Skycoin at Odyssey Hackathon 2019

Google ‘Odessey Hackathon’ and you will find an event billed as the world’s biggest AI and Blockchain hackathon. In just 3 years Odessey grew from 450 to 1500 participants competing in 11 tracks to solve 20 real-world societal challenges.

For the 2019 challenge, Skycoin partnered with Milvum which is a development house hailing from The Hague and with Hiber, a startup focussed on low cost, low energy communications satellites. Through the partnership, we demonstrated Skywire’s functionality in conjunction with other cutting edge technology.

The team competed in the disaster relief track and elected to solve the specific challenge of “Co-creating and sharing validated data during a disaster”. The challenge called on teams to create a redundant communication system that could be used by emergency teams to collect data from the public in order to obtain a comprehensive, validated picture of the situation on the ground.

Dubbed Hummingbird, the team’s solution was to deploy a Skywire meshnet across the area and integrate it with Hiber satellite nodes. The application layer consisted of a mobile chat app that provided emergency relay functionality.

In the event of a disaster, such as a fire or an earthquake, that interrupted the regular communications networks, the chat app could be switched to emergency mode from where it would connect to the Hummingbird meshnet and enable communication with first responders.

Three intense days of furious hacking saw a successful solution deployed by the team. Skywire was integrated with the Hiber satellite network to create a truly multi-tiered mesh network that doesn’t rely on traditional Internet infrastructure and the app worked beautifully on top of that. Challenge met. Goals achieved.