ETHSF is the world’s largest Ethereum hackathon with more than 1000 hackers from more than 30 countries. The event took place at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco city. Hackers developed exciting projects on Ethereum using the supporting platforms created by the sponsor members. The event received 121 submissions in total.

A USC team sponsored by the USC Viterbi Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (CCI) consisting of Ph.D. student Kwame-Lante Wright, M.S. student Rahul Radhakrishnan, and post-doctoral researcher Dr. Gowri Sankar Ramachandran participated in the ETHSF hackathon. Given CCI’s research interests on IoT, smart cities and blockchain, the team focused on developing a Currency AgNOstic data PaYment protocol (Canopy) for IoT and smart cities.

The CCI team developed Canopy using Connext‘s layer-2 scaling solution for microtransactions on Ethereum and ChainLink‘s Oracle platform for fetching currency conversion metrics. The judges from the Connext and ChainLink organizations liked the proposed idea and provided positive feedback. The Connext team selected Canopy as the protocol with the most innovative use case and announced a cash prize of 1500 USD.

In addition, Aditya Asgaonkar, an undergraduate visiting researcher at USC CCI, participated in the hackathon with Vlad Zamfir’s team from Ethereum Research and developed a sharding tool titled Atomic XShard Transactions with Routing/Balancing which made it to the top 10 list and also received a prize.