| The Elastos Foundation announced the commencement of three major developments on August 25th at our One Year Anniversary Event in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Merge mining with Bitmain, the Alpha release of the Elastos Smartweb, and the official launch of Cyber Republic are all live. For more details: https://elanews.net/2018/08/27/elastos-commences-merge-mining-with-bitcoin-cyber-republic-and-alpha-smartweb/ The Elastos Infographic Contest produced many fantastic visuals that express our technology and infrastructure in easy to understand formats. Thank you to everyone who submitted for continuing to help us prove that a community driven approach can produce top quality content. Winners and their submissions can be found here: https://elanews.net/2018/08/30/elastos-infographic-contest-winners/
 Elastos Community Leader, Kevin Zhang, shared his experiences over the past 2 months, visiting 14 countries and attending 19 meetups organized by the Elastos community. According to Kevin, the most important factor to make Elastos successful is the amount of DApps running on top of Elastos. DApp developers will play a very important role in the ecosystem and his aim is to motivate them and encourage them to build on Elastos through Cyber Republic.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKUIRsNkXXE
Elastos PR Director, Hao Cheng, shared the PR dynamics of the year highlighting major events attended and awards received by Elastos.
 
Elastos Chief Secretary, Hongjie Hu, disclosed the Annual Expenditure of the Elastos Foundation and announced the burning of 453,415 ELA
Elastos Co-Founder, Feng Han, spoke about evaluating a cryptocurrency investment by focusing on four major points: - Vision
- Team Leaders
- Key problems they are solving
- Global Community
Feng also announced the beginning of merged mining with Bitcoin and his plans to set up a fund with Jihan Wu for the development of the Elastos Ecosystem. While Jihan Wu was not in attendance at the anniversary, he had this to say about the announcement of merged mining. "At Bitmain, we strive to be at the forefront of recognizing new, innovative technologies in the blockchain space as well as the cutting edge teams leading the way to mainstream adoption — Elastos is one of those projects. There are very few projects we have opened our community up to, and there are currently only three merged mining with Bitmain. I have an immense amount of faith in the potential impact of Elastos, which is not limited to the blockchain space alone. We look forward to continuing to be a part of the community promoting the Elastos ecosystem." Rong Chen said of the announcement, "ELA is one of the first coins to be merged mined with Bitmain. This partnership serves as an affirmation of the strength of the Elastos community and technology. The accomplishments in our first year alone are indicative of Elastos' potential to make waves far beyond the blockchain space — we are on track to change the whole internet industry, its users, digital ecosystem and to create an industrial strength IOT network. This is the internet of the future, where people will own their data, and connect directly and securely."
A new website for cyberrepublic.org and a totally new brand were born at the anniversary. Cyber Republic is an online country where entrepreneurs and developers can join together to help build the Elastos vision and be rewarded in the native currency of ELA. This website is in its alpha version and will continue to be updated as the project grows. Initially conceived of as a place for developers and community members to find tasks to complete and be rewarded in ELA, the new Cyber Republic is a much grander and more ambitious project. To start, the Elastos Foundation ceremoniously gave 16.5 million ELA to Cyber Republic during the Anniversary Event. 
This total, nearly half the total coin supply, is more than a symbolic gesture. Cyber Republic will have full autonomy over these coins and will be able to build their own government and plans for the use of the coins. For the near future, an Interim Cyber Republic Council made up of Fay Li, Chief Marketing Officer, Kevin Zhang, Head of Development, and Yipeng Su, Chief Architect, will manage the funds and major hiring decisions for the online country. However, these are temporary posts that will evolve as the Cyber Republic Constitution is completed and a government mechanism is put in place to self-run the ecosystem with global leadership and democratically elected representatives. We hope to have our voting mechanism in place by June 2019, at which point the public will be able to start voting for the Cyber Republic Council Members and Secretaries. Fay Li, Chief Marketing Officer of Elastos, said of Cyber Republic, "We are starting an online country that will enable entrepreneurs and developers to democratically build the new internet, and we are giving almost half of our coins to fund it. Our first initiative for Cyber Republic is to fund the construction of 100 decentralized applications on Elastos. We are the first blockchain project to do this." The main initiatives announced were two projects, CR100 and Empower35.
