“The rapid growth of the ecosystem is clearly evident with rising interest to build on Tezos from those both inside and outside of the Tezos community”
Hello, and welcome to our fresh biweekly report on Tezos! We hope this text finds you well and healthy during such stressful times. Tezos Foundation, teams, grantees, and operational entities work distantly, but in a very effective way. Moreover, recently, the Foundation reported that they are monitoring the situation closely, particularly as it pertains to global asset deterioration, and they can assure that the Foundation is well-prepared with sufficient funds to continue executing on its priorities despite the worldwide downturn. Teams are doing their best to move forward with their development as it was planned before the outbreak. Baking Bad released a beta version of BCDHub. With the support of the Tezos Foundation, the team has rewritten everything from scratch and added lots of new features. Everstake gave an update on Teztracker, where they mentioned their focus on the Governance part of the explorer. Now you can track the amendment process, check bakers’ participation in the governance, and enjoy a few UI/UX fixes. Notably, the Foundation released the second biannual report, highlighting its activities from August 2019 through early 2020. In this update, they coped with covering grants distribution, financials, governance, and a lot more! By the way, Tezos Ukraine published a recap of the Tezos Foundation Biannual Update in the Russian language. Apart from the mentioned above, Stove Labs gave an overview of state-of-the-ecosystem tooling for smart contract development. Tezos-Nodes published an update on version 2 of its reliability rating service of Tezos bakers. Cryptonomic upgraded its Tezos indexer and API, Conseil. This and much more information about the current state of development you can find in the update below!
Social activity is limited by social distancing at the moment. While in-person events and appearances may slow down with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Foundation team remains committed to being accessible on social and in online messaging forums like Riot and Agora. Tezos teams successfully arrange events and educational resources remotely. A case in point was a Virtual Meetup on the latest developments in Tezos core protocol engineering, organized by Tezos Berlin. Blockmatics held a developer webinar to teach unit testing in SmartPy. Nomadic Labs participated in an Ask-Me-Anything session on Tezos Agora to discuss its upcoming sapling integration proposal. Additionally, they put together a recap “aftermovie” of their Tezos Developer Day for those who missed it.
Furthermore, Adrian Brink from Cryptium Labs appeared on the Unforkable podcast to discuss Tezos, liquid proof-of-stake, and on-chain governance. Ryan Lackey participated in an AMA hosted by Crypto.com. Sandy Peng from Tezos China also attended. Tezos Besides, Commons released Issue #18 of the Baking Sheet newsletter with updates on the Tezos ecosystem.
Another significant milestone — more than 20 companies expect to tokenize securities on the Tezos blockchain, representing some $200 million in deals, through a new partnership with fintech merchant bank DealBox and software provider Vertalo. The partnership will see Vertalo tokenize 22 different securities issued by DealBox’s clients, providing data management services, and providing liquidity.
The community is growing in social networks and chats. It’s time to be responsible and stay together. See you in two weeks!
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
Development
For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.
- Overview of state-of-the-ecosystem tooling for smart-contract development on tezos by Stove Labs. Learn more by watching Matej Sima walk you through a TZIP-12 like smart contract with on-chain callbacks.
- Teztracker Update #6 — the everstake team was actively focusing on the Governance part of the explorer.
- Now you can track the amendment process using Teztracker. It provides a piece of detailed information on each voting period with participation rates, quorum specs, and many other things.
- Using Teztracker you can also check Bakers participation in the governance process.
- They added a separate list for public bakers.
- Now you can switch the date format on by enabling the slider in settings (top right-hand side of the page).
- Applied a few UI/UX fixes, added the possibility to select the amount of items per page and sorting buttons for bakers.
- Tezos-Nodes published an update on version 2 of its reliability rating service of Tezos bakers.
- Baking Bad released a beta version of BCDHub. With the support of Tezos Foundation Baking Bad team has rewritten everything from scratch and added lots of new features. All the functions will be available in a few weeks, meanwhile, they are waiting for your feedback here.
