ETH Team wins at Switzerland’s largest Blockchain Hackathon

In a 42-hour intensive hacking marathon, an interdisciplinary and international team from ETH, supported by the external page Blockchain Business Lab (b2Lab), defeated six other competitive teams including a startup and came in first place in the eGovernment vertical category. The members of the ETH team were Burak Seyid (MSc student at D-MTEC, Turkish), Marcel Bühler (MSc student in Data Science, Swiss), Sergiu Șoima (MSc student in Computer Science, Romanian), Semion Rozov (MSc student in Mechanical Engineering, German & Russian), and the external team member Lennard Wenzel (BA student in Digital Business Management at DHBW, German). As the eGovernment vertical winner, team ETH was awarded a number of prizes, including CHF 8,000 in cash and crypto coins, CHF 5,000 in cloud credits, two free desks for six months at Trust Square, and free legal incorporation services in Switzerland.

The three-day event featured over 200 participants on 41 teams from almost 20 countries. The Blockchain Business Lab of the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics (MTEC) at ETH Zurich contributed to the event as an academic partner. The Blockchain Business Lab’s mission is to explore the business impact and implementation challenges for blockchain in corporate settings, thereby connecting academia and business. The participating hackers solved real-life challenges in six different verticals (categories): eGovernment, Agriculture & Food, Mobility, Finance, Supply Chain, and Intelligent Parcel.

Two members of the ETH team, Burak and Marcel, reported that the team was impressed by the organisation and coordination of the event, and that they had enjoyed the hackathon experience. They praised the organisers and partners, saying that “Trust Square and b2Lab provided all the support needed for the hackathon”.

Team ETH delivered a solution called Petizio, a blockchain-enabled online petition platform, to address problems that currently plague most petitions. Traditional petition campaigns often resort to a manual and cumbersome procedure, sending staff onto the streets to collect pedestrians’ signatures and personal information. Online petition platforms such as Change.org, on the other hand, are prone to hacking attacks, and sometimes fail to detect information that has been manipulated or people who have signed the same petition multiple times. By implementing the Petizio solution, users can now generate a unique personal identifier or personal eID to initiate petitions without the need to verify themselves and disclose their personal information every time. In addition, this solution ensures that each person can only sign a petition once, and prevents the manipulation of signatures.

The inspiration for the eGovernment vertical was that eGovernment public services still lack powerful solutions for many challenges such as digital ID, e-Voting and the management and registration of documents. The hackers were expected to address the questions of how a government body can ensure that information can be updated flexibly while also being accurately and truthfully replicable, and how it can prove that the information has not been manipulated. The hackathon insights could contribute to resolving current issues around trust, security and transparency and thus to establishing a new era in the relationship between governments and individuals.