KUALA LUMPUR: Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and Australia’s financial intelligence agency Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre have named Overwatch – Blockchain Address Validation as champion for the inaugural International Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) Codeathon 2017.

In a statement yesterday, BNM said Overwatch created a programme that showed genuine innovation, originality and most effectively addressed the “Help Your Community” Challenge by providing cryptocurrency users and platforms an artificial intelligence-enabled service to red-flag Blockchain addresses which had  been directly involved in or linked to suspicious activity. It said the Codeathon, held on Nov 18-19, 2017 in conjunction with the 3rd Counter-Terrorism Financing Summit 2017, brought together 69 participants from 11 different countries.

“The areas participants worked to solve challenges are – where is the money and how would the participants monitor the changing world of value exchange internationally; who are you and how would the participants identify people engaging in terrorist funding, money laundering, drugs or other criminal activities with crypto currencies or other pseudonymous channels; and, helping the community, where the the participants would identify tangible impending risks to the community,” it said.

BNM said the participants would select at least one of the challenges and created solutions to address terrorism financing issues effectively, as well as products that signify originality and ease of use.

“After a gruelling 32 hours of coding, the participants submitted their solutions with a short video explaining the use and relevance of the product to address the respective challenge, and the winners for the Codeathon team category included Overwatch – Blockchain Address Validation bagging A$5,000, 1st runner-up, SocialHash bringing home A$3,000 and 2nd runner-up winning A$1,000.

“The participants are invited to register for next year’s ASEAN-Australia Codeathon, hosted by AUSTRAC in Sydney from March 14-15, 2018 in the week prior to the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit and Counter-Terrorism Conference,” it said. — Bernama