BETH - the Blockchain School for Sustainability (formerly known as BIOTS) brought together 150 students from ETH Zurich and around the world for one exciting week of learning about and hacking on blockchain and Internet of Things technology to tackle sustainability challenges. BETH19 took place Feburary 11-15, 2019.
After a welcome address by Prof. Lothar Thiele, AVP of ETH Zurich for Digital Transformation and co-lead of ETH's Blockchain Initiative and Prof. Dirk Helbing, Chair of Computational Social Science and the organising team, #BETH19 offered two full days of packed lectures, hands-on sessions and breakouts to deep dive into various aspects of developing decentralized applications based on the Ethereum smart contract platform. Aside core sessions around Distributed Ledger technologies and Ethereum in particular, students learned about ethical incentive design, connecting IoT sensors to the blockchain, and how to use the infrastructure of the Finance4.0 platform which you can try out yourself at www.FinFour.net.
Thanks to all who made BETH possible! 
Prof. Lothar Thiele 
Prof. Dirk Helbing 
Nick Beglinger 
Reto Trinkler
The first half of the week was concluded with the BETH dinner party, where participants mingled around lots of good food to find partners for their teams and discuss the challenges posed by the BETH partners and their own ideas for the second half of the week - the BETH Hackathon. See the full agenda here.
The BETH hackathon took place at ETH's main building and, thanks to a cooperation with the Student Project House, at ETH Hönggerberg campus. There, the teams were able to experiment with IoT hardware and senssors to include in their solution designs - all in an environment designed for communication and cooperation.
The hackathon offered six challenges for the teams to choose from. From a total of 21 teams, 13 finalists were selected by the BETH Jury to present their prototypes in a 5min pitch in plenary.
- Benefitting Climate x2 (by Energy Switzerland)
- aDappter (winner) and NRGo
- Nature Conservation (by WWF Romania/Switzerland)
- Byson/CryptoRangers (winner), Chainge, and carpETHii
- Trust in Global Supply Chains (by Peterson & Control Union)
- Bohnanza (winner) and SoBeIt
- Easy Time banking (by KISS, City of Zug)
- INplusONE (winner) and BETHerCare
- Finance 4.0 (by FuturICT2)
- CiviGo (winner) and BetterHealth
- Open category (by students)
- A Bit of Charity (winner) and BloodChain
The winning teams are indicated and linked. The jury has been very impressed with what the teams achieved within only 48h of hackathon time. All partners showed keen interest in following up with the winning/finalist teams of their challenge and together explore ways of how to get the promising prototypes to the next level. Together with the Student Project House team at ETH Zurich, we are happy to support everybody to make this happen!
Being the "Blockchain School for Sustainability" we are happy that the cooperation with MyClimate allowed the entire week to be run in a CO2 neutral way.
The BETH team likes to thank all participants, speakers, partners and sponsors for an inspiring, fun and high-energy week! Let's make the world a BETher place together!
Source code: github
Twitter: #BETH19
Pictures: coming soon
YouTube: coming later
Reports: coming still later
