Machine learning on the blockchain: How Algorithmia's DanKu experiment unfolded

Much of the discussion about blockchain technology to date has either lauded its transformational promises or snickered at the marketing hype undeterred by the lack of actual breakthrough applications. But Algorithmia, a startup curating a marketplace of machine-learning models, just demonstrated how Ethereum can be used to submit and verify those machine-learning models in a recent contest. Back in February Algorthmia introduced a contest around its new Danku protocol, which was designed to see how well the Ethereum blockchain worked as a vehicle for verifying machine-learning models without Algorithmia's active involvement. Last week the company revealed that a winner had emerged, who submitted a model predicting how a given area of the United States was liable to vote based on a limited random sample of 2016 election data with the required level of accuracy. "We've been thinking about, how we do acquire machine-learning models faster and in a better way?" said Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia founder and CEO (and a GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit advisor).