Words can’t begin to describe the events that have taken place at a University in Venezuela the past few weeks. I’m not talking about politics either.

Let me explain. For a while now we have been thinking on how to best “market” Byteball. We don’t like to create hype and make announcements of features we will tease for months before maybe releasing them on testnet. We would rather just show what the platform can do, right now, out of the box, off the shelf, in real life. Hard to believe, but Byteball is an almost feature-complete 3rd generation cryptocurrency platform, yet hardly anyone even knows it exists.

Other projects hold Hack-a-Thons, but we don’t actually need even more features: we’d rather find out what would happen if people start using the platform in the real world to benefit their local community. So we invented the concept of a “Use-a-Thon” to find out exactly that.

Casper Niebe, who coordinates the translation efforts surrounding Byteball, has built a great network of enthusiastic people all over the world.

It is through his contacts that we managed to get a University on board for this grand experiment. And not just some random one either, Simón Bolívar University is one of the most prestigious and important universities in Venezuela.

Once the poster to announce the Use-a-Thon was out in the wild the whole thing exploded. Byteball network activity went through the roof, attestation bots ran out of funds and Twitter went crazy.

When the dust settled 35 teams had entered our first ever Byteball Use-a-Thon and more than 6.000 students had attested their e-mail address. This means that now a large number of people have Bytes and highly motivated and intelligent students are looking for use cases to help their local community. We can’t wait to see what becomes of this! Stay tuned for more. :)