From May 14 — June 24, 2018, the first Byteball Use-a-Thon is taking place at the Simón Bolívar University, Venezuela. The idea is to come up with beneficial uses for the Byteball platform in a local community. Small teams will compete for a monetary prize.

This is a wonderful example of Byteball breaking out of the crypto bubble and engaging with the real world. Will enough students sign up? Will any good ideas come out of it? Are unforeseen circumstances going to arise? We don’t know, but whatever happens, it will be worth reporting on. More details can be found on the Byteball wiki Use-a-Thon page. There is also a video where Casper introduces participants and new users in general to the Byteball platform.

A big thanks to Casper Niebe (Punqtured on Slack) for making this happen. Initially, there was interest from a university in Indonesia, but for unknown reasons the interest died out. Mere mortals might have given up, but Casper somehow managed to find the new university in Venezuela and get the whole thing launched only weeks after the Indonesian Use-a-Thon fell through. Casper is a Byteball volunteer and has a full-time real-world job, which makes it even more impressive!

Note: the prizes are being funded by the Byteball Community Fund after Casper submitted this grant request which was accepted. A quick reminder, if you have an idea for helping the Byteball project feel free to submit your own grant request in the #grants channel on Slack.

An official announcement from Trade The Odds

Trade The Odds (upcoming decentralized P2P betting exchange to be powered by the Byteball platform) made their official announcement on Medium. The goal is to release the alpha in time for the World Cup (….World Cup…….goal…….). In case you missed it last week their gorgeous demo dashboard is live. Incidentally, sports betting in the US was in the mainstream news this week. If any journalists are reading, is there a potential story here on how government authorities might be being left behind by projects like Trade The Odds? We think there could be.

Welcome to BIoT — IoT solutions on the Byteball platform

Byteball developer Evgeniy Stulnikov posted this Medium update on his project to use the Byteball platform for Internet of Things and micropayments. Yes, despite what some people may think, Tony Churyumoff is not the only developer of Byteball!

If you are interested in learning more, the project has a Telegram Channel and is naturally on Github.

Pay for email attestation with the reward from the Telegram quiz

The price of email attestation (linking your Byteball wallet to your email address) has been reduced from 500 KB to 50 KB. This means you can now attest your email using the Bytes you earned by completing the Byteball Quiz on Telegram.

A quick reminder: email attestation allows you to send Bytes directly from your wallet to an email address (like Paypal but using crypto).

Our email service provider switch seems to have gone smoothly

Last week we switched from crypto and ICO-suspicious Mailchimp to crypto-friendly Mailerlite. We were a little concerned our emails might start ending up in junk folders, but at least judging by open rates this does not seem to have been the case.