“Energy Blockchain Hack”: first Russian hackathon for energy markets takes place in Moscow

On 9-11th November a 48-hour-long hackaton, dedicated to the search of innovative blockchain-based solutions for energy markets took place in “Tablica” coworking space in Moscow. As one of achievements, a team from Saint Petersburg presented the first prototype in the world for green certificates on blockchain.

Energy Blockchain Hack, organized by Evercity venture ecosystem and “Russian Carbon” fund, became the first event of this kind in Russia, bringing together blockchain developers and global leaders in energy field. Schneider Electric and Hevel Solar acted as strategic partners of the hackathon.

Over 100 specialists, students of technical institutions and representatives of energy-related startups took part in the development, competing for the prize pool of 400,000 RUB and opportunity to collaborate with the leading market players.

The hackathon was a part of the global Climathon initiative that united 130 cities and over 4000 developers internationally.

The main goal of the hackathon was the search of new talents and technologies for the phase transition in Russian and international energy industries.

A choice of 4 themed tracks was available for participating teams:

• “Energy management: smart contracts for verification of energy efficiency and mutual settlements with clients”

Team “Winners” suggested the best solution in the nomination by the event’s strategic partner Schneider Electric - a leader in electric energy and energy management. Team from Moscow developed the architecture of smart contracts and interface to optimize machinery and track the level of customer satisfaction, reducing costs for efficiency and eliminating human factor.

• “Creation of digital infrastructure of green certificates on blockchain”

Saint-Petersburg team “KORUM” won the prize from the strategic partner of the hackathon Hevel Solar - the biggest integrated company in Russia in the field of solar energy. The members presented their solution for the problem of proof that generated energy is really “green”. The model “certificate=token” includes audit of power station by the managing body, recording of the process by sensors and emission of tokens in the end of the process, which can later be sold to organizations.

• “Electric transport: creation of platform to stimulate the usage of electric vehicles based on smart contracts”

The partner of the event - EDF (Électricité de France), international leader in energy generation with low CO2 emissions - awarded the team “HypeTrain” for development of an application which allows major socially-oriented businesses, interested in obtaining green certificates, to attract owners of green electric vehicles for a set of tasks (delivery, etc). In case of successful task completion, users receive tokens and carbon units. The goal of the application is to incentivize people to use electric transport with participation of business players.

• “Distributed energy: development, smart contracts implementation and payments control on blockchain”

As a part of the nomination by NP "Market Council" and "Rosseti”, team “StarBlock” suggested a solution for a widespread problem of network companies, which suffer losses when users fail to comply with the network regime (amortization, overload and spare capacity). The presented solution is a system of members incentivization via bonuses for conscientious users and penalties for violators.

The team pleasantly surprised the jury, having created a real physical IoT sensor to register compliance with conditions, as well as a working application and a smart contract.

In the course of the awarding ceremony Oleg Barkin, Vice Chairman of the Board of NP “Market Council”, noted the importance of the topic and relevance of suggested solutions.

“Energy is a very complex field, but I hope that new technologies will change it. I want to express gratitude to the organizers and respect to those teams who made it to the finals and showed the best projects. There’s a lot of work to be done and a lot of implementation opportunities in Russia. I also see the potential that these solutions will be in high demand all over the world”.

Renowned blockchain companies Parity, Airalab, DAO IPCI and Onder acted as technological partners of the hackathon. They lead a series of workshops for participants during the event and provided their technologies to help solve the cases.

Hackathon finalists were also granted certificates for participation in the first Robonomics winter school by Airalab team.

Alexey Shadrin, Evercity CEO shared his impressions on the event: “The level of the developed solutions dazzled our mentors and partners. Upon their request, we will make Energy Blockchain Hackathon an annual event! The next hackathon by Evercity will take place in early 2019 and will be dedicated to smart sustainable cities”.

Workshops and final presentations were aired live during the event.

Energy Today, CoinFox, NewsBTC acted as info partners of the event.

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About organizers:

• The goal of Evercity ecosystem is to find, accelerate, finance and implement innovative Russian solutions for smart and sustainable cities (blockchain, AI, IoT, cleantech and other related technologies) in Asia and Asia-Pacific countries.

Evercity collaborates with leading venture funds in Singapore, China, Japan and Korea, and acts as a partner of United Nations U4SSC initiative (“United for Smart Sustainable Cities”), assisting of fundraising into cutting-edge technologies for further scaling and implementation into the global ecosystem of smart sustainable cities.

We are open for collaboration: [email protected].

• “Russian Carbon” fund is a non-profit organization, promoting sustainable development agenda in Russia since 2011. The fund is an official partner in five international organizations: UN Global Compact Network, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, World Bank Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, Foundations 20 and Blockchain Climate Institute.