Team No Other Choice took first place overall at JunctionX Lisbon 2026, held on 10–11 October 2026 at Técnico’s Oeiras campus with around 150 participants. According to DEI, the team also won the Inspiring Solutions challenge.
The team was made up of David Santos, João Teodósio, Miguel Rodrigues and Tomás Lopes, students at Técnico’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI), and Pedro Silva, from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL). Técnico’s Oeiras campus reports that the team came together after a teacher encouraged students to try the hackathon format.
The project
Inspiring Solutions’ QuantumTrace challenge asked teams to uncover cryptography that will become vulnerable as quantum computing advances. The team’s solution, which DEI refers to by the challenge’s name, QuantumTrace, combined:
- a platform that checks source code, network traffic, cloud configurations, certificates and websites for vulnerable cryptography;
- a browser extension (for Google Chrome, according to Técnico’s Oeiras campus) that flags security problems in website connections;
- a Visual Studio Code extension that highlights problems in code and suggests AI-assisted fixes.
Miguel Rodrigues explained that the team chose this challenge because the alternatives left less room for creative ideas. After a first round of presentations against the other teams working on the same challenge, No Other Choice reached the final and presented to company representatives, organisers and the public.
Next stop: Finland
The win earned the team a place at Junction 2026 in Espoo, Finland (13–15 November 2026), representing Portugal and Técnico. Pedro Silva said the chance to compete in Finland was part of why he signed up, while David Santos credited the programming, networking and operating-systems foundations from his degree for making the project possible.
See the JunctionX Lisbon 2026 winners page and the edition archive for the full record.