The Royal Canadian Mint is inviting developers to create innovative digital payment apps using its MintChip digital currency technology. The winners will be paid in gold!

MintChip is a digital currency designed for low value (less than $10) payments that can operate like cash in the physical and virtual world with no requirements for external authorisation.

The Chip is a secure smartcard integrated circuit which can be in the form of a MicroSD for a mobile phone (Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7), a USB stick for a PC or a Hardware Security Module (HSM) for users with high transaction rates such as merchants.

The Hosted Mint Chip third party service also provides a cloud solution that extends MintChip to devices that don't accommodate it.

A complete MintChip transaction always consists of two MintChip devices, a Sender and Receiver.

A Receiver's MintChip ID must be known by the Sender, this is the main purpose of the MintChip Request which can be transmitted in many different ways, for example: a telephone call, a printed QR code or as a special MintChip Request Message.

You can see more about it in the promo video below but don't expect too much technical detail:

• Create software applications and proofs of concept utilizing MintChip
• Highlight potential advantages of the technology and digital currency

The Royal Canadian Mint will provide participating developers with an SDK, two microSD MintChips, and two remote MintChip accounts they can use to integrate the Mint's technology with their digital payment applications.

The competition is limited to 500 approved partcipants and registration is now open and closes on July 18. The deadline for submission is August 1 and judging will take place from August 15 to September 12 by a panel of expert judges and by Public Voting, for which a video is required.

The prize for Best Overall Application is 10oz of gold, worth $17,000 Canadian dollars; second prize is 6 oz of gold and there fives prizes of 3 oz of gold.

More Information

MintChip Challenge

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Google+, Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook or sign up for our weekly newsletter.