Last week we took part in one of the biggest stationary hackathons in the world – HackYeah. We do like a challenge, and competing against almost two and a half thousand developers from Poland and all around Europe is as good a challenge as it gets. Applover sent out few teams, that competed in different areas – but we mainly focused our attention on the Blockchain challenge set forward by the Polish petrol giant – PKN ORLEN. Their Blockchain Technology in the loyalty system challenge was an obvious choice for us, as we believe that this technology will take over the future in ways we still can’t imagine, and it’s potential is still untapped.

 

Practical use of Blockchain Technology

Most of the Blockchain implementation focus so much on technical aspects of the project, that the ease of use is forgotten. It is one of the factors that Blockchain Tech still have not caught on beyond the digital currency systems.

According to Hackathon rules – we didn’t have much time to come up with a complete and functional product, but as we started off brainstorming the idea of the system, we found a common approach. We wanted to combine the ease of use of a smartphone app with the security of the blockchain system.

 

ORLOC – Blockchain Loyalty System

To make it work we decided to go all in. We set out to create website app that imitates storefront. An iOS app that allows users to gather points for their purchases. Blockchain implementation that ensures data integrity and a REST API that connects it all. Orloc is a proof of concept. It’s a representation of the loyalty system that could be both secure and easy to use. While the system uses a relational database for day to day operations. We used blockchain as a source for data in case the database gets corrupted or maliciously altered by a third party. Once an inconsistency is detected we scan the blockchain (which is incomparably harder to falsify) and replace all invalid transactions in the database.

 

Why we do it?

As a result, the Jury honored us with the second price in the PKN ORLEN Challenge.

“It was our second time on an event that big, and we have seen that the environment of a hackathon has a positive influence on work atmosphere in our software house. It gives a lot of inspiration and new ideas to developers, and the sense of competition brings the best in people.” Said our CEO – Radosław Bułat.

You can read more about our another Blockchain implementation here. Learn about important feature of Blockchain – Smart Contracts in our blog post here. You’ll find more about the HackYeah Hackathon here.