The latest Obyte email newsletter: Life Pay launched + another step closer to decentralization

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(Translations of the text below: Chinese 中文 Japanese 日本語 Korean 한국어 Spanish Español)

Life Pay launched

Not many cryptocurrencies can be used to make purchases of hugely popular things like mobile phone credit, but the Obyte community in China is doing something to make it possible with Obyte.

Life Pay has been launched, which enables users to top up mobile phone credit with Bytes. In addition to this, they also made the smart move of including Obyte tutorials on the Life Pay website. There are an estimated 750 million smartphone users in China so who knows where this could lead.

In the future they hope to also include options to use Bytes to pay for gas, water and electricity bills.

P2P charity donation progress

Two of the ITU students that helped build the p2p charity platform PolloPollo have confirmed they want to help further develop it, which was really pleasing to hear. With this in mind, Casper Niebe has submitted a grant application along with a very detailed breakdownof proposed tasks to be completed.

We also have some English/Spanish explainer videos nearing completion, along with some very cool chatbots to help explain the platform and attract new users. A shout-out to Obbie MT who is currently working on the chatbots and has revealed a hidden talent for smooth copywriting!

Some stats from PollPollo, which we are optimistic will soon be much higher:

• Number of full donation cycles carried out through the platform: 40
• Number of pending applications awaiting Receivers to pick up products: 9
• Total USD amount donated so far: $455
• Number of Producers/Merchants: 4
• Number of Receivers with completed donations: 13

Summer O photo competition

Show the world your creative talents and enter the Obyte summer photo competition! It’s pretty simple, just take a photo that features an O - the 3 best photos will be awarded a prize. It’s summer in half of the world right now, so it’s a great time to get outside and go O exploring.

Second independent witness added

We are another step closer to decentralization, with another independent witness having recently been added to the Obyte default hub’s list.

The next time you open the wallet app, it will ask you if you agree to replacing one of the founder witnesses with the new independent witness. We kindly ask all other hub operators and full nodes to do the same, so we can move on to the next witness candidate.

Reminder - witnesses are nothing like Bitcoin miners, in that they do not act as validators or gatekeepers to the network, meaning all users have equal access.

Name ideas for Obyte tools/features

There is a long and growing listing of unique Obyte tools and features, but some of them don't exactly have names that easily roll off the tongue. Please add suggestions for better names on the subreddit. Obbies have already made some good suggestions, but more suggestions would help the project.

New website structure

The amount of content on the Obyte website has grown significantly since launch, which reflects the continued technical development of the platform. We feel now is the time to change obyte.org to a multi-page site structure instead of the current single page. This will likely be built using Grav, an open source flat-file Content Management System.

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