Hello, Tezos! The progress of teams, grantees, community, and the foundation was substantial over the past two weeks. A lot of changes appeared in order to keep up with the Babylon upgrade. It is feature-wise, a steep step from Athens, which touched almost all the main areas of the protocol: Michelson, voting procedure, accounts, and consensus. To reflect on the update, Nomadic Labs and Cryptium Labs co-released a retrospective on the lessons learned from protocol upgrade; they stated that with Babylon upgrade, the Tezos community proved to the world that it is the first blockchain that can significantly amend a running protocol.
Furthermore, teams and grantees coped with a considerable amount of development on their projects. camlCase announced a new update to Dexter, with upgraded smart contracts for Babylon and a fresh UI. Baking Bad released a Telegram Faucet Bot as a resource for community members. Tezos Rio deployed a new version of TezzeT, a fast, secure, lightweight Tezos wallet that is now compatible with the Babylon protocol. Tulip Tools released the first version of Tplus to get community members started with smart contract development on Tezos. Catsigma published a new application sample for integrating apps with TezBridge, a tool that allows users to use applications built on Tezos from their browsers without a browser extension. There is also an update of Tezos Notifier bot, featuring notifications about the new proposal, upvoting the proposal by the delegate, and even the result of the period.
Moreover, Tezos Capital founder, Jonas Lamis, announced a new platform, StakerDAO, to be built on Tezos with support from Polychain Capital. The platform is designed specifically for governing financial assets in a secure, decentralized, and compliant manner. It plans to deliver financial assets that make it easy to participate in Proof of Stake networks.
Tezos Foundation put a lot of effort into expanding the community, and they succeed in it. Plenty of meetups, workshops, and other events are sponsored worldwide. Stove Labs and Nomadic Labs organized a LIGO training workshop in Paris. Tezos Korea hosted INNOVATORS 2019, the first-ever Tezos blockchain idea contest in Korea. Tezos India Foundation had a great meetup in Bangalore with over 60 attendees. Tezos Los Angeles arranged a meetup on the state of Tezos dApps and smart contracts with Vishakh from Cryptonomic. And a crucial one for us — Baking Bad, Norn Community, P2P Validator, and Paradigm Fund held the first Tezos meetup in Moscow with about 100 attendees, where our team members were honored to give a speech on Tezos building experience and Financial flows. By the way, don’t forget to check Tezos Commons’ helpful guide to some Tezos community events in November. A pleasant consequence of the international tezos expansion — the number of subscribers in social networks grows with the community rise. It is just amazing to be a part of such a community. Do not hesitate to join us!
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
Development
For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.
- A website of a cool use for developers — Tezos Developer Portal.
Other useful links:
- Lessons Learned from the Babylon Protocol Upgrade: A Retrospective — Less rush, more testing, more documentation, more community involvement. In summary, they have identified the following as key areas to improve the proposal process:
- Outline the desired features ahead of time, strictly focus development on them and wait all reviews, testing and documentation to be done.
- Make feature documentation and changelogs more accessible and visible ahead of time, to give the community more time to engage.
- Release of independent features to testnets, so ecosystem developers have an early access and can provide feedback in advance.
- Reorganisation and maintenance of testnets.
- More reviews per merge requests and more unit and integration testing.
- CamlCase shared the Dexter update:
- UI design is complete and they are making it real with ReasonML.
- Smart contracts have been upgraded for Babylon
- They are running property tests on the smart contracts using the Morley framework
- Baking Bad Telegram launched a Faucet Bot — now you don’t have to worry about your wallet or contract balance.
- TulipTools team is proud to announce the first release of Tplus, to get started with smart contract development on tezos visit.
- Very cool update of Tezos Notifier bot: new class of messages — voting notifications! Notifications for the Proposal period: about the new proposal, upvoting the proposal by the delegate, and also the result of the period.
- Tezos Another DApp sample has been added to the documentation of TezBridge.
- Truffle tezos-example-box looking great as test deployment succeeds on Babylonnet. Better Call Dev confirms it.
- Update: Week Of 28 October 2019 & Update: Week Of 4 November 2019 — progress of Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News (excluding already mentioned in our update).
- Happy Tezos’ Tezos as a Service (TaaS) endpoints can now be generated by all community members at TezosLive.io.
- Tezos Help released a sneak-peak of its upcoming web interface with a new design.
- SimpleStaking created a guide to help community members use their Trezor wallets after the Babylon upgrade.
- TzStats now displays baker reward splits for past and future cycles.
- Tezos Commons released a helpful guide to some Tezos community events in November.
- Tezos Rio released a new version of TezzeT, a fast, secure, lightweight Tezos wallet which is now compatible with the Babylon protocol.
- Tulip Tools released a guide to creating a custom sandbox and deploying a SmartPy contract with Tplus.
Social encounters
- Amazing meetup in Moscow with P2P Validator, Paradigm Fund, Baking Bad, Atomex and Norn Community. If you missed the first Moscow Tezos meetup, watch the full video.
- The founder of Tezos Capital is launching a new company — Stakerdao. It’s built on Tezos and you can read the backstory. StakerDAO is launching a secure, decentralized, compliant governance platform for managing financial products. From this platform will come a growing set of offerings — created and governed by the Staker community. It will allow participants to vote on where to best earn rewards as validators in a given proof-of-stake network. Polychaincap is backing the project. Read another article by Coindesk.
- Dev Workshop Room 2 at Blockchain week at San Francisco. See post:
First up — an introduction to Tezos and the on-chain governance mechanism by Kevin Nielsen. Post.
- Medium-term Tezos protocol amendments being discussed by the community. See post:
- zero-knowledge proofs
- Tendermint consensus on public testnet
- Marigold (Plasma-like layer 2 scaling)
- Plebeia (10x reduction in state size
- The guts of a smart contract! Here is the underlying Michelson after Michael Klein Tezos smart contract compiled.
