01 Sep Symbol blockchain news update – 01/09/22
Good morning and welcome to another Symbol Blog update! It has been a while but I am back and you can expect to hear a lot more from me over the coming weeks and months!
A new chapter
It is officially my first day as part of the Symbol pirate crew and I am very excited and slightly overwhelmed at the moment 😅 I thought that I should share some information about my background and my new role with the Syndicate as probably many of you will be asking why the hell they hired the Symbol Blog guy! 😁
Without giving too much away, I have been a scientist for many a year now and I am leaving a faculty position at a UK university to start a new role with Symbol. As a disclaimer, my background in crypto is almost non-existent and my expertise lies in biology (with a small smattering of computer science) so don’t expect me to be an expert from day one 😅 Why did they hire me? I am still asking myself that question 😆 but I think that the transferable skills that I have (data analysis, research, writing scientific papers and grants, teaching, presenting and mentoring) will give me a good starting point on my journey into crypto.
Why am I quitting a permanent, job-for-life, tenured position? Short answer, I was getting bored and saw an opportunity to switch to a completely new field that I was genuinely interested in. I have gone from being a character on the periphery of Symbol, hiding away from the rest of the community to someone that truly cares about the people and the project. This is probably my dream job that marries my skills with my passion so in the end, it was a no-brainer. Given that I am now in my (early) 40s 😬 this was the right time to jump ship, otherwise, I would be a bored and crusty old professor in my 60s waiting to retire. This is a huge move for me so give me time and I will try to repay the community through hard work and determination.
I know that you are used to a very informal style of writing through the blog but I am actually going to initially be spending most of my time taking a deep dive into everything crypto-related and will be writing up what I learn in an accessible but potentially more technical style. I will also be rebranding, so XHarvesting is no more and ninelives (fancy new avatar coming soonTM) has been born. I will also set up a more project-neutral Twitter account in the near future to publish general crypto research with the aim of building a presence in the English-speaking crypto community.
So that’s me, that’s what I will be doing at least initially, I know that Hatchet has longer-term goals and that I will be kept extremely busy! Wish me luck! 😁
Tomatina 2022
First of all, apologies, I was away with very limited internet access for the last week and I missed the big event yesterday! 😭 It looks like good fun was had by all and thank you to Radio for throwing some tomatoes at my Symbol Blog address!
Mosaic mania
Radio wasn’t the only one to throw their own variety of tomato! The pirate crew and captains all got involved in the Tomatina fun with their own tomato mosaics:
In fact, a total of 30 different tomato varieties were thrown! I am way behind the curve here with one 😢 If you have spare and are feeling generous then please throw some to the Symbol Blog address: NCAY26LEBPOXM7NPCNV4HL4EH5WM6UJ5UUN4UGA 🙏 I’d love to collect all 30, only 29 more to go! 😂
Tomato transaction explosion
You guys were busy! This is a bit of a game of Chinese whispers (Korean -> Japanese -> English!) but it looks like there was a 1,092% increase in transactions during the Tomatina event versus the previous day! This equates to over 19,000 transactions and almost(!) 1,000 XYM generated in fees. A big thank you to Karriz for generating the stats, this was the first thing I thought to look at when writing today’s post but you did the hard work for me! 😁
Games galore
I didn’t know about this until I went through Twitter this morning but it is awesome! The Tomatina event actually looks like the real thing! Check out this video showing community members pelting each other with tomato mosaics – I love it! Such a shame that I missed it, the event gets better and better each year. Looking forward to the 2023 event already! I wonder what surprises we have in store.
Haha! @subarumanSP published a specially updated Tomatina version of his game developed for the hackathon event. “When I was reincarnated in another world, the legal currency was TOMATO” looks incredibly cool and very much like the JRPGs of old. I am sure there were lots of community members playing this yesterday! I really wish I was fluent in Japanese!
HEXA NFT
I don’t know much about HEXA but I think it is an incredibly popular NFT platform in Japan. It is no surprise then that they are now accepting payment using an incredibly popular cryptocurrency in Japan – Symbol. Great to see Symbol get the recognition it deserves and congratulations to the community for making this happen!
NEMTUS funding
Great to see that NEMTUS has received funding from the core devs to support their work on growing and promoting Symbol and NEM in Japan. According to this post, 1.5 million XYM and 1.5 million XEM were gifted to the non-profit organisation. They have announced an incentive system to support activities and contributions, presumably from the NEM/Symbol community. They will also create and develop places where students can learn, give presentations, and chat about Symbol and NEM.
Fighting talk
Wow, this is a pretty bold statement from Hatchet and I like what I read! Very excited to see what is on the horizon for Symbol, it won’t be coming any time soon but when it does it sounds like whatever is in the pipeline will be game-changing!
Symbol website DAO
I think that I covered this before(?) but apparently, the multi-talented Toshi is creating a system for rewarding contributors to DAO projects such as the community Symbol website. There is an overview of the pipeline below which should ensure fairness, and transparency and allow contributors to be rewarded for their efforts.
Hatchet AMA
Whilst I was away I also missed an impromptu AMA from Hatchet. Thankfully Klim and Angel have written everything up here so you don’t have to scroll through a really long Twitter thread!
Blockchain games event
According to this press release Opening Line held a blockchain game event on August 24th in collaboration with ITeens Lab, which runs programming classes for elementary and junior high school students in Fukuoka. The aim was to educate students about blockchain using a fun and accessible medium – Toshi’s excellent game “The Tower“. Very cool, I wish I had learned this in school but I was born 30 years too early 😂
Decentralisation?
This is an interesting post about our (and other projects) reliance on a small number of providers to run their nodes. This announcement relates specifically to Hetzner but is applicable to any company (think AWS etc). I think that NEM and Symbol have a real issue with the number of nodes running on AllNodes for example. The take-home here is that running a node at home provides a much greater degree of decentralisation than using a small number of cheap hosting providers. I know that there are many Symbol nodes being run using Hetzner’s services and apparently this is against their terms of service so if they really clamp down on this then we may see a large number of nodes go offline 😬
XYM Comic episode 7
Woohoo! A new version of the excellent XYM Comic was released in English and Japanese earlier this week and it’s another fun-packed, slightly weird manga adventure with the sisters of Symbol! I really love the artwork as usual – you have a very talented artist producing these comics!
Get XYM Fit!
I’m sorry @choconaak! you tagged me on Twitter and I forgot to give you a mention so this is a late news item! XYMFit (a walk to earn app on Symbol) has been updated and new features have been added:
Testnet version XYMFIT, major update.
・Save data as json
・Modify parameters and strengthen security
・Introduction of XFT staking, which increases the acquisition rate depending on the activity time and the number of consecutive activity days
. Regarding this, I think it would be nice if shoes and parameters could be combined into an NFT, but I don't know how to do it. Also,
I gave up on iOS porting because I don't know if someone who has an iPhone has a Mac.It is still on testnet but hopefully we will see a mainnet release in the future. I think that choconaak is looking for testers so please help him out! I don’t have an Android phone so won’t be able to try it but for those of you that do maybe you would consider writing a short article about it. I would love to publish it on the blog!
Thanks!
Thanks for reading and apologies for the delay! I better get back to my (new) day job and educate myself on my first research topic – hopefully I will be sharing my findings with you soon! Also, don’t worry, Symbol Blog updates will continue as a non-official source of news and gossip 😁
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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