
We got this!
We had a mix of subject matter experts (not just on the panel!), folks creating social justice solutions, creatives and marketers all thrown together to play our ‘Blockchain GAME’.
Each player received a Starter envelope labeled with a letter and a number. Inside were either 3 tokens and/or pencil toppers or fun gadgets. Players
- Participated in an exchange where one player ‘sent’ another player tokens by declaring both parties and amounts.
- Players verified the transaction, checking the sender was not an impersonator and actually had the funds to make the exchange.
- Once the exchange occurred. The transaction was recorded on the team’s ledger.
Of course, we had a few ‘rules of the game’ some of which included that

- Players who began with a ‘toy’ had to SELL it during the game
- Players who began with tokens had to ‘make a purchase’

The fun really got started when Player E was found to have passed on a contaminant.
Lucky we had ‘kept track’ of every transaction. Hence we were able to remove the ‘contaminated’ tokens.
Supply chain transactions are a natural fit for Blockchain. In real-life such as the romaine lettuce scare earlier this year, if the path of transactions were executed using blockchain, you could quickly detect the source of the contaminant and remove it. Why is this important? Millions or billions of dollars are spent pulling food and other items ‘off the shelf’. By using blockchain, the transactions are transparent and traceable.
Thank you to all of you who made this night happen. Thank you to our volunteer panelists Daisy, Betsabe, and Alex. A big thank you to Mitchell and Jess for working with us to not only create the ‘Game’ but test it out on some Fellows at Insight Data Science. Photos courtesy of Afshin Shirazian.
And, of course, we couldn’t have done this event at all if it were not for our sponsor, Heroku-Salesforce!