Danish esports tournament organiser BLAST has entered a deal with blockchain company Hdac Technology. 

The partnership will see Hdac Technology branding featured throughout the BLAST Premier Country-Strike: Global Offensive circuit – including the Fall Series, Showdown, and Finals – in addition to content and giveaways. 

‘The Economy Play’, a broadcast integration featuring analysis of economy rounds, dissecting how teams choose to spend money on weapons, will also be sponsored by the blockchain company. 

Discussing the partnership Commercial Director for BLAST, Leo Matlock, said:

“BLAST and Hdac share a passion and focus on innovation and technology, which makes this partnership the perfect fit. In esports, our key audience are naturally more attuned to new technologies and pioneering industries – making them more open minded to the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

“We look forward to developing our partnership and are excited to see what can be achieved by bringing blockchain technology into the world of esports and Counter-Strike.”

While Senior Director for Hdac Technology, Hyun Jun Shin, added:

“We’re really excited to partner with BLAST and have a chance to collaborate on various unique pieces of content for the esports and gaming community, who are very tech savvy and open to investment in cryptocurrency. 

“As a proactive blockchain company who are invested in the esports industry including sponsoring the G2 Esports team, we are looking forward to engaging with the global audience.”

Hdac Technology is based in Zug, Switzerland (aka ‘Crypto Valley’), and the company also has a branch in Seoul, South Korea. Its platform, RIZON, combines blockchain with other core tech including IoT, Cloud, and Big Data, to provide a decentralised platform that meets a variety of needs. 

Specifically, RIZON optimises performance through its new ‘Friday Consensus’ system, providing fast general purpose WASM-based smart contracts, and human readable ID’s, SDK, and chain customisation. 

AYO.NEWS says:

Yep, we absolutely agree with Leo and Hyun, those involved in the esports scene tend to be very enthusiastic about the blockchain world too, so this seems like the perfect partnership, and we’re sure it will inspire other esports organisations to partner with blockchain and emerging tech companies. 

Staying with BLAST, last week the company announced its entry into Riot Games’ VALORANT, with a planned Ignition Series tournament for the title. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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Crypto-based sports betting platform Sportsbet.io has been named official betting partner of English Premier League club Arsenal FC. 

The three-year deal, which covers both the club’s mens and womens teams, starts with the 2020/21 campaign, and will see Sportsbet.io create exclusive digital content and experiences to reward its customers and Arsenal fans around the world. 

Sportsbet.io says it will also be collaborating with Arsenal to support the development of women’s football in its home country of Estonia, with the club sending pro coaches to train the country’s under-19 women’s team.

Discussing the partnership founder of Coingaming Group, Sportsbet.io’s parent company, Tim Heath, said:

“Signing a three-year deal with Arsenal, one of the most celebrated teams in the world, is a huge venture and something we are all very excited about. We’re confident that with Arsenal’s drive to innovate the sports industry, together with our own drive to innovate the gambling and crypto space, this is the perfect team for us.”

As previously reported, at the end of August, Sportsbet.io came to the rescue of another English Premier League club, Southampton FC, after it was forced to terminate its partnership with Chinese sports content, marketing and entertainment platform, LD Sports.

AYO.NEWS says:

It’s easy to forget that it was as recent as June 2019 when Sportsbet.io made history as the first ever crypto sports betting shirt sponsor of a Premier League side, when it inked a deal with Watford – now it seems having an official crypto betting or trading partner, or even a crypto sportsbook as main sponsor, as with Southampton, is mainstream. 

Staying with Coingaming Group, last week it was announced that former COO Maarja Pärt had been promoted to CEO. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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Ava Labs has said it will launch the fully-featured Avalanche mainnet on Monday 21 September 2020. 

Avalanche is described as a highly-scalable, open-source platform for launching decentralised finance (DeFi) applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one, interoperable ecosystem.

Confirming transactions in under a second

Developers say it is the first smart contracts platform that confirms transactions in under one second, supports the entirety of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (VM) and development toolkit, and enables up to millions of independent validators to participate as ful, block-producing nodes. 

The Avalanche token (AVAX) is the native token of the Avalanche platform, and is used to secure the network through staking, pay operational fees, transfer value peer-to-peer, and create new networks on the platform. 

Discussing the upcoming mainnet launch Co-Founder and CEO of Ava Labs, Emin Gün Sire, aid:

“Monday will mark the beginning of a new era for cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and decentralized applications.

“Avalanche is the first major breakthrough in our space since Satoshi’s leap forward, and we intend to follow in their footsteps to have the same, defining impact as we stand on the cusp of a new decade.”

While Kevin Sekniqi of Ava Labs added:

“Avalanche moves at the rapid pace of crypto markets and will offer the first compelling alternative to existing networks that either rely on centralization to perform or haven’t shown they can scale to market demand without incurring massive fees. We’re excited to be launching with an outstanding community around us, and look forward to fueling DeFi’s next boom.”

Avalanche’s developers also claim the platform is capable a throughput orders of “magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks” – some 4,500+ transactions per second on low hardware. They also say it has much greater security standards than the typical 51% of most networks. 

Addressing gas fees, congestion, and security issues

According to DeFi Pulse, DeFi applications on Ethereum peaked at some $9.6B in total value locked at the beginning of September- more than doubling the market’s size in less than one month. Though this shows there is massive interest in decentralised tech, especially in finance, it also led to Ethereum gas fees peaking at an unsustainable $15 per transaction, and the network is suffering increasing congestion. 

Ava Labs says Avalanche can help solve these issues, allowing Ethereum-based apps to achieve high-performance, increased security, and better scalability, without much disruption or change to workflow. Avalanche’s Contract Chain (C-Chain) is an implementation of the Ethereum VM, meaning Solidity works ‘out of the box’ to make porting over applications easy. 