- Tezos Foundation Releases Second Biannual Update. This report provides an overview of the Foundation’s activities from August 2019 through early 2020. In this update, they coped to cover grants distribution, financials, governance and a lot more! By the way, Tezos Ukraine published a recap of the Tezos Foundation Biannual Update in Russian language.
Some key highlights:
- Update: Week Of 16 March 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread around the globe, they are monitoring the situation closely, particularly as it pertains to global asset deterioration, and they can assure that the Foundation is well-prepared with sufficient funds to continue executing on its priorities despite the global downturn.
- Update: Week Of 23 March 2020.
{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}
- Blockmatics held a developer webinar to teach unit testing in SmartPy.
- Adrian Brink from Cryptium Labs appeared on the Unforkable podcast to discuss Tezos, liquid proof-of-stake, and on-chain governance.
- Cryptonomic released an update to its Tezos indexer and API, Conseil.
- Tezos Nodes published a Tezos reward calculator to more effectively evaluate Tezos bakers.
{FAQs}
Regarding the civil litigation update — who is entitled to receive the settlement funds and how will they be distributed?
Settlement funds will be distributed to those in the settlement class who file valid claim forms. The settlement class would consist of those who participated in the Foundation’s fundraiser in 2017, but would exclude the defendants and certain of their affiliates. The federal courts in the United States have not yet determined how to allocate funds among class members.
- Build Your First Dapp on Tezos — Everything you need to know to create a simple Dapp on Tezos is in this article.
- Stove Labs prepared an update, thus the tezos-starter-kit is now fully Carthage-proof.
- Self-quarantine is a great opportunity to brush up your knowledge of Ligo and smart contracts on Tezos. With a new tutorial by Claude Barde, maps and big maps will have no more secrets for you!
- Tezos indexer & API now has big_map support! Check out the latest Conseil release notes here and registered tokens support pave the way for FA1.2 support through the whole stack. See post.
- Demystifying Supersonic has been added as a topic on tezos Forum (Tezos Agora) Research & Development. Feel free to discuss and provide feedback. The Supersonic SNARK protocol is part of a recent trend of gradually improving SNARK protocols based on the principles of Interactive Oracle Proofs and Polynomial Commitment Schemes. Supersonic introduces DARK, a new Polynomial Commitment Scheme where trusted setup is optional, that can be combined with existing or future Interactive Oracle Proofs such as Sonic, PLONK, or Marlin.
- Operation error handling — tezblock Update #19.
- After feedback from the community and Baking Bad in a video, they have made improvements to the handling of failed operations. Errors are now displayed prominently on Transactions in a human-readable form that were already available, which will be extended in the next release.
- Additionally across all tables on every page like the Originations Overview for failed operations, the error description is displayed in a tooltip when hovering over the operation.
- For Proposals more information has been added, a detailed description of the changes can be found for each proposal also links to the discussion taking place on Tezos Agora.
- Additionally to the features, many small changes have been done.
- Time has been invested in refactoring the whole code to support the ngrx approach.
- baker-table: is_baker refactoring
- baker-table: Tezos Nodes API update
- proposal-detail: period improvements
- contract-detail: transfer refactoring
{Code}
- big_map support with three new tables: big_maps, big_map_contents and originated_account_maps.
- New governance table
- New registered tokens table in preparation for FA1.2 support in the next release.
- Better logging of entry points for contract invocations
- Micheline-format operation parameters
- Account activation status recording
- Tracking baker active status
- Operation error reporting
- Added period to operations table
- The rolls table has been removed.
- Some minor performance and stability improvements
And a lot more!
Social Encounters
- If you missed the Tezos Developer Day organized by Nomadic Labs, they prepared an aftermovie for you.
