UAE-led ConsenSys team wins inaugural Africa Blockchain Summit Hackathon

Tunis, Tunisia: The GCC-led team from global blockchain specialist, ConsenSys, won first place in the ‘Code4Chainge’ hackathon at the inaugural ” Africa Blockchain Summit”, which opened May 14, 2018 in Tunis. Three members from the ConsenSys Dublin office, Alan Jones, Miguel Rojo, Zied Brini, and one from Paris, Nicolas Maurice, received the 30,000 dinar prize from the Central Bank of Tunisia (BCT), which was split in half with the other winning team from the BCT.

About 50 Tunisian and foreign finance and technical professionals, divided into 16 teams, worked non-stop for 36 hours with coding a program which employs Blockchain as the main leverage for cross-border payments in Middle East and Africa. The basic objective was to illustrate the potential of this technology in the banking sector.

Code4Chainge was also positioned as an event for hackers and developers that want to be a part of the decentralized future and also brought together industry experts from companies dedicated to creating new ways of thinking on issues of improved communication and increasing interaction between different players.

The innovative solution proposed by the ConsenSys team showcased how to allow cross-border payments between countries which have non-convertible currencies, without passing by an intermediary currency, such as the US Dollar or the Euro. The tangible benefits would be to enable wider South-South international trade and allow these countries to be more present in the global trade scene.

“We are delighted to have won the first prize and credit goes to the high profile ConsenSys team who performed so creditably,” said Zied Brini, Technical Project Manager at ConsenSys. “For us, it was an occasion to use the hackathon to test our technical stack and capture a good grasp of the local Blockchain scene in Tunisia,” he added.

He added that an event of this caliber gave the team the opportunity to have a positive impact on younger developers and showcase ConsenSys’ forward thinking approach to the new technologies.