Grammy Award Winner ‘Pitbull’ Announces Blockchain Smackathon

Armando Christian Pérez, popularly known as “Pitbull”, has announced Smackathon, a blockchain coding competition encouraging coders to come up with ideas that has potential to disrupt the music industry. The developers should use Ethereum blockchain to turn their ideas into reality. Any constructive ideas, from playlist curation to artist royalty payments, are welcome.

The competition is held by Pitbull in partnership with eMerge Americas conference – an annual two-day tech conference aimed at connecting Europe, North America, and Latin America and conducted in Miami Beach. Zeppelin, which created the Open Zeppelin platform for developers, is the technical and back-end support partner of the Smackathon, a name derived from the popular computer programming event hackathon.

The competition, which began on April 24, will end on May 25. Participants are encouraged to use Zeppelin’s open-source smart contract platform to convert their ideas into a blockchain solution for the music industry. The selected finalists will be flown to Miami to present their plan to the three-time Grammy award winner and serial entrepreneur.

eMerge Americas executive vice president Melissa Medina said

“I’ve always wanted to integrate a music component into eMerge. Having [Pitbull] as a partner in this project, I really think this is going to be something big and special.”

Further Medina said

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with [Pitbull], and he has a lot of frustrations. He’s Mr. Worldwide, he’s wildly successful, but he’s thinking about the artists of the future and the roadblocks they hit.”

The event carries a prize money of $6,000. Furthermore, Pitbull will be ready to write a cheque on the spot, if he is impressed with any project. Zeppelin, Medina Capital and eMerge Americas are also interested in investing in projects which have the potential to disrupt the music industry.

The winner will be judged based on originality, comprehensiveness, usefulness, and design of the project. There are no other specific criteria for the participants. Bonus points will be allotted to those who use Zeppelin’s open source platform. At the end of the day, the idea should be big enough to impress Pitbull who sung “ Give me everything […]. we may not get tomorrow.”