Hello, and welcome to the Tezos biweekly update! While A Proof-Of-Stake Validator Summit is providing the participants with precious knowledge on the staking, we are ready to give you a detailed overview of what happened in Tezos during the past two weeks. From successfully demonstrating on-chain governance to building an actual use-case for blockchain in the real world, Tezos has an extremely bright future ahead! The current proposal Carthage 2.0 has reached quorum and is now in the testing phase. Then it will move to the promotion phase in which bakers can vote to activate the new protocol upgrade.
Furthermore, the Foundation, teams, grantees, and operational entities made substantial progress on the development performance. Nomadic Labs published a blog post on formally verifying the spending limit contract used in the Cortez mobile wallet. Baking Bad team released a new version of the Baking Bad API (v2) with a complete list of public bakers featuring unique data on bakers. They also announced that their TzKT explorer now allows users to export a .csv statement of account operations with a complete history of account balance changes. Moreover, AirGap released Beacon, a simple way to connect Tezos wallets with applications. Taquito team shared the news on its TypeScript library suite for Tezos. Besides, an official blog post on how StakerDAO operates was finally published. If you forgot, StakerDAO is a decision-making platform where the token holders collaborate to launch and manage financial assets. Check more development highlights inside our update!
The public life of Tezos is even more impressive! When Tezos Commons was first formed through the early community on Riot, it had one mission — to build a global community dedicated to the digital commonwealth. Recently, they released a 2019 year in a review blog post detailing its initiatives, objectives, and progress over the past year. Additionally, numerous events were live in January, and a lot of meetups are likewise scheduled for February. Nomadic Labs hosted the ENVITED ecosystem workgroup for discussion on its work building an ecosystem for the virtual proof of validation of autonomous driving functions. Plus, they will serve as a founding member of the Association for the Development of Digital Assets, which aims to promote the development of digital assets in France and Europe. It’s also important to mention that Foundation CFO Roman Schnider spoke on a panel at the Geneva Annual Blockchain Congress on January 20. He discussed tokenized assets and capital markets. The Foundation Council Member Hubertus Thonhauser spoke on digital assets on a panel at the CV Labs Summit in Davos on January 23. Tezos Southeast Asia is hosting a Baking Tour in Singapore and Thailand to teach aspiring bakers how to set up their baking operations.
And the last for today — two significant milestones! The first is associated with Andra Capital, a San Francisco based venture capital firm that announced plans to issue Andra’s Silicon Valley Coin (SVC) via a Security Token Offering (STO). Collaborating with the Tezos Foundation, SVC will utilize TokenSoft’s issuance platform and be built on the Tezos blockchain. Secondly, Vertalo, a Texas-based security token management, and issuance platform, will now encourage its customers to switch over to Tezos, citing Tezos’ faster transactions, greater scalability, and more stable network of participants. Seems like it was a fantastic January for Tezos!
The number of subscribers continues to grow with the increase of interest in the project among the crypto community. Do not hesitate to join and learn more!
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
Development
For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.
- Formally Verifying a Critical Smart Contract — Nomadic Labs presented the formal verification of the Spending Limit Contract, a critical component of the Cortez wallet. How can the user be assured that this critical software has been correctly implemented? In this blog post, they detail how they have applied formal methods to verify the safety of a core component of the Cortez safety layer: the Spending Limit Contract smart contract. They first detail the contract and its specifications. Even though the deployed contract is hand-written in Michelson, they here give more readable pseudocode in CameLIGO. Then provide an overview of common approaches to formal methods, before discussing the tool they have used: Mi-Cho-Coq. Finally, they discuss the verification effort itself.
- Update: Week Of 20 January 2020
{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}
- Baking Bad released a new version of the Baking Bad API (v2) with a complete list of public bakers featuring unique data on bakers.
- Luiz Milfont published two tutorial articles regarding Tezos smart contract development: 1) “Calling blockchain smart contracts from Android”; and 2) “TezosJ Smart Contract Caller demo dApp”
- Nomadic Labs is a premium sponsor for the Paris Blockchain Week Summit 2020 on March 31 and April 1.
- Nomadic Labs will serve as a founding member of the Association for the Development of Digital Assets, which aims to promote the development of digital assets in France and Europe.
