Blockchain as a technology stands on its own, disconnected from the real world in any meaningful way, unless there are Oracles bridging the gap. Oracles are mechanisms that send, receive and verify real (and digital) world occurrences and submit this information into smart contracts, triggering changes and thus allowing the blockchain to communicate with off-chain entities.
A voice from the sky going straight into the blocks
Oracles open up decentralized apps to the world, allowing off-chain data to directly interact with the blockchain, and thus affect results of smart contracts. Any publicly available data can be integrated, such as election results, weather conditions, sporting event results and even commodity prices such as gold and oil. This opens up the field for major use cases such as financial applications, supply chain management, information markets, insurances, gaming, payment solutions, trade, finance, health, the Internet of Things and many more.
The Akshwani Hæck , an initiative by the æternity blockchain and Superhero.com, is created to analyze exactly that aspect of Oracles. Gathering the brightest and best minds of the blockchain space, the Akshwani Hæck will look deeper into the future, beyond the obvious use cases and attempt to find benefits of blockchain, through the use of Oracles, that haven’t yet been explored.
In ancient India, the oracle was referred to as the* Akashwhani *, meaning a voice without a body, unseen, or a voice coming from the sky… and the challenge is to plug that voice into the blockchain to unveil the full potential of trust-less applications.
Whilst most modern smart contract platforms have to rely on separate projects to provide Oracles, a distinct advantage of the æternity Blockchain is that it has embedded Oracles on the protocol level, since its Mainnet launch. As æternity’s ecosystem grows daily, there is a need to expand the knowledge and opportunity of building on the blockchain leveraging the full potential of its unique features, and allow more people to come in touch with the innovative technology and simple, yet effective, solutions that æternity offers.
The scheduled training sessions will be comprised of not only oracles, but also State Channels .
A State Channel is a two-way interaction channel between two parties. State Channels make it possible to execute smart contracts off-chain, without fees, while keeping the same level of security that the æternity blockchain already provides, making use of other unique scalability features, and significantly increasing privacy.
Registration is open!
The Hæckathon will be running online on devpost.com from April 5th to May 7th and, apart from helping developers to learn how to build on æternity, it will supply them with tools and techniques to do so, while making sure that the solutions developed answer real market needs.
Projects created during the Akshwani Hæck will be competing for prizes in different categories with a prize pool of $50,000 in Æ tokens . Additionally, the projects which show the most promise might have the opportunity to be further developed and supported, in order to accelerate their development and give them the best opportunity of success.
Participants are able to access more information and sign up at: https://akshwanihaeck.devpost.com/ 
Read the full article on the æternity blog: https://blog.aeternity.com/register-for-our-1st-oracle-based-akshwani-haeck-d3c4a574fa6b
