24 Jan Symbol blockchain news update – 24/01/23
Hello, residents of XYM City! I am back with another (for the time being weekly) update. It does seem like there is more and more news and activity coming out of the Japanese community so maybe I will have to write updates more often soon! 😊
Hackathon prizes level up
Sitting on the fence when it comes to participating in the NEMTUS Hackathon? Well here’s a little extra incentive to take part! The prize pool has been boosted and now there is a combined pot of 70,000 XYM for the top prizes as well as smaller prizes for other notable entries. I think that you can submit any kind of project, game or app built on Symbol so get thinking, get creative and get building!
Tech talks
It looks like @faunsu19000 gave a talk about Atomic Swaps between Symbol and Ethereum, Polygon and JPYC at the “SoftBank Tech Night 💪
You can download his slides but obviously, they are in Japanese so it’s not so easy for us English speakers to follow. Great work though! It’s fantastic to see that Symbol is being showcased at different events in Japan!
Toss a coin to your Symboler
You may have noticed a trend on Twitter where users (including me) have been adding an “@” before and a “.symbol” after their account address or alias. This seems to be a way to allow community members to tip each other to share their appreciation for the work that they are doing as well as showing that they support Symbol! Thanks to those that tipped the blog and thanks to those community members that I tipped for being so awesome (I left loads out so will send some more soon)! 😁
If you would like to share the love then consider adding your address to your Twitter profile and more importantly check out this growing list of community accounts created by @ishidad2!
Building on Symbol
I saw this post from @XEMBook this morning which looks super cool but I am very hazy about the details. From what I gathered from this article it appears that ZEN PLACE Co., Ltd, a pilates and yoga company has created an app “Flutter” which is built on Symbol and goes live today. I am not 100% sure what the app actually does but from what I understand, it has been developed for use in their workplace and allows customers to collect tokens known as “zenp” which are issued as a Symbol mosaic. I guess like a loyalty reward that you might see in supermarkets or coffee shops. Customers can also send messages of support and gratitude to their instructors using the app as well as tipping them with zenp tokens. It wasn’t clear from the article what the tokens can be used for but apparently, there are plans to “build a unique token economy” based around zenp.
From the screenshots included in the article, it looks pretty slick and there are plans to issue customers with NFT certificates to show that they have successfully completed the instructor courses that they are enrolled on. It’s a nice idea and hopefully, in the future, we will see it integrated into other workplaces! 😊
Boost a QUEST
@faunsu19000 is doing an amazing job of promoting Symbol through a variety of projects and he has just launched this incentive to get more people to use the QUEST platform. As usual, I struggled a bit with the translation, especially as it was presented as an image rather than text! 😁 But, if I understand correctly, a prize of 3,000 XYM will be awarded to one lucky QUEST user, There are several rules which I have tried my best to decipher but there could be mistakes so please correct me if I got anything wrong 😅
- The competition is open to any QUEST user but only non-blockchain quests will count in the competition. So I guess that these are personal quests, gaming etc but not those directly related to Symbol development projects.
- Points will be awarded to users starting quests on February 11th and these must be completed successfully before the end of May 2023
- The more quests that you boost the more points you will earn in the competition
- The higher the contribution made the more points you earn
- I think that points will be awarded if you receive a boost of more than 100 XYM in a day (but I am not sure if this is only on February 11th or not)
So if you are a regular QUESTer or a new user please consider getting involved and supporting this initiative and even if you have no intention of entering then please spread the word! QUEST is an amazing platform and it deserves far more users. Hopefully, it will grow as our community expands as I am sure it will in the coming years.
Virtual drinking game? 🍻
More craziness from Japan, it looks like me in my student days or perhaps the end of a stressful day in my house 😂 As far as I understand @usatyun is creating a new game which involves this female character getting absolutely trashed on alcopops and you can “throw” (tip) XYM by pressing a button. I am not sure that I have fully understood the concept but it’s certainly unique and I look forward to trying it out 😁
Symbol Times videos
Lastly, and thanks for tagging me in this post Klim and Angel(!), The Symbol Times has created a short YouTube video which I guess is computer generated (it’s amazing what you can do nowadays!). It mentions some of the benefits of developing on Symbol e.g. the ability to interact with the blockchain in your programming language of choice rather than having to learn a completely new language. I think that there is a plan to create more videos in the future. Maybe this is something to consider for the blog too, with some simple videos showing how to e.g. send transactions using the Python SDK. I hate talking on video but if a machine will do the talking for me then maybe it’s a possibility 😊
Thanks!
Thanks again for reading, I hope that you have enjoyed today’s update and thanks to everyone that I have mentioned in today’s post for their outstanding work – well-done guys! 👏👏👏
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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