In what might very well have been one of the first times ever in crypto history, Obyte (then Byteball) decided to do something truly unique. To airdrop Bytes - the native currency of the DAG based Obyte platform - not to BTC holders, but users of another altcoin platform: The Steem blockchain.

The airdrop quickly became a top story and more than 100,000 Steem users became aware of Obyte that day back in July 2018. Since the announcement, more than 76,000 users have linked their Steem users with an Obyte wallet, and despite the need to introduce changes to the rules to avoid the worst abuse, the attention the airdrop resulted in was huge.

Time is ticking

The part of the attestation rewards that was locked for 1 year, started being released a year ago and since that, another year has passed. The activity on the Steem Attestation Bot has dwindled as more and more users claimed their reward. As one of the qualifying conditions to claim a reward is that the Steem user was created prior to the announcement, this is of course to be expected.

With Steem now forked and as we see no further use for the Steem Attestation, we hereby announce the end of the distribution method exactly 2 years after it started. So by July 12 2020, the possibility, and thereby also the rewards, for new users linking their Steem usernames to Obyte wallets will no longer be available. If anyone is interested, they are free to clone the Steem attestation bot code and become an attestor themselves for Steem or any of the forks.

Final chance to claim your locked Bytes

The locked up part of the attestation rewards were possible to claim 1 year after the attestation was completed. So if you linked your Steem account on July 12th 2018, the locked part would automatically release from the smart contract on July 12th 2019.

As we knew a lot of users would quickly sell the liquid part of the reward and not really care about the locked up part, we had to introduce a safety mechanism preventing a significant number of the fixed supply of Bytes to be lost. Therefore, all contracts were made so the user could withdraw it after 1 year and if the user failed to withdraw after 2 years, the funds would be returned to the Obyte Foundation to be used in other distributions.

The 2 year mark will start kicking in on July 12th 2020 and we therefore remind all users that they should withdraw funds from the smart contracts. The 2 year lock is calculated from the time of the attestation, so while some users will have until July 12th to withdraw before funds are returned to the Obyte Foundation, others might have more time.

We are extremely proud of what we achieved and still see this as an unprecedented event that definitely caught the attention of a lot of users. Some users were able to collect many referral rewards while others might have been able to buy a good cup of coffee at the local cafe.

Obyte’s unique features made it possible

The ability to create smart contracts with time locks and safety mechanisms already back in 2018 proved Obyte’s massive potential and was unique already at that time. Since then, far more advanced features have become possible and Obyte now features a fully decentralized token exchange, an easy web-interface to issue stablecoins pegged to USD, BTC or other assets provided by Oracles on the Obyte network and a native scripting language allowing developers to deploy fully decentralized autonomous agents (or dApps) on the Obyte DAG. And as all features planned up until 2020 have been completed, an ambitious roadmap for 2020 has been released.

We hope everyone enjoyed the airdrop and we always welcome users to our Discord or Telegram communities. A recent addition on Discord of an advanced tipping bot developed by tip.cc now allows us to keep distributing small amounts of Bytes to our community in new, fun and exciting ways. So stay tuned!

Sincerely, the Obyte Core Team