The IOTA Foundation has joined the Odyssey Hackathon, in Groningen NL from April 12–14, as an Ecosystem partner.The Odyssey Hackathon connects selected top teams (new teams, pre-startups, startups, and SMEs) to their potential launching customers from corporate, governmental, and non-profit sectors (among which: the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, the Dutch Land Registry and the Chamber of Commerce, Vattenfall, KLM, Nutreco, and many others). 100 selected teams will be building solutions prototypes with the support of the international ecosystem that includes the tech, business and legal experts, and the financial regulators.Last year, the event was attended by 1,000+ people and resulted in 64 prototypes. In 2019, Odyssey is set to bring together 1,500 attendees to solve 20 real-life complex challenges; these challenges cover a multitude of areas, including energy transition, public utility networks, (self-) governance, self-owned digital ID, biometric data communication, wildlife restoration, cargo insurance, and many more.The teams will compete for €200K in total cash rewards and a chance to access the Decentralized Business Incubation Program to scale their solution with the partner consortia of their challenges and Odyssey Acceleration Partners.Here’s what Forbes says about the hackathon: http://bit.ly/2X4qW4gChallenge info and registration: www.odyssey.org.The IOTA Foundation will be supporting a number of challenges at the hackathon by providing technical support to teams before, during and after the event. We’ve chosen these challenges due to their compatibility of the IOTA protocol to solve them. The tracks the IOTA Foundation is choosing to support are as follows:Please Note: We have chosen to support these challenges given their suitability for the IOTA protocol. This does not indicate any endorsement from the affiliation companies/organisations.CREATING A MOBILE VIRTUAL POWER PLANTVattenfall is looking to transition to a more sustainable energy system through the expansion of renewable production and climate-smart energy solutions for their customers. They have posed the Vehicle to Grid (V2G) challenge. They want to see Electric Vehicles used as mobile assets to provide electricity grid flexibility.We believe that IOTA is in a unique position to support this challenge given the suitability of our technology and the prior work of Elaad NL & Enexis with their charging solutions.BUILD THE UNIMAGINABLENature 2.0 is challenging teams to build a digital commons using distributed ledgers & AI. They are looking for teams to build ownerless systems that provide a net benefit back to the communities they operate in. While a daunting task, these types of systems can fundamentally change how our future communities operate.We believe that this challenge is one worth tackling. It proposes we build a future with autonomous agents: machines, humans and software, interacting to benefit of everyone. IOTA can offer a protocol for these machines to communicate and create value within.PROTOCOL FOR REGISTERINGAND COMMUNICATING DIGITAL PERMISSIONSThe Ministry of Justice and Security in the Netherlands is challenging teams to build an open-source protocol for requesting and approving consent in a standardised and immutable manner. This would be a crucial building block for e-commerce, medical systems and many other uses.Given IOTA’s unique properties among other distributed ledgers, we believe that the protocol would useful tool in architecting a solution for this challenge—The IOTA Foundation excited to see the solutions that the hackers create during the event. We encourage interested individuals and teams to sign up now!Registrations close on the 25th of February. Follow the link to sign up to the hackathon: hereIOTA joins the biggest blockchain hackathon in the world: Odyssey was originally published in IOTA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.