The winner will receive the impulse necessary to become real. The event will be held from December 5th to 8th in Santiago de Chile
Social impact plans that seek to provide efficient solutions through blockchain technology will be recognized in the second edition of the Blockchain4Humanity (b4H) awards, an organization that will provide the opportunity to make the award-winning project real.
During the last few months, different companies have applied for blockchain patents to use distributed accounting technology in order to guarantee payments to charities, and even more recently, research funding has been sought, based on this technology, to help find a response to fearsome diseases as cancer.
The blockchain technology, beyond its use to support the security of transactions with cryptocurrencies, has great appeal precisely because of the method it uses: simply save parts of a message or information in different blocks or “nodes” so that in this way the message is not altered, violated or intercepted in any way.
For these reasons, in addition to the increase in proposals for blockchain technology new uses, b4H decided, in 2017, to launch a contest in which the main incentive is to win the recognition of the winning project and obtain support to make it a reality in a minor lapse of time.
Everything is almost ready. Until November 15th the organization received a total of 36 projects that will be evaluated in the framework of Labitconf 2018 next edition. According to Alex Casas, co-founder and main collaborator of Blockchain4Humanity, the winner would be an entrepreneur who has seen a way to achieve positive changes in the world, thanks to the use of blockchain technology.
Blockchain4Goodrocks, Bitcoin Argentina and RSK Labs were some of the institutions that supported the b4H initiative. The first edition took place in Bogotá, Colombia.
This year, the results of the awards will be announced during the Labitconf conference, which will be held from December 5th to 8th, in Santiago, Chile. According to Casas, the jury selects four winners in two different categories, for a total of eight award-winning projects.
“We consider projects that have already had funding, have a functional product and are already generating social impact for the award we call Social Hackers Award. There is another category of projects in a more initial phase that we call Dreamers Award and in which b4H concentrates its efforts to move from the idea phase to MVP (minimum viable product)”, he said.
In the case of the Dreamers Award category, the projects selected by the jury are incorporated into the Decentralized Altruistic Community (DAC) b4H built on the Giveth platform. Through this channel, financial contributions are channeled based on the achievement of different milestones of the projects.
The teams will also receive guidance and advice from business, legal and technical mentors from b4H DAC in order to guarantee an optimal final product. Regarding the category Social Hackers Award, the award is an acknowledgment to the job of the teams, although they can receive timely support from the organization.
The 2017 Blockchain4Humanity Awards highlighted the job of the EthicHub platform, which was one of the Dreamer category winners. The objective of this startup is to offer a decentralized P2P (peer to peer) loan service to small coffee producers in Mexico.
Through the EthicHub project, thousands of Mexican farmers can access financing for their activity. “EthicHub is a clear example of the type of projects that b4H wants to accelerate and support its massive adoption”, says Casas.
It is expected that this year another eight projects will be chosen from the group of 36 to receive the boost they need, although there is not much detail about the nominees. The result will be, surely, another pleasant surprise.
By María Victoria Rodríguez