{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}
- Atomex created a simple guide for delegating Tezos tokens (“tez”) directly from the Atomex HD wallet.
- Baking Bad announced that its TzKT explorer now allows users to export a .csv statement of account operations with a complete history of account balance changes.
- Equisafe announced that with their recent work in collaboration with Nomadic Labs, the Nyx Standard will be available this month.
- Madfish Solutions published an introductory blog post explaining its Solidity to LIGO transpiler.
- Nomadic Labs hosted the ENVITED ecosystem work group for discussion on its work building an ecosystem for the virtual proof of validation of autonomous driving functions.
- Nomadic Labs published a second, more detailed blog post on how to write a Tezos protocol.
- Securitize released a video demo on issuing a security token on the Tezos blockchain using the Securitize platform.
- Taquito announced a new update to its TypeScript library suite for Tezos development.
- Tezos Commons released the 16th issue of its Tezos newsletter, “The Baking Sheet.”
- TQ Tezos is serving as a technology partner for Vertalo’s upcoming Tezos-based on-chain stakeholder registry and direct listing platform.
Beacon allows you to seamlessly connect your Tezos wallet with an application and interact with it. Requests from the dApp can be signed on a mobile, desktop, hardware wallet or browser extension.
- Scan QR code from browser application directly with a mobile wallet to establish a connection
- Beacon browser extension with multiple possible signing methods: wallets, Ledger and local secret (development)
- Implementation of the tzip-10 standard which describes how a wallet interacts with a dApp
- Decentralized transport layer (based on the matrix protocol) for the communication between dApp and wallet
- Currently still in Alpha and under heavy development
Improvements & changes
- Additionally to the features, many small changes have been done.
- Improvements to the loading behavior and speed of all tables
- bugfixes & performance improvements
- Baker names and payout addresses have been added
On the first days of January 2020, a new type of asset appeared on Tezos. In block 767840, a transaction was submitted to originate the StakerDAO Contract on the Tezos Mainnet — and StakerDAO, its STKR tokens, and the Staker Agora governance process were launched. StakerDAO is first and foremost a decision-making platform where STKR token holders collaborate to launch and manage financial assets. Its token holders have the responsibility to elect a governing council from their ranks on an annual basis. Each governance cycle runs for 1 calendar month and is divided into 4 phases, and each phase lasts 1 week — with the 4th phase lasting the remainder of the calendar month.
{So What will StakerDAO Launch?}
There are clues about the direction of StakerDAO assets in Proposal 001 which was approved in January. The proposal specifies that the Ops team should:
- Ops is to prepare a proposal for February 2020 to launch a PoS tracker token
- Ops is to initiate research on single token tracker for Tezos and/or Cosmos
- Ops is to initiate research on an algorithmic stablecoin for the Tezos network
In this direction, they expect the February governance cycle to reveal substantial information about a forthcoming PoS tracker token model.
- TezosJS Smart Contract Caller Demo dApp available for download! Now everybody can test Tezos Smart Contract interaction. And developers can get some inspiration. Check it out!
“During the development of the RPC module, we had to consider the node’s architecture which is based on the actor model. The actor model is a conceptual design that can be used to increase the security and resilience of a system. Each module in the node is separated from the others. In case of an error, the problem is limited to the faulty module. We can restart the faulty module and recover using the most recent valid state. Therefore the error does not spread to other modules in the node.” Check and learn more about accessing and receiving data through remote procedure calls (RPCs).
- Calling blockchain smart contracts from Android — Learn how easy it can be to interact with Tezos blockchain using a library. To make Android Java code interact with the existing, deployed smart contract, the TezosJ library from TezosRio is used.
Social encounters
- Tezos Commons — Year in Review. When Tezos Commons was first formed through the early community on Riot, it had one mission — Build a global community dedicated to the digital commonwealth. The mission has evolved since, not only do they want to build a global community for Tezos but also empower the community to be architects through bootstrapping local community organizers, communications, promotion, education, funding open source initiatives and advocacy. Learn about community building, events, meetups, hackathons, education, and business development!
- Foundation CFO Roman Schnider spoke on a panel at the Geneva Annual Blockchain Congress on January 20. He discussed tokenized assets and capital markets. Additionally, Foundation Council Member Hubertus Thonhauser discussed digital assets on a panel at the CV Labs Summit in Davos on January 23.
