Developers and seafood experts from around the world gathered together on October 21-22 in Cologne, Germany to hack seafood traceability challenges. The GDST partnered together with GS1 Germany and fTRACE 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 Euro, 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.

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: Santized Fish

Rob Glew and Claudio Varini, for their project Sanitised Fish, provided a “sanitized” discovery service for the fish supply chain by hashing sensitive data from EPCIS events and uploading them to a distributed storage location, such as blockchain. 

2nd Place: Lonely Fish Saver

Michael Petry produced a zero-trust architecture to ensure information security between supply chain partners and also proposed a low cost monitoring system in his project entitled Lonely Fish Saver.

3rd Place: Fishy Coordinates

Neil Struthers, Gary Tyre, and Paul McGrellis for their project FishyCoordinates provided an application to check the validity of a catch’s area based on GPS data submitted by the vessel.

The hackathons were generously supported by these partners and sponsors: