The "Blockchain Hackathon" will kick-off in Riyadh on Feb. 9-11, 2017 hosted by King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), represented by Badir Program for Technology Incubators in partnership with IBM. The three-day hyperledger project, aimed at fostering a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust, accountability and transparency, will be held in the conference hall of Badir headquarters in Riyadh. Hackathon is a social coding event that brings computer programmers and other interested people together to improve upon or build a new software program. The blockchain technology has taken the world by storm and is expected to transform how multi-party transactions are conducted across industries. At the core of blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. Some 60 hackathon participants, who will be a mix of startups and students, will work in teams on their projects to generate local interest in blockchain and enhance their skills through the weekend after the event opening. Mentors will be available to support the teams. The teams will present their projects to a panel of judges on Feb. 11 who will identify exceptional projects, which will be highlighted via social media. On the first day, blockchain use cases will be discussed to inspire attendees and form them into working groups. Days 2 and 3 are devoted to hacking activities, interspersed with 2-3 more short talks on further blockchain use cases. The third and final day includes presentations and demo, as well as the announcement of winners. "We anticipate that the hackathon will create a vibrant cross-disciplinary blockchain community in Riyadh that will explore how to apply hyperledger technology to local and global emerging applications," organizers said. Each node (computer connected to the Bitcoin network using a client that performs the task of validating and relaying transactions) gets a copy of the blockchain, which gets downloaded automatically upon joining the Bitcoin network. The blockchain has complete information about the addresses and their balances right from the core block to the most recently completed block.