- Nomadic Labs co-sponsored the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest (SWERC) of the International Collegiate Programming Contest on January 25 and 26.
- Automotive Solution Center for Simulation tweeted: “Today the ENVITED ecosystem work group visited the core developer team of tezos blockchain Nomadic Labs in Paris. Tezos seems to be the right technology for our automotive use case building an ecosystem for the virtual proof of validation of autonomous driving functions.”
- Tezos Israel hosted an event on Tezos business solutions.
- Tezos Community Update — February — check all the community events to happen in February!
Upcoming events:
Visit Tezos Foundation Events page to learn more.
- 2nd February 10:00 am — 8th February / 6:00 pm UTC+8 — Tezos Baking Tour
- Tezos Southeast Asia’s president will speak on baking and offer a demo on setting up a baker on February 3 at Trust-less 2020, a Proof-of-Stake Validator Summit in Thailand.
- 6th February — Participate in the AMA in the Binance Spanish TG channel.
- 7th February — Bakers Summit in Vienna, Austria.
- 11th February — #BUIDL Week Colorado — hosted by Cryptonomics
- 22nd February — Tezos Africa will host the first-ever Tezos meetup in Accra, Ghana.
- Tezos Boston will host the Tezos Boston Pitch Competition 2020 in Q1, and has officially published the tezos.boston website.
- 22nd February — Tezos Berlin x Cryptonomic — Blockchain Development with Tezos, Workshop
- 26th February — Tezos Barcelona — How to deploy a node and bake
- 19th March — TZ Ventures is hosting a Demo Day.
Finance
- ZenGo — Introducing Tezos Staking: Earn Rewards in One Tap. In one tap you can start collecting rewards on your hard-earned tezzies, similar to earning interest in a savings account.
Partnerships and team members
The Tezos Foundation is pleased to announce that 21 new ecosystem grants have been issued to projects submitted in response to its most recent request for proposals (RFP). A total of 90 grant proposals were submitted to this RFP.
- Atomex STO Gate, BetterCallDev [Hub], and IMichelson by Baking Bad
- Cross-University Vote by Electis
- DeFi Developer Experience by Protofire
- Ejara by Nzinghaa Lab
- eth2tez, QuipuSwap, and Thanos by Madfish Solutions
- Golang Support for Tezos Smart Contract Development by Anchorage
- Go Tezos by Brice Aldrich
- Sotez by Andrew Kishino
- TaaS (Tezos as a Service) — GraphQL by Agile Ventures
- Tezos Academy and Tezos Link by OCTO Technology
- TezosKit by Keefer Taylor
- Tezos-nodes Mobile Apps by Tezos-nodes team
- Tezos Package Manager by Blockdaemon
- Tezster 2.0 by Tezsure
- TezTracker by Everstake
- Zombies in the Room by BUIDL Labs
- Silicon Valley Coin by Andra Capital Uses Tezos Blockchain and TokenSoft for Its Security Token Offering. Andra Capital, a San Francisco based venture capital firm, announced plans to issue Andra’s Silicon Valley Coin (SVC) via a Security Token Offering (STO). Collaborating with the Tezos Foundation, SVC will utilize TokenSoft’s issuance platform and be built on the Tezos blockchain. Andra Capital’s open-ended technology fund (the “Fund”) allows investors to invest in the fund traditionally with the option to take delivery of a blockchain-based token, Silicon Valley Coin. The Fund plans to invest in late-stage, private technology companies and leverages the Tezos blockchain through SVC to open this investment opportunity to qualified purchasers in the U.S. and permitted investors around the globe.
- New RFP For Ecosystem Grants. Check the categories and join! Prospective applicants should submit grant proposals here.
- Fabrx has completed “If Tezos”, a protocol-level triggers & events platform for on/off-chain events for tezos blockchain. It is deployed and ready to use now. For details on the full capabilities see the article.
- Vertalo announced that it has made Tezos its default blockchain for digital securities issuance, transitioning over from Ethereum. Vertalo, a Texas-based security token management and issuance platform, will now encourage its customers to switch over to Tezos, citing Tezos’ faster transactions, greater scalability, and more stable network of participants.
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
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
