Ultra’s Next Big Partner: AMD

The Ultra team has announced a partnership with AMD, the global leader in the GPU market and the world’s second-largest supplier of x86-based microprocessors. This just weeks after announcing Ubisoft as a Blockproducer, and once again showing the world how excited big traditional tech companies are about blockchain. Both companies agreed to work on co-marketing activities from now on, and AMD will distribute games to their customers to redeem on Ultra as both companies plan to optimize cryptographic computing performance on the platform for gamers using AMD processors and graphics cards.

Joerg Roskowetz, Head of Blockchain Technology of AMD was quoted: “AMD is excited about the use of blockchain technology for games publishing, licensing and rights management. AMD and Ultra are working together to make next-generation, community-centric game publishing a reality, transforming the way games are purchased, shared and experienced.”

In their press release, the Ultra team also mentioned yet unannounced hyper-social features of the Ultra platform, which we are very excited to learn more about soon. These announcements brought Ultra a lot of media exposure as they were featured in Yahoo Finance and other mainstream publications. Ultra promotional output is heating up and we encourage you to check out their August trailer to get properly hyped up!

Chestnut Technical Whitepaper

The Chestnut team came to life during the London Hackathon in 2018, where they won 2nd place and took the Best User Experience (UX) prize. The team kept working on their vision of providing security features for users since then, similar to the standards we know from traditional financial services.

For many potential new users, it’s quite intimidating to take full responsibility for the security of their account, and we still hear about scam artists trying to abuse such inexperienced users.

This is a problem the crypto community is facing as a whole, and solving it is crucial for the wider adoption and success of cryptocurrencies.

In their technical white paper, the Chestnut team introduced several account security features, concepts, and services that are leveraging the flexibility of EOSIO account permissions and smart contracts. We encourage you to give it a read to learn more about how they plan to prevent mistaken or fraudulent transactions from happening. Their solutions are on-chain, designed to be scalable, and Chestnut plans to expand to other EOSIO networks once established on EOS.

Crypto.com Adds EOS



Another combination of traditional financial services and Crypto is provided by Crypto.com, a popular platform for crypto investors. On their mission to make cryptocurrencies more usable in the real world, they created the MCO Visa Card, which lets you pay with crypto and comes with a couple of interesting perks, such as a crypto back program and a free Spotify account. We’re happy to report that they recently integrated EOS as the 8th option to top up your Credit Card account. Currently, the service is available for 38 US States, but we expect that the service will expand soon. Learn more about the benefits of different tiers in a video published by the YouTuber Crypto Lark, who just shared his experience using this interesting product.

BlockBase Airdrop Continues

The EU-funded Blockbase team reported that it’s working hard to deliver its product for testing and aims to start their alpha phase in January 2020. They’ve released their code on Github just recently, where it’s being constantly updated. Blockbase is currently distributing BBT tokens via their innovative airgrab. The 2nd airdrop round (of 24) had 27,848 accounts registered, but only 14,252 were accepted to avoid abuse. There will be two new rules for airgrabbing starting December 20th.

Rule #1 – each account needs to hold at least one EOS in total, either unstaked or staked to CPU or NET, at token distribution time, otherwise that account won’t receive its tokens.

Rule #2 – each account needs to be one month old. These EOS and account age minimums may be adjusted in the future.

If you haven’t claimed your BBT tokens yet, we encourage you to participate in round 3.

However, be careful and double-check the address, since the team recently discovered that there’s a phishing site abusing the air grab’s popularity. Best use the link we shared below. For future reference, it’s blockbase and NOT blocksbase.

Marshall Islands inspired by EOSIO

2020 might be a year where more governments show more clarity on cryptocurrency regulations, and several countries are actively working on the issuance of their own digital national currency based on blockchain technologies. One of those countries is the Marshall Islands, and we’re excited to learn that their efforts were inspired by the work of Block.one on EOSIO. The cryptocurrency, SOV, is set to tackle some issues the RMI struggles with, including high costs of remittances.



One potential reason why Jim Wagner, co-founder and CTO of SFB Technologies, the company behind the development of SOV’s blockchain infrastructure, chose EOSIO for his inspiration, might be that participated and won the Hong Kong EOSIO Hackathon as a member of the ID Pass Team.

Scatter Design Process

Rami James took us through the design process of the Scatter wallet in a detailed article, which is an interesting read for anyone that wants to learn about user experience and what things to consider. We’ve seen quite a few versions of Scatter already and the Scatter team never got tired of adapting their product according to their users’ feedback. In the article we learn what worked and what didn’t work from the user’s point of view, and there’s valuable information about what motivated the development of the Scatter Simple, a new interface mode for users that don’t need to manage multiple accounts and just want to use a dApp or play a game.

We also very much liked this quote in the article: “Experience is defining the design of the future.” Go Scatter!