NITI Aayog and Proffer – a blockchain startup founded by Harvard and MIT graduates – have collaborated to organize a hackathon and blockchain summit. The events will be hosted by the prestigious IIT Delhi.
The events are being organized as a part of the ‘Road to GES Events’ and contribution to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. The hackathon will be organized from November 10 to 13, 2017. The purpose of the event is to discover how blockchain architectures can support a new digital infrastructure for India as well as improve efficiency, privacy, transparency and cost across other sectors.
The event is expected to attract more than 1,500 participants from IITs, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard and other prominent engineering institutions across the world. Out of these, over 500 participants will be attending the hackathon in-person at IIT Delhi.
The sponsors of the events are Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Accel, IBM and Coinbase. These firms will be offering prizes over $17,000 to the top 5 blockchain-based applications.
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The best applications will be picked on the basis of the problems addressed by these problems in government/enterprise infrastructure, energy markets, finance, supply chain, information exchange, decentralized Aadhar identities and other sectors.
The event will start on Friday, November 10, 6:20 pm. Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog will deliver a keynote and shed light on how blockchain technology can benefit the Indian economy. He will also present his vision for IndiaChain – an infrastructure enabled by blockchain for Indian enterprise and government.
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Other speakers that will be present at the inauguration ceremony of the event as well as on the following day are Dr. Sriram Raghavan CTO and Director of Research at IBM India, Ms. Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary of Telecom/IT and Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of Aadhar/UIDAI.