MIT made headline just a few weeks ago with news the school’s bitcoin club would be arranging to have all undergraduate students at the institution receive $100 worth of bitcoin for free.
They’re taking it a step further, it seems. The MIT Bitcoin Project has announced BitComp a summer-long competition that will have developers create innovative bitcoin-related apps and programs.
It’s all in effort to get more developers in the bitcoin space, which would obviously have an all-around positive impact on the community.
In order to be eligible, participants must currently be an MIT student or alumni. There can be groups of 1 – 5 people, and they must present original work (a given, really).
Over the summer, there will be three deadlines for submission.
On June 22nd (which is coming up faster than you think), a 250-word pitch will need to be submitted by participants. Three $250 “topic” prizes will be awarded.
We know you’re wondering what a topic prize is, so here it is (quoted exactly as posted on this link):
- Improving MIT Award: Application or service with most potential for improving some aspect of student life at MIT
- Engineering Award: Application or service that features impressive engineering or that is effective in demonstrating the capabilities of Bitcoin.
- Evangelism Award: Best application or service for introducing new users to Bitcoin
- Next Billion Award: Application or service that best addresses challenges in developing nations
- Awesome Award: Application, service, or project that’s just plain cool, fun, or creative
The next prize hand-off will be on July 27th, where the participants’ demo video will need to be submitted. Again here were have topic prizes; three $750 awards.
And finally, on August 24th it all comes to a close when each team’s practical demo will need to be shown off. There are five $1,500 topic prizes awarded on this day and one $5,000 grand prize winner.
Could the next big software in the bitcoin space come from this? We’ll just have to wait and see.
For more information, you can view the BitComp website here.