Our Computer Engineering students developed a project of a currency exchange service using a blockchain code

Innovation, security, and entrepreneurial vision: these were the ingredients that made the team of Insper’s Computer Engineering students stand out, winning the 1st edition of the BTG Pactual Code competition, carried out between July and August 2018. BTG Pactual is a Brazilian investment bank that operates in the investment banking, wealth management, and global asset management markets in America. During the competition, participants were challenged to develop solutions to day-to-day issues of the financial market, using blockchain — a code technology for information security.

Insper students André Elimelek, Bruno Cesconetto, Felipe Aron, and Nicolas Stegmann developed a currency exchange project, with transactions from the Brazilian real to the US dollar. The exchange service recorded all purchase orders in blockchain coding and a DLT platform. The group chose to use the Ethereum blockchain network, which charges by registry. To reduce operation costs, the students utilized a technology called IPFS, which enables the compaction of several transactions in a same access key.

“Our differential was the entrepreneurial vision. We did not limit ourselves to solving the problem that was proposed; we saw beyond that, with a solution that guaranteed data security, but whose cost did not impact the project,” explains Nicolas Stegmann, a student in the 4th semester of Computer Engineering at Insper.

From the 40 groups enrolled, nine were selected for the second phase of the competition, through an analysis of the participants’ curriculum. The students had 20 days to develop the project, and each group counted on the guidance of a BTG Pactual mentor who assisted with technical advising for the development of the solution. The final project was presented to a board of examiners composed of bank partners. “The competition encourages studies and projects that use the blockchain and can contribute to Brazil taking the lead in this technology, which is still new, but very relevant,” Stegmann analyses.

The four students who won the competition are part of BlockchainInsper, the first university institution in Brazil entirely dedicated to the study of blockchain. The organization was founded in September 2017 with the goal of engaging students and disseminating knowledge about the subject to as many people as possible.