IS Students Win 2nd Prize in MIT Blockchain Hackathon
MS Information Systems students Swathi Kommaghattachandr and Vivek Madhusudanbadrina won the second place prize at the MIT Blockchain Hackathon. The Hackathon had over 250 hackers organized into 30 teams participating in the competition.
Swathi and Vivek built an end-to-end smart contract application leveraging Blockchain technologies to protect the drug supply chain from counterfeit crimes. The World Health Organization estimates that fake drugs in the developing world could reach 40%. Through an innovative crypto-engineering technique of their own, they showed how to create digital trust fabrics that could safely facilitate the movement of drug medications from the manufacturer and all the way to the point-of-sale at the pharmacy. They demonstrated how Blockchain techniques make it extremely costly to inject fake and dangerous drugs into drug supply chain.
Swathi and Vivik were approached by a number of investors and other interested parties to help them market their solution.