Bloomen Hackathon winner: A platform to connect fans with artists, using Blockchain

An interview with Bill Keleris. His winning entry “Music.book” showed how Blockchain can be used to connect fans directly with musicians – and it sparked some ideas about a world of music very different from today.

Two of the five days of our Bloomen week event (May 25-29, 2020) were dedicated to a hackathon. The idea was to invite students to conceptualise and develop demos of Blockchain applications, focused on better handling of media assets, such as photos, music or video.

We are  happy to present a short interview with the winner of the Hackathon: Bill Keleris, a student from Athens. He presented “Music.Book”, a concept of a music community, based on Blockchain technology. The core idea is that of a direct connection between fans and musicians.

What Bill presented was not only an interesting approach. The level of development in very short time (two days) was impressive, too. 

Further his idea sparked questions a world of music very different from today: How would such a platform – if it existed then – have affected the musical career of The Beatles, is a platform like this would have existed? Or other bands – Abba,  Roxette, The Clash, Avici, Justin Bieber. Would this direct support be a problem or a source of energy and motivation? 

These speculative questions are otherwise hard to answer. What is easier to answer is this: Without a technology like Blockchain a community/market with direct fan/musician support would not even be possible. Because one big quality of Blockchain is that it allows for a trustable connection between two parties who do not know each other.

Here is our exchange with Bill Keleris, the developer of the winning application, he lives in Athens, Greece.

Q: What is your current occupation – study, work?

Bill Keleris (BK): “I work for Intralot as an Automation Engineer. My first Bachelor’s Degree was in Networks and Telecommunications at the American College of Greece with full scholarship. In September I am getting my second Bachelor’s Degree in Software Development at University of Piraeus.”

Q: How did you develop the idea for the Bloomen Hackathon?

BK: “I always wanted to create a social platform with music content which will be free, easy to use, and accessible by everyone based on Blockchain technologies and the Bloomen Hackathon was exactly what I was looking for.”

Q: What is the core idea?

BK: “Music.Book is an initiative which aims to support anyone who creates music content and wants to share it with other people in order to receive feedback and promote his/her talent. Music.Book offers a transparent and safe way to upload your music content on the Blockchain being sure that you preserve all the copyrights and the ownership of your work.” 

Q: Can you describe the technical elements you used?

BK: “Ganache Blockchain was the backbone of my project used for the ethereum distributed application development. Solidity was the chosen language to implement all the smart contracts while Truffle was used to deploy these smart contracts on our blockchain network. The frontend was created based on the VueJs Javascript framework. The Web3.js Javascript Api library was used to interact with the Ethereum node.”

Q: What was the biggest challenge developing this?

BK: “I guess the biggest challenge was to meet the time deadline having prepared a fully workable dApp with a pretty UI and all its necessary capabilities.” 

Q:  How much time did it take to develop the entry in the Hackathon?

BK: ”2 days of full code, coffee, great energy and a lot of fun.”

Q: What is your opinion about Blockchain technology? BK: “I really believe that Blockchain has come to stay! It brings a new mindset regarding the way we store, we access and we manage our data. The transparency, the safety and the potential of such technology has introduced a new way of developing applications and I am sure that this decentralized way of working is going to replace many traditional and obsolete systems used today.”

Q: What profession would you like work in after finishing your studies?

BK: “I love coding! I love blockchain technology! I love research! So, the future seems to be really interesting and I strongly believe that the best is yet to come!”

As the first prize for the winner Bloomen presented Bill Keleris with a high-quality laptop, which he picked up at the ATC office in Athens. 

Photo of Bill Keleris by ATC staff
Headerphoto by Akshar Dave on Unsplash