NEW YORK (PRWEB)
April 06, 2020

Today, ConsenSys Health announced the Stop COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon launching April 13 and running until May 11, 2020. The hackathon is co-sponsored by Gitcoin, Hyperledger, ConsenSys, One Million Developers, and OpenMined, leveraging blockchain and other emerging technologies to improve data access and veracity for researchers, healthcare experts, and life sciences professionals attempting to better understand and stop COVID-19 and prevent future pandemics. ConsenSys Health is seeking to accelerate the launch of operational technology as part of the fight against COVID-19, and has issued a call for hundreds of healthcare and life sciences leaders worldwide to serve as mentors, lending their industry expertise to Web3.0 technologists as they come together to develop solutions.

“In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, our goal for this global competition is to bring together healthcare and life sciences domain experts with engineers from three open source software communities: Ethereum, Hyperledger, and OpenMined. Working together for the first time with a very specific toolset, this interdisciplinary group will rapidly create highly-relevant solutions with the potential to have both immediate- and long-term positive impact,” said Heather Leigh Flannery, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ConsenSys Health. “The core of our effort is to leverage converging innovations like blockchain, tokenization, zero-knowledge cryptography, and federated machine learning to advance immediate and long-term public health goals while preserving individual privacy.”

The STOP COVID-19 Hackathon solutions will be evaluated by each phase of the pandemic they address, leveraging the model proposed by McKinsey & Company: Resolve, Resilience, Return, Reimagination, and Reform. The healthcare and life sciences expert volunteers serving as mentors will help software developers understand key topic areas in those phases. Some of these areas include clinical trials for treatments and vaccines, global screening data, vulnerable and at-risk populations, identity provenance and consent, privacy-preserving location tracking, and supply chain optimization for ventilators and other vital medical supplies.

The Hackathon is hosted on Gitcoin, a platform for developers to collaborate and monetize their skills while working on open source projects through bounties, grants, and hackathons. Gitcoin has facilitated over 4 million dollars of value transfer for open source work within their community of 36,000 developers. For those looking to compete, the prize money for the STOP COVID-19 Hackathon totals $20,000, including $10,000 for first place, $7,000 for second place and $3,000 for third place. Winning entries will be fast-tracked for additional funding sources through Gitcoin and ConsenSys grants, as well as other funding opportunities within ConsenSys Health. For those looking to learn more about blockchain, ConsenSys Academy is offering two full weeks of training for free to novice Web 3.0 developers who want to get up to speed quickly to contribute to the hackathon. Kaleido, an industry leading enterprise blockchain platform, will be available for “Technical Tuesday” and “Walkthrough Wednesday” virtual sessions throughout the Hackathon, and ConsenSys product Infura will also have open hours with engineering every Thursday.

“To take on the challenges brought forth by COVID-19, it’s vital to marshall experts from across disciplines and markets,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director at Hyperledger. “This Hackathon brings together the medical and scientific communities and elite developers with the singular goal of developing operational solutions, built on cutting-edge software, to mitigate damage and speed recovery from this pandemic. Hyperledger fully embraces this opportunity to help accelerate innovation on this front and will engage its community and technologies in this incredibly important work.”

Starting April 6, Hackathon participants will be able to join Q&A-based virtual panels with mentors from academia, public and private sector healthcare and life sciences organizations to better understand the problem space, as well as identify mentors as the right fit for future endorsements of projects. Close collaboration of industry mentors and software engineers ensures that the solutions generated will meet the complex requirements of the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem.

The confirmed judges for the Hackathon to date include Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys and Co-Creator of Ethereum; Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger; Dr. Alex Cahana, Chief Medical Officer and EMEA Market Leader of ConsenSys Health; Dr. Sean Manion, Chief Scientific Officer of ConsenSys Health, Dr. Jonathan Holt, Chief Medical Informatics Officer of ConsenSys Health, and Debbie Bucci, Director, Patient-Mediated and Institutional Data Exchange at ConsenSys Health.

To join the STOP COVID-19 Hackathon as a mentor, partner or participant, visit ConsenSysHealth.com/COVID-19.

To learn more about the development resources and training available, register to join an introductory virtual event on Monday, April 6 at 12 EDT.

About ConsenSys Health

ConsenSys Health is a spin-off from ConsenSys, one of the world’s largest blockchain companies, focused on solving the biggest problems in healthcare. We are part of an ecosystem of technology and industry partners seeking to drive positive, inclusive change in healthcare and the life sciences. As a member of the Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition, we are committed to developing solutions to fight the current pandemic and advance the healthcare ecosystem to protect our future privacy and security. For more information, please visit http://www.ConsenSysHealth.com.

About Gitcoin

Gitcoin is a community and platform for developers to collaborate and monetize their skills while working on Open Source projects through bounties.

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