Hello to the Tezos community and fans! We are here to share all the recent news and updates that happened within the Tezos extensive ecosystem. Grantees, teams, and operational entities are working hard on their projects, contributing to the expansion and growth of Tezos. So before we start — let’s have a quick overview of some latest events! A collaborative consortium of teams from across the Tezos ecosystem announced that they are taking over the ongoing maintenance and development of Kiln, an application that allows users to monitor, receive alerts, and bake on Tezos. The consortium includes teams from Baking Bad, Obsidian Systems, Tezos Commons, and TQ Tezos, along with community support and contributions. The consortium also announced that with the transition, there is a new Kiln repository on GitLab, which includes Kiln version 0.8.1 with a long-awaited build for MacOS Catalina.
Moreover, a new evolution of Kukai with a more user-friendly design for both mobile and desktop browsers was introduced. Kukai 1.8 also offers HD (hierarchical deterministic) wallets but includes full backward compatibility. All newly created Kukai wallets will be HD* wallets by default and maintain full compatibility with all older (legacy) wallets. Furthermore, Tezos Notifier Team published a big report for 2019–2020, so you can learn more about the bot’s gradual development and main milestones. It was also stated that more than 2700 users started and tried to work with the bot, while more than 2000 users remained active, which is pretty impressive!
TezosGigaNode clusters have been upgraded to node version 7.3. AirGap announced that users can now directly delegate to their favorite bakers from the tezblock block explorer. Baking Bad team published a blog post on Tezos Explorer API best practices. They recently announced that users can now download Tezos accounting reports in USD, EUR, and BTC, with price settlement at the time of operation. And by the way, Better Call Dev now supports Dalphanet and advanced contract interaction via Beacon. Blockwatch, the team behind TzStats, published their insights from reviewing a potential Tezos protocol proposal 007, covering baker account management, zero-knowledge proofs, and governance system extensions. Madfish Solutions posted an explainer article on how to use their recently released Quipuswap on the Carthagenet test network. Tezos Commons hosted Stephane de Baets of Elevated Returns on its latest episode of TezTalks Live. The Chain of Insight team released a piece on how to approach Tezos from an Ethereum developer’s mindset.
Besides, QR Capital — Brazil’s largest crypto hedge fund is to launch a new Legal Receivables and Precatory Bonds digital asset exchange on the Tezos blockchain. This will allow access to legal receivables for specialized funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals interested in investing in this high yield asset class.
Tezos community is growing fast, along with the rise of social media awareness. There is a constant increase in the number of subscribers in Tezos social networks and participants in chats. For more news and events, check the article below and keep yourself updated!
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Development
For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.
Teams from across the Tezos ecosystem announce the formation of a consortium to oversee the ongoing development of Kiln (including the initial release of a Kiln build for MacOS). Originally developed by Obsidian Systems, Kiln is an application that allows users to monitor, receive alerts and bake on Tezos. It offers users a convenient UI to set up a node and monitor nodes and bakers. Kiln has become a vital resource for the Tezos community by significantly lowering the barrier to entry for baking and monitoring.
Moving forward, the development and maintenance of the Kiln software will be run by a collaborative consortium that includes teams from Baking Bad, Obsidian Systems, Tezos Commons, and TQ Tezos, along with community support and contributions.
As part of the transition to the new Kiln consortium, there is a new Kiln repository on GitLab. Starting today, the repo includes Kiln version 0.8.1 which has a long-awaited build for MacOS Catalina available at this link.
Two years ago, Kukai launched its open-source Tezos web wallet based on three principles: Security, Community, and Reliability. Now they announced a new evolution of Kukai with a more user-friendly design for both mobile and desktop browsers. When they first started to reimagine the Kukai web wallet they wanted to adopt a process that balanced security best practices, clear guidance for new Tezos users, and maintaining their track record of reliability. A better-informed user who encounters fewer surprises is less vulnerable to the types of social engineering attacks that are common in crypto networks. Kukai 1.8 also introduces HD (hierarchical deterministic) wallets but includes full backwards compatibility. The Babylon upgrade changed the dynamics for users in regard to no longer requiring smart contracts for delegation. All newly created Kukai wallets will be HD* wallets by default but will also maintain full compatibility with all older (legacy) wallets.
