Hacking the Tokenised Impacts Economy
ReFi Cape Town presents it's first ever hackathon hosted at the Cardano Center. This hackathon called out the Youth to tackle issues faced in our daily lives, using blockchain technology.
ReFi Cape Town is a diverse youth-led, Web3 Community of Practice that was established to address some of our most pressing local challenges including inequality, youth unemployment, and a general lack of access to essential resources. We work with local social enterprises to develop, build and operate digital impact asset collections across energy, water, food, sanitation, housing and education sectors. The ReFi Cape Town Local Node is a growing community and is open to anyone who wishes to participate; all you have to do is show-up to one of our events or reach out to us on social media.
ReFi Cape Town forms part of a greater global movement initiated by ReFi DAO, which consists of ReFi Local Nodes” that are distributed across the world. All are interested in exploring Web3-powered ways of governing, funding, and viewing public and planetary challenges.
The image below illustrates where current ReFi Local Nodes have emerged. Each Local Node has their own unique mandate, identity, mission, vision, teams, funding and governance structures. The Local Nodes are connected by the same conviction: digital tools, specifically distributed ledger technologies and AI, can drastically improve the quality of humanities response to some of our global contemporary crises; persistent and rising inequality, loss of biodiversity, climate change, urbanisation, rural-urban migration, and global pandemics.
Our monthly events and hackathons
Much like many other ReFi Local Nodes, the Cape Town Local Node hosts monthly events that foster conversations and collaborations around the fast emerging tokenised impacts economy. The themes of our monthly conversations focus on narrative inquiry into social entrepreneurs who are using decentralised finance (DeFi) principles in the field of regenerative development.
The ReFi Cape Town Hackathon started on the 7th of September and focused on advancing the local tokenised impacts economy in Cape Town. A presentation by Kristina Zittel from UNICEF highlighted the challenges of urbanisation in South Africa, examples of local urban sustainability projects. She highlighted that around a third of the SA’s total population are between 0-14 years and that South African youth are leading in climate action evident through the SA Youth Climate Action Plan. She concluded that collaboration, learning for the future and opportunities for entrepreneurs are essential to regenerative urban development in South Africa.
Alwyn van Wyk, Developer Success Lead at ixo, spoke about tokenised impacts, being creative and incrementalist in local community projects. A few words of thanks were shared by Dee from the Cardano Cape Town Center and Ayakha Mzimkulu, Communications and Community Lead at ReFi Cape Town.
Shawn Alimohammadi from ReFi Cape Town opened up the hackathon by challenging young hackers to design and build a dApp that addressed a specific urban problem. Over three days, teams worked rigorously to develop impact focused dApps and tokenised dMRV solutions.
The final winning teams were selected based on the quality of their submissions, understanding and application of dMRV and impacts tokenisation, and the extent of local youth empowerment to address social and ecological issues. Solutions that empowered local youth to address sustainability were prioritised.
1st place / Impact Hub
Team members: Eneo Hollenbach, Diego Olaya, and Jordan Gallant
The Impact Hub links stakeholders, presents clear problems and incentivises the creation of new solutions.
2nd place / Eco-Scope - EcoPedalHeros
Team members: Graeme Leighton and Chienne Wolmar
Improving access to education, decarbonising transport systems, and improving internet access using digital impact producing twins.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18GlJ6-Ec53q7j09-O323jCsAq0HbC0XW/view
3rd place/ Fruga Designers - Recycling Revolution
Team members: Phumlani Dlamini, Okuhle Charlieman, and Keenan Deyce
Advancing recycling in schools across South Africa using dMRV for supply chain informatics and impact tokenisation using smart-contacts.
**https://github.com/okuhlecharlieman/thirdweb-tailwind-school-recycle/**
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cNTw9fJBoKny8UkOWFiAq1HNmrykHs6V/view
"The hackathon has challenged me in many ways, it was my first time working on a web3 project so a lot of research had to be done. And also working with a team was an interesting challenge and I'm glad I got to experience it." - ReFi CPT Hacker
“Learnt a great deal, used Thirdweb as our front end tool. It inspired us to create more.” - ReFi CPT Hacker #2
Moving forward
The ReFi Cape Town team has built a DAO using ixo toolkit. This is to democratise governance, improve transparency and open participation to anyone who is interested in participating from the local community. We will also be using ixo infrastructure to host an Impacts Marketplace, where we assist local NGOs in building digital measurement, reporting and verification services and the creation of data-dense impact tokens.
Are you keen to collaborate, co-research, invest or join the ReFi Cape Town community? Visit our website or reach out to hello@reficapetown.com