CR100
CR100 is the flagship project of Cyber Republic, inviting teams of entrepreneurs to apply for funding to design and build the next great Elastos Ecosystem DApp. The 100 projects listed are templates that exemplify the diversity and abilities of the Elastos infrastructure. Each project represents a different use case for a decentralized application that can disrupt the current landscape of applications. Teams are asked to use these ideas as inspirations for either their own future or existing whitepapers and to submit detailed proposals that outline their plan. The Cyber Republic Council will select projects that are particularly promising and provide funding of 100k USD in ELA to a chosen team for 5% equity or tokens as an angel investor. Funding will be provided as milestones are hit based on the whitepaper submitted. While CR100 is designed to create variety, funding may be provided to more than one DApp in each category. Teams are also allowed to submit their own unique proposal. This project is designed to really showcase what Elastos can do. Allowing the public to come in and submit their ideas and be supported by Cyber Republic is a pioneering project in the blockchain space that puts the philosophy of the Republic on display with real and tangible action. The doors are open, now come and build with us.
Empower35
Empower35 is a project to select the future leaders, managers, and congresspeople of Cyber Republic. This group of experts in partnership development, marketing, business development, DApp analysis, DApp consulting, security, translation, writing, product management, media production, law, public speaking, and investment will be the first representatives that will shape and enable all future growth of the autonomous and decentralized democratic republic. In the coming weeks, CR will begin accepting applications for each role and positions will be selected by the Cyber Republic Council. Each position comes with an annual compensation of 100k USD paid in ELA. Responsibilities for each applicant include: - Building and leading their own teams of members with the same expertise.
- Incubating the CR100 projects based on their experience.
- Applying for a budget based on their proposal to manage and hire their own teams in each respective area.
- Finding the next group of leaders as our Republic continues to expand and work towards our goal of full democratic decentralization.
Cyber Republic is looking for top candidates to lay the groundwork for all future growth and enable this very modern and exciting project to flourish. This is a bold and unique idea and Elastos is thrilled to support global cooperation and decentralization as we all watch the new internet be built.
Rong Chen gave an in depth talk on "A Computer Science Perspective of Elastos"
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUrjblXwcc
Ecosystem Partners Ecosystem Partner: ioeX | Speech by Aryan Huang
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C08hMHgO52U
Ecosystem Partner: Viewchain | Speech by Frank Wang
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k90pJ1KNOag
Ecosystem Partner: Bit.Game | Speech by Kelvin Wong
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqC1H2OmTY4
Ecosystem Partner: Hashworld | Speech by Yifan Song & Zijie Yuan
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dydkswhVAU8
Ecosystem Partner: WeFilmChain | Speech by Garnet Campbell
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMZIoYBZNQ
Anniversary recap and AMA webinars were hosted by Elastos for the global community. EU Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVJ-qiJmwH0 US Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Zn-ASQfPo
Team Building and Activities   
  
  
  
The Elastos Team participated in several activities in Chiang Mai.
August 27 
Elastos hosted a developer meetup in Chiang Mai
August 29 
Elastos community members organised a meetup in Bangkok.
August 30 
Feng Han attended the Blockchain World Forum hosted by the Blockchain World Forum Committee in Tokyo, Japan. He spoke about the value investment of blockchain and the core values of Elastos.
Events and Meetups Shenzen 
Singapore
Link: https://elastos-singapore-meetup.eventbrite.sg
Washington DC
Link: https://www.meetup.com/Elastos-Blockchain-Project-Washington-Meetup/events/253753736/
Boston
Elastos is a Platinum Sponsor and will be hosting a booth at the TokenFest in Boston. For tickets and more event information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/token-fest-boston-2018-tickets-45732485094
Atlanta
Link: https://www.meetup.com/Elastos-Atlanta/events/253792472/
Melbourne
Link: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-smartweb-future-tickets-48290936491 | 
