IOTA Contest: The Perfect Brainstorm

The community around IOTA is one of the most vibrant and innovative in the entire DLT ecosystem. With the help of the Ecosystem Fund, the IOTA Foundation is focused on funding the development of projects utilizing IOTA — effectively helping to bring ideas to life. This initiative has been a huge success so far, with 10 projects being funded to date with over $1m in commitments.  

Next to the initiatives supported by the Ecosystem Fund, we’ve seen a large portion of the community on Reddit and our Discord server proposing and discussing together possible use-cases for IOTA. This discussion within the IOTA community has helped mature the thinking around the possibilities of IOTA and DLT in general, and has brought various interest groups and individuals closer together. At the end of the day, IOTA is an open and permissionless ecosystem, with the IOTA Foundation acting as a facilitator of innovation within this ecosystem.

Today we are happy to announce The Perfect Brainstorm, a community contest aimed at bringing the brightest thinkers, visionaries and business oriented people together to work out concrete use case ideas enabled by IOTA. The grand winner of this contest will get their idea implemented. There will be cash prizes for the top 3 ideas and the best 5 submissions will receive limited edition IOTA branded Ledger Nano devices.  

Prizes and How to apply to the Contest

The winners of the contest will win a combination of the following:

The winner will be closely integrated into the IOTA Foundation and will work together with us on realizing their use case idea in the real world. This use case will be done in a completely open-source fashion to benefit the wider ecosystem.

In order for your submission to be eligible, you need to concretely define the following 3 points:

  • Problem statement: What is the problem you are trying to solve?
  • Market description: What does the market look like? Where would you apply the use-case? Local? Regional? Worldwide?
  • Solution: A detailed overview of how your proposed solution, how IOTA is used in this use-case and what would be needed to achieve this solution.

It should be noted that the team size is limited to 3 people. The deadline for submission is 14.12.2018 23:59 (14th December 2018), anything submitted after that moment will be discarded.We have created a custom form submission for this contest, where we suggest you to submit the use case proposals as PDF’s (for clarity and in case you have made any diagrams or graphics for your use case, that is the best approach).  

Please use the following form to submit your use-case:

https://iota.typeform.com/to/kKxqFG

Choosing a winner, the jury and prizes

The jury consisting of 3 people from within the IOTA Foundation will go through every valid submission and award points to them based on various criteria:

  • Originality: How original is your proposed use case and problem to be solved.
  • Feasibility: How feasible is the realization of the use case within a short time frame.
  • Quality: The quality of the content that was submitted.
  • IOTA as the enabler: How does IOTA fit in as a solution enabler

Each criterion is rewarded with 10 points each, with a total of 40 points to be rewarded. The projects will be transparently and independently judged by the jury, which consists of David Sønstebø (Co-Founder of IOTA), Regine Hashka-Helmer (IOTA Advisor and Founder & CEO of Seedlab) and Dominik Schiener (Co-Founder of IOTA). They will evaluate the proposals and pick 5 winning use-cases based on the criteria. This process should take about a week to complete, which means that by 21.12.2018 the winners will be announced.