T Challenge wants beneficial blockchain and clean crypto
Deutsche Telekom and its subsidiary T-Mobile US have announced their third annual T Challenge. This year it’s an open invitation to invent the best new Public Blockchain Protocol systems for Web3 over 5G.
Can you mobilise the power of 5G, bring Web3 to life and save humanity from its worst self? If so, you have until January 20, 2023 to get your entry into the latest annual T Challenge run by DT and T-Mobile. Six winners will split €600,000 (AKA dollars) in prize money and an all-expenses paid trip to Bonn to present their ideas to Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile US. Participants will be mentored by some of the industry’s leading lights in Web3, blockchain and crypto-currencies.
Social awareness is a big theme in this event, but the outlines given below seem fairly open to interpretation. There are five categories in which inventions are welcomed: Sustainability; Network & Infrastructure; Media, Entertainment & Experiential; Customer Engagement & Loyalty and Decentralized IDs & Wallets.
Your first big challenge is finding out what the judges call Web3 and matching their expectations. It’s a major trend, it’s the future, it’s crypto and it’s metaverse, apparently. It’s about new possibilities for the mobile phone user, say the organisers, which covers just about every base station. The main quality that DT seems to be looking for is social empathy in the application of technology, the DT web site says.
“Impactful technologies such as Web3, crypto or metaverse require a special degree of digital responsibility in their design,” explains Claudia Nemat, Board Member for Technology and Innovation at DT. “In line with our commitment to human-centric technology deployment, we are particularly interested in how we can use Web3 technologies to support our more than 240 million mobile customers in Europe and the US in their daily lives.” Neville Ray, President of Technology at T-Mobile US said the T Challenge is an excellent chance for young companies and developers to “use the power of 5G to create the next wave of innovation and new internet capabilities.”
DT and T-Mobile are partnering with four top Web3-focused companies that will support participating teams with knowledge and expertise to turn their ideas into compelling use cases. Celo makes a carbon-negative, Ethereal Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer-1 blockchain that uses fast, scalable proof-of-stake consensus. Celo’s main contributions include phone numbers as proxies for public keys and allowing for transaction fees to be paid in ERC-20 tokens. Fireblocks built an easy-to-use platform to help builders make blockchain systems.
The Graph is the indexing and query layer of web3 which covers 39 different networks including Ethereum, NEAR, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, Cosmos Hub and PoA. Chainlink is the industry-standard Web3 services platform that helps developers to build feature-rich Web3 applications for blockchains. “The Celo community cares about people and the planet,” said Rene Rheinsberg, Celo Co-Founder and Celo Foundation President.
That said the next web could create human empowerment protocols and climate-positive, decentralized applications for the world’s 6.4 billion mobile phone users. After an application review period, judges will select the top 18 submissions. Once selected, these teams will have until May 7 to develop their proposals, which include development sessions hosted by Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile US, Celo and others. More information about T Challenge