Congratulations to the winners of the Cambridge Blockchain Competition
TODAQ, Farrer & Co and GEMS Education sponsored the competition and awards which held its finals on December of 2020.
(2 min read)
After months of work from the participating teams, the Cambridge Blockchain Prize drew to a close with demo day & prize ceremony. Congratulations to the winner Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers for his 1st place standing and to and runner-ups Fredrik Liu and Frank Tietze! Huge thanks to our fellow sponsors Farrer & Co and GEMS Education, and co-organizer Cambridge Blockchain Hub. The judging team of Professor Jon Crowcroft of the University of Cambridge, Hassan Khan and Dann Toliver of TODA, David Fletcher of Farrer & Co, Hazem Danny Al-Nakib of the Cambridge Blockchain Society & Samsurin Welch had their work cut out for them with the strong slate of innovative solutions that were presented.
A final thanks to all the teams that participated and to all their supporters, best success in the future for all your projects!
The winning solution was FrameProv (‘provenance for every frame’) designed to address the end-to-end video provenance problem and become the global trust layer for video. The core requirement for FrameProv is to provably record raw data captured by a camera sensor and all edits, compressions and lossy transmissions done to a video on its journey to the viewer. As 82% of the internet content is forecasted to be video and market and societal problems created from misinformation and disinformation continue to rise this is a tremendous opportunity if solved correctly. Current attempts to solve this issue often rely on after the fact analysis to verify and validate video authenticity. These fixes are ultimately slower than the attention and media cycle and don’t provide and end-to-end solution. Something new is needed.
Within a short time period the core innovations required for FrameProv were identified: a frame chain data structure to tie provenance of video frames together cryptographically; and creation of VESL, a video edit specification language in order to embed video transparency and verification into the video content itself to be readable by any video player.
Peer reviewed research, working scripts, a video prototype and the first proof of concepts and media tests followed in time for the competition. The next steps will be to use the Prize award to further develop the protoypes, plug-ins and chip fabrication; standardize the underlying language and data structures to be ready for mass adoption; and find more applications and customers. Such a solution would naturally also integrate nicely into the ADOT Web and into TODA. We wish Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers the best success in the future!