Cointelegraph is thrilled to announce that the first part of our awesome Blockchain Oscar starts today.

During the upcoming three days our expert board of judges will be scrutinizing project proposals submitted by our participants. Six shortlisted teams will be honored to proceed to the second and the final battle that will commence at the BlockShow Europe 2017 in Munich on April 6.

There and then our finalists will pitch their ideas trying to win the love of our jury members and more than 500 BlockShow guests.

What is at stake?

Here comes the most exciting part. The prize fund of Blockchain Oscar amounts to €13000. Curious how this treasure will be redistributed? Members of “The Most Innovative Blockchain Startup” will stuff their pockets with €5000 worth in BTC.

“The Most Valuable for Humanity Startup” will be awarded a special prize generously provided by Humaniq, a unique project that provides banking services to those who are not connected to a global financial system for political, legal, geographic or/and other reasons. The team will get €5000 worth in Humaniq tokens.

But that's not all, as there's always “The People’s Choice” nomination. The winner will be determined through online voting on the website of another amazing sponsor and partner - Wings, a Blockchain platform that seeds and nurtures a community dedicated to the launching, backing and promotion of new projects proposals through a fluid organizational model referred to as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

The first three startups which get the most of people's love will be awarded the following prizes kindly provided by Wings:

  • First Prize - 2 BTC and 10000 Euro of crowd funding consulting services from the Wings Foundation
  • Second Prize - 1 BTC & 5000 Euros of crowd funding consulting services from the Wings Foundation
  • Third Prize - 0.5 BTC & 2500 Euros of crowd funding consulting services from the Wings Foundation

Who are the judges?

The jury board of the Blockchain Oscar 2017 is represented by bright and internationally known Blockchain experts from various sectors and industries. The full list of judges will be available on our Web page soon but at this moment we are proud to introduce you some of the jury members.

“I hope to see something brand new that I haven’t seen before - a great new idea and totally new way to use Blockchain that has not been thought of before.”

“Leverage expertise in cryptography, experience in fintech and my interests in smart contract verification, ZKP and availability vs consensus will help me in the selection process. I am after a genuine innovation and a perfect product-market fit, rather than “hammer looking for a nail” kind of projects.”

  • Dominik Zynis, Head of Communications at ChainLab and Advisor to Wings.ai:

“I'm looking for teams that are realistic who recognize fixing one thing very, very well and leveraging partners and the ecosystem is how to establish a foothold. What really makes the difference is the timing, the focus and the team. I'm looking for the ones that are laser focused and can show gaining traction with some market niche and expand from there. Team depth and history are also important - I think some of the presentation could focus a bit more on that. A lot of these people are definitely smart but will they stick around in year two or three and get the project to another level?”

  • Jamie Burke, Founder at Blockchain Angels, CEO at Outlier Ventures

Chandler Guo, Angel investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic startups, and Michael Dupree, Founder at Denver Bitcoin Center, owner of EasyBit, are there to share their knowledge and expertise as webinar participants and contest advisors.

Save the date!

The next few days are going to be really intense and productive with a series of webinars, Q&A sessions, and discussions of contestants’ cases. Are you ready?

Mark these dates on your calendar:

March 2, 18:30 (CET) - Addy Crezee and Tawanda Kembo will present our contestants, answer questions and announce those startups which unfortunately will not proceed in the competition further.

If you want to watch the first part of the competition live, click here.

March 3, 14:00 (CET) - Addy Crezee, Chandler Guo, Mike Dupree, and Richard Kastelein are answering questions from contestants and announcing whose show is over, at least in this competition.

If you want to watch the second part of the competition live, click here.

March 4, 12:00 (CET) - Addy Crezee and Richard Kastelein are announcing the finalists and answering questions.

If you want to learn the names of the finalists or ask questions, click here.

A sneak peak to the pool of cases addressed with Blockchain

We have received an incredible amount of applications from true visionaries who are passionate about technology and are looking for ways to leverage to real life problems.

Addy Crezee comments that it is great to see Blockchain technology being applied in various industries and showing potential in cutting the middlemen and building trust between stakeholders. “Participants presented solutions from IP rights, Artificial Intelligence, Insurance, Energy and etc.,” he says.

Dominik Zynis, one of the jury members identified a trend around projects taking on finance and IoT-oriented themes.

He says:

“The hardware and finance trend is something that has been developing for some time now and we might finally start to see some traction in both areas with some teams being able to execute and gain traction.”

Please meet the first ten of our contestants:

Bernstein - a Bitcoin Blockchain-powered platform that allows to quickly register any inventions, designs and proofs of use and provides Blockchain certification that proves ownership, existence and integrity of any Intellectual Property Asset.

Adahoy- a service that enables advertisers to easily create an affiliate network in a fast, transparent and reliable way. Built on the Ethereum Blockchain, this solution also helps mitigate frauds and scams, which plague current online commerce.

Quantoz - a company offering professional services to explore emerging Blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies and to understand the potential impact for various industries.

CoinDash - built as a social network, CoinDash is a social trading platform where users can follow top crypto investors, invest like them and learn from them.

Chain Capital - a fintech start-up based in Zug, Switzerland.

Shelf Network - a solution for multichannel auctioning. Through distributed ledger technology, Shelf Network is providing simultaneous real-time bidding and momentous exchange of information between multiple e-commerce Web pages.

Satoshi Fund - a safe, easy, low-cost and secure way to invest in Blockchain Assets.

SolarChange - a Blockchain-based platform that gathers a network of services and applications to improve and increase the use of solar energy worldwide and provide solar owners with more value from their systems.

Etherisc - a company whose mission is to build decentralized insurance applications, making the purchase and sale of insurance more efficient, enable lower operational costs, provide greater transparency into the industry of insurance compared to traditional operations and democratize access to reinsurance investments.

Status - Status is an open source project that combines a messenger, wallet and DApps browser for the mass market to begin using cryptocurrency and decentralized applications directly from their Android or iOS devices.

Ethan BIoT- a full-stack soft- and hardware Platform for the Blockchain. It solves challenges of reliability, scalability, security and remote management which are common to all verticals, control of devices e.g. Door Locks, home automation, automotive and a lot more.

WeTrust - a platform for Trusted Lending Circles, powered by people and Blockchain.