Developers and seafood experts from around the world gathered together on October 26-27 in Bali, Indonesia to hack seafood traceability challenges. The GDST partnered together with SecondMuse and USAID Oceans and Fisheries Partnership to host this seafood traceability hackathon (Trackathon) where knowledgeable specialists worked for 24 hours to solve challenges related to tracking seafood. They were competing for 12,500 USD, including VeChain VTHO tokens and Microsoft Azure credits in prizes and the chance to help improve interoperable technology solutions to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and support fisher in collecting and providing digital traceability data.

Four major categories formed the basis for the hackathon’s challenges: key data element verification, identifier technology, interoperability using EPCIS, and blockchain integration. If you are interested in understanding these concepts before diving into the winners, check out our GDST WIKI which describes our approach to event-based traceability.

The teams had 8 challenges to choose from – covering topics like verifying catch area location, monitoring by catch and extra harvest, and DNA barcoding to reduce fraud. Check out the detailed challenges here. You can also read more about all the teams and submitted solutions here.

The Winners

1st Place: Good Fish

Dien Wong, Katharine Leigh, Sherly Novianti Thahir, and Leonardus Litik from Team Good Fish developed a marketplace platform for traceable bycatch, connecting buyers to fishers directly using blockchain for data security and EPCIS for interoperability mechanism.  https://devpost.com/software/good-fish

2nd Place: FishEye.ai

Galih Dandung Akbar Gumala and his team FishEye.ai created an AI integrated tool to trace land use and land use change of shrimp farms, identifying whether or not farmed shrimp and fish are grown in ponds built on land converted from mangroves. Fish Eye also brought home a special AI prize from Microsoft Azure to develop their solutions. https://devpost.com/software/fisheye-ai

3rd Place: Fishtegrate

K-Marx Macalalag, Arcelio Jr. Fetizanan, John Lemo Lumbre, and Jarno Marttila from Team Fishtegrate developed a tool to integrate multiple traceability data, allowing interoperability between different tools and data exchange which are huge challenges in the industry. https://devpost.com/software/fishtegrate

The hackathons were generously supported by these partners and sponsors: