and sponsor Hack4Climate, a blessing right developed in partnership with the COP23 climate conference of the United Nations.
Climate Hacking
The pirates will take place from November 12-16 during COP23, the largest international climate change conference in the world. It will be held at the UN campus in Bonn, Germany. IOTA will be a partner for the presentation of hakkat, and the Ethereal Foundation contributes as a workshop partner.
According to the event site, there will be six events that will give competitors a chance to develop a blockchain-based solution for some of the most outstanding challenges facing environmental sustainability. For example, entrants will try to develop systems that integrate Internet of Things (IoT) technology into a distributed ledger to track carbon emissions across global supply chains and facilitate P2P carbon exchange.
The Hackathon app is open to the public, and the event organizer will select 100 people to get a prize of € 75,000.
'Hippy Mark Will not Change Anything'
IOTA founder David Sønstebø told CCN that the IOTA Foundation was inspired to sponsor hackathon because the distributed ledger technology has the potential to enable the world to tackle climate change in a new, more effective way. Noting that climate change has begun to have a devastating effect on the lives of millions of people around the world, he says that it is very important to develop technologies that can be easily integrated into large scale industries to promote sustainability.
> Poor sign and song will not change anything, we know from history that technology always changes the status quo. Distributed Ledger Technology has the potential to secure and provide tamper proof data in accordance with the overall climate crisis, as well as enable new smart grid models, EV charging networks etc.
Some crypto startups have tried to contribute in the fight against climate change. The Aussie Power Ledger project, for example, only collects $ 17 million AUD in ICO for the solar energy market.
However, Sønstebø believes that the IOTA Tangle protocol is uniquely suited to solve this problem on a more comprehensive scale:
> This is a real-world use case that requires power through, given that currently only the IOTA scale can be adapted to this large-scale ecosystem, it is not a brainer for us to support this effort. Hackathons are great for producing a new, innovative minimum feasible prototype that may, over time, become a killer app, which is why IOTA likes to sponsor and host it.