🌟 Our 2020 Chapter Highlights 🌟

2020 has been a big year for BEN! We've expanded our national chapter programs, launched new educational initiatives, and partnered with industry leading blockchain companies.

• We launched BEN Turkey with founding chapters at BAU Blockchain Technology Club, Sabancı University Blockchain Club, Kocaeli University Blockchain Club, Bilgi Blockchain, and Istanbul University Blockchain Technology Club.

• We launched BEN Africa with founding chapters KNUST Blockchain Hub and CRUTECH with a "Intro to DeFi" kickoff event hosted at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana with guest speakers from DeFi Africa.

• This year, BEN Italy celebrated their 6th anniversary. They also joined the European Law Institute to consult on blockchain policy and regulations. In March, BEN & BEN Italy together participated in the Helperbit campaign that raised $147,000 to provide additional medical equipment for the Italian Red Cross during the initial outbreak of the virus in Italy.

• BEN hosted the annual BEN Global Airdrop, sponsored by Game Credits, GDA Capital, and MyCrypto. With the help of 19 of our BEN university chapters and community partners Blockchain Acceleration Foundation and the Midwest Blockchain Consortium, we airdropped thousands of dollars worth of ETH to 214 students from 96 universities and 5 high schools across 21 countries.

• Over the spring, BEN hosted a speaker series of online interviews with various figures in the crypto space including student-founded companies such as Namebase as well as innovative blockchain initiatives like The Giving Block, Wibson, and The Defiant.

• BEN Global launched our first annual BEN Excellence Awards to recognize club chapters in four categories including Outstanding Chapter of the Year, Outstanding New Chapter, Outstanding Chapter Research, and Outstanding Chapter Digital Presence.

• Over the summer and the fall, BEN hosted an Ethereum developer series in partnership with Blockchain Developers United. We held various developer workshops ranging from "Intro to Solidity" to "How to Become an ETH 2.0 Validator".

• At the beginning of the year, we hosted 20 students from BEN Canada, BEN USA and BEN Italy at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami.

• At the North American Bitcoin Conference, a team led by BEN Canada students won first place at the Miami Bitcoin Hackathon.

• In the spring, we launched the BEN Wiki, a collaborative open source knowledge repository full of blockchain resources, lessons, tutorials and more. The resources are submitted by all of our clubs, students, professors, and partners.

• In October, we launched BENcoin, an ERC20 token used to incentivize learning on our platform that can be redeemed for travel, visas, conference tickets and more.

We've had an incredible year across all our national and university chapters despite the unprecedented challenges that we faced.

We look forward to a stronger 2021 with more initiatives and campaigns to onboard even more students from the around the world.

- Best,

The BEN Team

Announcing our RabbitHole Partnership

We are excited to announce our newest partnership with RabbitHole!BEN and Rabbithole will work together to onboard the next generation of Web3 developers and enthusiasts through bounties and gamification to incentivize learning on the blockchain.Both BEN and RabbitHole share an innovative approach to learning and education and we can't wait to offer this to our students!  

📢 BEN is Moving to Telegram 📢

Back in July, Ledger.com was hacked and the names, emails, phone numbers, and physical addresses of 270,000+ customers were stolen and sold on the dark web. A few days ago, the stolen database was leaked publicly on pastebin.

To see if you have been affected, please check

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

BEN is taking this Ledger hack very seriously. Hackers can target email addresses with phishing attempts, phone numbers with SIM swaps, and physical addresses with threats of violence.

To better protect the privacy of our students, alumni, and community, we are making a concerted effort to move to more privacy-preserving social media for our community channels.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and posting in a WhatsApp group exposes your phone number to the other group members, which could potentially lead to SIM swapping attacks.

Please join our BEN Announcements Telegram channel where we can continue sharing updates and announcements from our national and university chapters and our community and partners.

New BEN Wiki Lessons Available

• Extropy's Zero Knowledge Proof tutorials

• Extropy's Solidity tutorials

Job Opportunities

Be sure to mention BEN in your application

• The Giving Block is hiring 2 backend developers

• BCA Solutions is hiring a crypto technical analyst

Featured Upcoming Events

📅 When

: Nov 17 - Jan 25

🌐 Where

: Online

💻 Link

:

https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/hack-the-horizon/

💰

Prizes

: Up to $50,000

Hack the Horizon is a collaborative, creative, and inclusive cross-chain hackathon focused on building applications that utilize the Horizon Bridge. Our singular aim to work with Ethereum and Harmony developers to build the most interesting, useful, and innovative applications that take advantage of Ethereum and Harmony's strengths.

More Upcoming Events

• Golem Network Hackathon Dec 8, 2020 - Jan 5, 2021

• Baseline Protocol 2020 Hackathon Dec 9, 2020 - Jan 6, 2021

Want to access resources like free event tickets, job opportunities, and educational blockchain content?Sign up for the BEN NewsletterJoin the BEN Announcements Telegram

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