- A Digital Collectible Card Game is Coming Soon to Tezos. Learn how the gaming company Coase, plans to launch a digital collectible card game on the Tezos blockchain and take advantage of blockchain technology to create a modern economic system containing a tournament, competitive system and marketplace.
- A short guide for your first smart contract by Johann Tanzer, development has never been easier! Learn how to create a custom sandbox and deploy a smartpy contract with Tplus.
- TEZOS INNOVATORS 2019, the first Tezos Blockchain Idea Contest in Korea — Since August of 2019, to increase the brand awareness of Tezos blockchain in Korea and back up people who have great potentials, Tezos Korea started ‘TEZOS INNOVATORS 2019’ targeting graduates, undergraduates, and pre-entrepreneurs. Learn who won the contest via the link above.
- In the second round of the Tezos Blockstars B9Lab has over 100 students from over 30 countries! Soon they will be creating smart contracts and writing clients. See post.
Upcoming events:
Find more Tezos community events here.
- TQ Tezos’ Jacob Arluck will speak at Oppenheimer’s Disruption Innovation Summit in San Francisco on November 12.
- 13th and 14th of November — Nomadic Labs will be attending BCParis, a dedicated blockchain conference with a variety of Speakers, Workshops and Meetups in Paris
- November 13th: Kyiv — Launching Tezos Ukraine
- November 19th: Hong Kong — Tezos Hong Kong Meetup #1
- November 28th: Perth — Tezos: Learn the benefits
- November 28th: Geneva, Switzerland
- November 29th: Nice, France
Finance
- Cryptonomic updated short and sweet new domains, http://arronax.io and http://mininax.io, for Arronax and Mininax respectively.
Partnerships and team members
- Tezos Foundation will work with tZERO, Alliance Investments, and Megalodon to tokenize £500m of real estate assets across the UK on tezos over the next several years. Alliance Investments intends to tokenize at least £20m of the value of River Plaza. The River Plaza STO will be digitized using tZERO’s tokenization technology and Megalodon’s advisory services and issued on the Tezos Blockchain. River Plaza’s security tokens will provide investors with liquidity through tZERO’s secondary trading technology, which powers the alternative trading system operated by PRO Securities, LLC, a subsidiary of tZERO. The STO is expected to launch in Q1 of 2020.
There is also an article by Coindesk.
- Fundament Group Forms Strategic Partnership with Tezos Foundation to Develop Digital Securities Infrastructure. Fundament Group’s mission is to create an inclusive financial market by opening up institutional-grade financial products for all classes of investors while being fully regulated by and compliant with German and European capital market laws. Fundament Group was the first company to receive approval from the German Financial Market Authority (BaFin) for a €250m blockchain-based real estate bond. Its first product, Fundament Real Estate, is the country’s first tokenized real estate bond issued on a public blockchain, available with a minimum investment of €1. Fundament Group’s adoption of permissionless blockchains means the tokenized bond is easily tradable and enables self-custody with many popular wallets.
- Figment Networks received a grant from Tezos Foundation. With tezos, Hubble is now a multi-chain staking explorer for 5 networks (more coming soon!)
Hubble supports:
- testnet launches
- mainnet delegation research
- governance
- monitoring & alerting
- rewards reporting for taxes
- TezBox has hired a new community manager, Jovan Smith. He wrote a blog post describing TezTech’s online resources and introducing his new role to the community
- Tezos Foundation Strengthens Support For Tezos Block Explorers And App Accessibility. The Tezos Foundation is pleased to announce that it has issued grants to Figment Networks, a Tezos baker and the team behind the popular Hubble block explorer, and Papers, the team behind the tezblock block explorer and AirGap wallet. With these grants, both the Figment and Papers teams will help make the analysis of the Tezos blockchain more advanced and accessible. Figment Networks is a professional staking services company and contributor to the Tezos ecosystem. The team built an open-source baking rewards payout tool last October and actively engages with the wider community of Tezos bakers. With this grant, Figment Networks will create and open-source a high-level analytics, alerting, and governance tool for the Tezos ecosystem, with a goal to provide the most useful information for Tezos bakers and delegates. Papers is an active development team in the Tezos ecosystem and has received an additional grant to further develop and advance its tezblock block explorer. tezblock aims to make collecting data about and analyzing the Tezos blockchain as accessible and user-friendly as possible. The Papers team will continue to improve tezblock by adding more advanced baking and governance data through integration with Tezos Agora, Tezos smart contracts and assets support, and other key metrics and data visualizations. For more information about tezblock, check out Papers’ latest project update here.
Social media metrics
Tezos community continues to grow. There is a constant increase in the number of subscribers of Tezos social media channels.
There is also Tezos Riot chat and YouTube channel.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Tezos Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
The Tezos Foundation is committed to supporting organizations which contribute to the growth of the Tezos community and ecosystem. They are especially interested in supporting regional organizations and university-based groups focused on Tezos and the larger blockchain ecosystem.
Check out some of the community organizations that compose the Tezos ecosystem:
- Tezos Commons Foundation: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Korea: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Montreal: Website, Twitter
- Tezos OCaml Michelson Institute: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Detroit: Twitter
- MyTezosBaker: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Luxembourg: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Turkey: Twitter, Telegram
- Tezos Geneva: Twitter, Meetup
- Tezos Rio: Website, Twitter
Learn about key operational entities
- Nomadic Labs: Website, Twitter
- Tocqueville Group (“TQ”): Website, Twitter, Wiki
- Tezos Japan Foundation: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Korea Foundation: Website, Twitter
- Tezos Southeast Asia Association: Website, Twitter
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
