The EOSIO Global Hackathon Series hosted a series of inspiring events during the last year and laid the foundation for many interesting projects and connections to be forged. Many expected Block.one to continue this initiative, and we saw a video released last week that showed precious moments of previous hackathons, while explaining how they plan to evolve the concept.

The new Motto here is “Host. Partner. Attend.” and brings many opportunities to everyone in the EOSIO community. It’s an open call to follow the example Block.one gave in the previous year and aims to further decentralize the EOSIO community and diversify how the developer community wants to grow while catering to what is most needed in their specific region.

In other Block.one news, the company announced they’ll open their new US Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, as their fourth global site. After successful cooperation with the State of Virginia and the educational hub Virginia Tech, it seems Block.one is happy to deepen their presence in the region and is reportedly committed to creating 170 high-skills jobs in Arlington over the next three years.

“We are excited to be setting up Arlington, Virginia as our U.S. headquarters. The region boasts a rich combination of security, engineering, and IT skills that we seek, and its proximity to the nation’s capital positions us close to the policy innovation around digital assets and distributed ledger technology in the U.S,” said Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer. “This expansion opens up important new avenues of talent expansions for us at a time when there is rapidly increasing demand for blockchain-based technologies.”

Clearly, Block.one is intending to further expand their workforce and it will be exciting to think about the highly skilled talent that Block.one is attracting. Some of this talent is highlighted in a video series that portraits individuals already hired by Block.one. In the most recent episode we had the chance to meet Greg (Vice-President of Engineering) and Joe (Product Owner) as they describe their roles and why they love what they do.

Our final piece of Block.one news has quickly echoed around the crypto world! As posted on the Block.one blog:

“Block.one has reached a civil settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) in connection with the company’s sale of an ERC-20 token between June 26, 2017 and June 1, 2018. Under the settlement, Block.one will pay a one-time fine of US$24 million, whilst neither admitting nor denying the SEC’s findings.”

This is actually very good news for Block.one, EOSIO and consequently, the EOS public network! Marco Santori tweet stormed a good overview of the settlement while Katherine Wu from Notation Capital did a great job breaking down the legal documents with simple annotations in a way that makes the situation easy to understand. This is good news for the entire crypto space and we expect it to get a lot of attention in the coming days!