Welcome to the Intro to Blockchain Series, sponsored by IBM. We're going to explore Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Composer, and Blockchain use cases for business.  Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is based on Hyperledger Fabric - a platform for distributed ledger solutions; and Hyperledger Composer - an extensive, open development toolset and framework to make developing blockchain applications easier.

IBM hopes to build a Blockchain Community within Topcoder to do real customer work in the near future.  In this Intro series, we will lay the groundwork for a demo App, which solves a real-world problem with use of the blockchain technology, and tools provided by Hyperledger Composer. Within this project we plan to have a series of three challenges addressing different use cases of blockchain tech, thus focused on implementation of three different blockchain models with Hyperledger Composer; followed by a few extra challenges to wrap the best model into a great Angular 2 demo App.

With the total prize pool over $8000 in this series, we believe this is a great opportunity for the community to dive into the new and cutting-edge technology.

IBM Blockchain Experts will be reviewing the top submissions and providing their feedback on this challenge! See below in the Review Criteria.

Challenge Scope

The goal of this challenge is to make community to explore Hyperledger Composer, while approaching the application of blockchain technology in the domain of government regulations.

For example, an IBM team has implemented a blockchain network https://github.com/dselman/composer-sample-networks/tree/master/packages/animaltracking-network that allows users to implement the UK’s DEFRA regulations around the movement of animals https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/general-licence-for-the-movement-of-pigs-sheep-and-goats. Movement of livestock must be reported for purposes of disease control. The animal tracking network allows to collect and report all necessary information without any need to submit paper forms.

In this challenge you are expected to implement a similar solution for an US Federal Regulation. As you see from this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Federal_Regulations, there are plenty of government regulations in US to choose from. Please, choose an interesting one, and implement your blockchain model for that. In a subsequent challenge, we’ll take the best implementation and build a UI for it.

Review Criteria

- 40% of the score comes from how interesting and complex the chosen regulation is, and how well it is modeled.
- 40% for how well it is implemented technically
- 20% for how well you present your solution (docs + video).

This challenge will be reviewed in two stages. At first it will undergo the standard community review with two reviewers following the criteria stated above. Then, top evaluated submissions along with the results of community review will be passed to IBM Blockchain experts, who will make the final judgement and provide detailed comments, so that both competitors and reviewers can learn about this technology.

Final Submission Guidelines

Submit banana file (.bna - Business Network Archive) along with source Hyperledger Composer project, along with verification instructions, description of the implemented model, and demo video (note that Hyperledger Composer is able to automatically generate simple Angular 2 frontend to demonstrate blockchain model in action).

Members who place (for a cash prize) will be asked to submit a paragraph of text explaining how they approached the problem, and what they liked or disliked about this challenge. Topcoder may use those quotes in social media or blog posts about Blockchain. This is not a dissertation, and doesn't require you to explain your submission.