At its core, Shenzhen is a hardware town. But over the weekend, members of the southern Chinese city’s tech community embraced a new challenge—to create innovative applications for a variety of blockchain platforms.

That was the task at the center of the 24-hour TechCrunch Shenzhen Ontology hackathon, which took place in the run-up to TechCrunch Shenzhen 2018 conference. By the time it finished on Sunday, teams had come up with several new applications related to verification of intellectual property rights, vaccinations, and digital medical records.

“I guess I wanted to do a project in just one day,” said Yue Xuming, who moved to Shenzhen after he graduated from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in eastern China. “I thought that would be pretty cool,” he said, adding that he had no prior blockchain experience.

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