3 testnets, and $60M in funding

The Avalanche mainnet launch comes a mere 16 months after Ava Labs exited stealth mode. The team has completed and launched three test networks, and attracted contributions from a large pool of open-source developers, awarded significant grants for engineers to build infrastructure and apps through its accelerator, and integrated with projects like Chainlink, Polyient, and Quantstamp.  

In total Ava Labs has raised $60M to-date, including $42M in a 4.5 hour public sale this July, and a private sale led by Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, and Initialized Capital.

AYO.NEWS says:

There’s no doubt that Ethereum has some serious issues that need dealing with urgently regarding congestion and gas fees. But, that’s some pretty big talk from the Ava Labs team, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the launch of the Avalanche mainnet goes. Will it really be the dawning of a new era for cryptos, blockchains and decentralised applications? 

Away from Ethereum, as we reported at the end of August, New York-based Kadena has completed hybrid blockchain scaling to 480,000 transactions per second on 20 chains, while preserving the security of the Proof of Work consensus utilised by Bitcoin. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has been raided by police again, and its director’s shares have been seized. 

As we previously reported, on 2 September the company’s office in the Gangnam District of Seoul was raided by police, and now it appears there have been two follow up raids; one on 7 September, and one earlier today (16 September). 

According to reports in local media, during the latest raid police seized shares in Bithumb Holdings that belonged to Kim Byung-Geon, Director of Bithumb Korea. 

The investigation seems to be centered around possible fraud relating to Bithumb’s native BXA token – which was heavily promoted but never actually launched or listed, causing investors to lose an estimated $25m USD. 

Reports suggest the police action has already promoted Samjong KPMG, which is the supervisor of the sale of Bithumb, to declare it plans to sell its own stake in Bithumb Holdings.

AYO.NEWS says:

While it’s obviously inappropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation, it’s safe to say things are going from bad to worse for Bithumb! 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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Esports betting platform Unikrn has been fined $6.1m USD for an unregistered initial coin offering (ICO). 

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has hit the Seattle-based company with the hefty fine for the ICO of its UnikoinGold (UKG) token between June and September 2019, which is estimated to have raised around $31m. 

In its ruling, the SEC said:

“The order finds that Unikrn planned to use the offering proceeds to make more features available on the gaming platform and to develop additional applications for the UKG tokens.

“Unikrn promised investors that it would facilitate a secondary trading market for the tokens and that its efforts to increase the usages for the UKG token would increase demand for and in turn, the value of the tokens. 

“The order finds that Unikrn offered and sold UKG as investment contracts, which constituted securities, yet failed to register the offering or qualify for an exemption.”

However, SEC Commissioner, Hester M Peirce, emphasised that Unkrn had not engaged in any fraudulent activities, saying:

“While many SEC enforcement actions in this space include allegations of fraud, Unikrn falls within the narrower category of token issuers charged only with violating Section 5 of the Securities Act. 

“In other words, Unikrn is alleged to have offered and sold its tokens in an unregistered offering and in a manner that did not qualify for an exemption; it is not alleged to have engaged in any fraud in doing so.”

Peirce went on to add:

“I do not concur in my colleagues’ opinion that Unikrn’s token offering constituted a securities offering[…] I respectfully dissent from the Commission’s actions today relating to Unikrn.”

In a statement, Unikrn explained that fighting the decision and embroiling itself in costly litigation would be more damaging to its long-term goals than simple settling. 

So, in the best interests of current and future platform users along with investors, Unikrn has agreed to pay the fine, publish the ruling on its website, disable its UKG digital currency, and seek its removal from all trading platforms, but has not admitted or denied any wrongdoing. 

AYO.NEWS says:

This must be a bitter blow to Unikrn, which has earned a reputation as one of the straightest players in the esports betting scene, and had solid plans for its UKG token. 

Though there’s no doubt some ICOs targeted by the SEC were outright scams, it’s clear that others, like Unikrn, have simply been caught up in the ambiguity and confusion that the SEC itself helped foster. 

Staying with Unikrn, earlier this month the company’s CEO, Rahul Sood, was announced as an Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 Pacific Northwest Region Award finalist by Ernst & Young LLP. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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StormGain has been announced as Official Crypto Trading Partner of top-flight Italian football club SS Lazio.

The cryptocurrency trading platform is supporting SS Lazio at a significant time, as the club returns to the UEFA Champions League, and the partnership will see StormGain engage Lazio fans by giving them the chance to win exclusive VIP prizes. 

Commenting on the deal CEO of StormGain, Alex Althausen, said:

“StormGain is happy to partner with SS Lazio, a team with a rich history and values which echo our own perfectly. Through this sponsorship, we’re thrilled to join the worlds of crypto trading and football together and offer many exciting benefits for our clients, who can win exclusive access to the Roman superstars and unique prizes thanks to StormGain. We look forward to the start of a new season, which, no doubts, will be exciting and yet different from any other!”

While Marketing, Sponsorship and Event Director of SS Lazio, Marco Canigiani, added:

“We are very proud of this partnership that will reinforce our innovative positioning. The partnership will help us widening our international landscape and create at the forefront projects for our fans”.

StormGain pitches itself as taking the complexity out of crypto trading, and currently has over 120,000 clients in more than 100 countries. The company recently won the ‘Cryptocurrency Trading and Exchange Platform of the Year 2020’ award from The European Magazine. 

AYO.NEWS says:

It is beginning to seem like every self-respecting football club needs a crypto partner these days! But, seriously, if you’re an Italian club, now that gambling sponsorships are a no no, crypto platforms offer a much needed alternative. And, from StormGain’s point of view this is a pretty big deal – the platform still has relatively few users, and S.S. Lazio should boost its profile significantly. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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