Oracle blockchainKeen to make its mark in blockchain innovation Oracle has joined academia and banking industry leaders as part of the Carolina Fintech Hub (CFH) Generation Blockchain Challenge. This aims to encourage students to develop commercially viable and cross-industry Oracle blockchain applications.

Tariq Bokhari
Tariq Bokhari

Tariq Bokhari, Executive Director of Carolina Fintech Hub said: “This challenge offered students an incredible opportunity to learn more about blockchain technology and to help them develop their business and technical skills with the help of their industry and academic mentors — and access to Oracle’s advanced enterprise-grade blockchain cloud platform. The students not only identified problems and created real, viable solutions but through this process have learned important skills they can apply to their employment future.

The CFH / Oracle Blockchain Challenge

Thirty students – from North Carolina State, University North Carolina Chapel Hill, University North Carolina Charlotte and the University of South Carolina – worked together with leaders from Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Ernst & Young, BB&T, Ally Bank, SIA Partners and Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service implementation partner Aurablocks to solve real-world industry challenges covering:

  • banking
  • higher education
  • energy
  • healthcare
  • real estate.

The goal of the challenge was to bring both a single source of truth with trusted transactions to complex distributed business processes by using blockchain technology. For seven weeks, 10 finalist student teams worked with industry mentors to define, test and implement proof of concepts using beta versions of the:

CFH

CFH is an organization which focuses on accelerating the merging worlds of financial services and digital technology. The CFH Challenge culminated at an event hosted in North Carolina on April 20 by AvidXchange where student teams sought to deliver innovation combined with entrepreneurship. The winning team, Versity, created a decentralized student records credentials platform which enables individuals to validate, store, and share their student records with employers and educational institutions from anywhere, anytime.

Throughout the challenge, Oracle and AuraBlocks led the training of more than 200 students in the Carolinas on blockchain technology. Additional partners included North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Sia Blocks.

The winning student teams who participated in this program have the option to join the Oracle Startup for Higher Education program This gives students access to mentorship and other resources required to further develop their entrepreneurial ideas into real enterprises.

Sanjay Mathew
Sanjay Mathew

Sanjay Mathew, senior director, Global Financial Services Industry, Oracle said: “Oracle’s blockchain platform is built to enable rapid experimentation and provide enterprise-grade capabilities to simplify moving POCs and pilots into production.

“The scope of what the teams designed and built in seven weeks with this unique collaboration is impressive, and we look forward to having the teams evolve these projects into full solutions deployed on Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. This could not have happened without the outstanding participation from motivated students, industry leaders, partners and academia combined.”

Enterprise Times: what does this mean

One striking consequence from the CFH Blockchain Challenge, at least according to Oracle, is that nearly all the student teams intend to hone their projects based on Oracle’s platform. They may yet develop future businesses based on their innovations.

This is important for Oracle, which has been a relative latecomer (compared to, say, IBM or Microsoft) to a blockchain arena where enterprise interest grows and grows. By encouraging student teams to start and then refine potential businesses using Oracle blockchain technology, Oracle jumps forward – so long as some of the efforts do emerge as commercial enterprise offerings.

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