- The Case for Tezos with Adrian Brink. ‘My baker just sent me some XTZ’ Do you know what this means? If not, then this episode is for you! Adrian Brink is the Co-founder of Cryptium Labs. He and his team of engineers and researchers are running one of the biggest staking services for the Tezos network directly out of the Swiss Alps. In this conversation, they dive deep into the Tezos blockchain. They discuss how Tezos Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism works. Why governance is important and what XTZ, the native cryptocurrency of Tezos, one day could be useful for. They also learn why Tezos is called the self-amending blockchain and what formal verification is all about.
- Ryan Lackey participated in an AMA hosted by Crypto.com. Sandy Peng from Tezos China also attended. While in-person events and appearances may slow down with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Foundation team remains committed to being accessible on social and in online messaging forums like Riot and Agora.
- Nomadic Labs held an AMA on Tezos Agora to discuss its upcoming sapling integration proposal. Check the forum to catch up with all the discussion topics.
- Tezos Commons released Issue #18 of the Baking Sheet newsletter with updates on the Tezos ecosystem.
Upcoming events:
Visit Tezos Foundation Events page to learn more.
According to the recent Tezos Community Update, Tezos Commons is canceling community events except for third-party and remote sponsorship for March because of COVID-19. TQ Tezos has announced that TQuorum Paris will be rescheduled, follow TQ Tezos on Twitter for future updates.
- 30th March — TQuorum, Paris (?)
- Nomadic Labs is giving away 100 developer passes for the Paris Blockchain Week Summit from March 31 — April 1.
- 25th April — Tezos Baking Tour: Thailand
Finance
- (An article considering the second biannual update) Tezos Foundation Grants $37 Million to the DevOps Team. The Tezos Foundation has just released its second Biannual Report which describes the group’s overall progress in Q3 and Q4 of 2019. The report clearly states that Tezos Foundation owns $635 million in assets right now. It’s much more than that of the $232 million raised in its infamous initial coin offering. The report released emphasizes how the foundation uses its funds, which reveals that it grants more than $37.6 million for the Tezos ecosystem since August 2019.
Partnerships and team members
- Update On Civil Litigation Involving The Tezos Foundation — the Tezos Foundation and the other defendants have entered into a settlement, subject to court approval, of all putative class action lawsuits, all of which are pending in California state and federal courts. The Tezos Foundation chose to settle all claims because the Tezos Foundation believes it is in the best interest of the Tezos project and community as a whole. The Foundation continues to believe the lawsuits were meritless and continues to deny any wrongdoing. However, lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming, and it was decided that the one-time financial cost of a settlement was preferable to the distractions and legal costs associated with continuing to fight in the courts. A nice precision is given by Alex Liu in his article “Tezos Litigation is 99% Over!”.
- Vertalo, a partner of TQ Tezos, announced that they will tokenize 22 different securities on Tezos. More than 20 companies expect to tokenize securities on the Tezos blockchain, representing some $200 million in deals, through a new partnership with fintech merchant bank DealBox and software provider Vertalo. The partnership will see Vertalo tokenize 22 different securities issued by DealBox’s clients, providing data management services and providing liquidity, Vertalo CEO and co-founder Dave Hendricks said. His firm is also a registered transfer agent with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
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 that 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
Recent Paradigm Fund updates on Tezos:
- Biweekly update 27th February — 15th March: Welcome To The Carthage, The Foundation Governance Structure And Future Nominees, Equisafe Launched STO Platform And Tokenized The First Asset On Tezos, Introducing FA2, March Community Update
- 15th February — 27th February: A New TzStats API Upgrade, TAPS — Automatic Payment System, Ryan Lackey On The Tokyo FinTech Podcast, LIGO, SCaml & SmartPy Progress, The Baking Sheet By Tezos Commons
- 1st February — 15th February: Tenderbake Introduced, A Message From Ryan Jesperson, Core Development AMA, Sony Invested In Securitize, Taurus Group Partnership, A New Version Of The “Mainnet-Staging” Branch, Promotion Phase For Carthage 2.0, A Worldwide University Voting Experiment On Tezos
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