Now Tezos Notifier Team presents a big report for 2019–2020. In this article, you will learn how the bot is developing, and you can also look at many graphs, which makes this article look more presentable and serious.
Current statistics of the bot in short:
- more than 2700 users started and tried to work with the bot, while more than 2000 users remained active;
- more than 5300 addresses in monitoring total;
- more than 2400 unique addresses in monitoring;
- almost 500,000 messages per month are sent to users.
In this article Baking Bad team continues to show you how to get the most out of using TzKT, Tezos Explorer API. Almost every day new bakers, wallets, DApps, exchangers, and even various explorers appear in the Tezos ecosystem. In this series of articles, they try to help developers to use Tezos Explorer API in a more effective way, which will lead to better user experience.
Earlier you were able to download Tezos accounting reports from TzKT explorer in XTZ coins only. But now you can also get reports in USD, EUR, and BTC, with price settlement at the time of operation. TzKT Tezos Indexer v1.1 has been released. Now it supports indexing of market data aligned by block timestamps. You can switch between various quote providers (TzktQuotes and Coingecko are supported at the moment) or easily create custom ones. The coolest feature is injecting historical prices right into TzKT API responses, so you can, for example, request Tezos transactions in USD, EUR or BTC at the time of operation.
You can now perform contract calls of arbitrary complexity (nested types, lambdas, etc) and execute them via Thanos wallet or another Beacon-supporting extension, or do a simulation, or just copy raw parameters. In addition to that, BCD now allows to clone any contract using a convenient storage editor and deploy it via Beacon as well.
Beacon offers a way for applications to interact with Tezos wallets. With the added Beacon support to tezblock, delegations in a wallet can be triggered now directly from a bakers site on tezblock. Delegations can be triggered on all wallets that support Beacon like AirGap, Beacon Extension (Ledger, Mobile, local secret) or Thanos.
Baker can now simply share their tezblock link for their potential new delegators and onboard them quickly with their favorite wallet (that supports Beacon). Status if a baker accepts delegations, this should prevent users from delegation directly to exchanges or bakers that have a special setup. AirGap baker as an example.
- How to use Quipuswap on Carthagenet by Madfish Solutions
For the last half of the year, Madfish team has been working hard on the Quipuswap — the protocol that aims to provide an easy interface for decentralized token exchange on Tezos blockchain. They share that they have finally reached the milestone where it’s tested and fully working on the Carthage network! In the article above, they go through several steps explaining how a regular user can interact with Quipuswap exchange.
For this tutorial, Claude chose vanilla JavaScript to write the dapp as it will give you all the information you need to use Taquito with the Beacon wallet and adapt the code to whichever framework you prefer. The dapp he will build is extremely simple, it connects to a demo smart contract I deployed on Carthagenet (testnet) to test different features, the dapp has a button to connect your wallet, a simple interface with information from the blockchain and the smart contract and it gives you two options to save data into the smart contract. In order to continue reading, you must have at least a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS and of how the Tezos blockchain works.
Ecosystem Updates
- Blockwatch (the team behind TzStats) published their insights from reviewing a potential Tezos protocol proposal 007, covering baker account management, zero-knowledge proofs, and governance system extensions.
- Tezos Co-founder Arthur Breitman spoke about DeFi applications at the Global DeFi Summit.
- TQuorum session featured Ian Miers (Founding scientist of Zcash) and J Ayo Akinyele (Co-founder & CEO of Bolt Labs) in a discussion about privacy-preserving features on Tezos.
- Baking Bad released a video on how to install a Tezos blockchain indexer and API from sources.
- Tezos Commons published its community update for August.
News and Social Encounters
Earlier this year, the ENVITED ecosystem working group published the first results of its research into an ecosystem for digital traceability and proof of virtual validation for autonomous driving functions. This week, the Foundation caught up with working group member and BMW Group Systems Architect Carlo van Driesten to discuss the working group, the state of blockchain tech for autonomous driving, and the working group’s participation in the Tezos ecosystem.
Following the update above which mentioned the new collaborative consortium that will oversee Kiln’s ongoing maintenance and development, Tezos Foundation spoke with some of the teams involved in the consortium to learn more about future changes to Kiln.
In discussing the transition, Iryna Gerasymova of TQ Tezos said, “We’re excited to be a part of the team that’s moving Kiln forward, beginning with a Kiln build for MacOS. This new approach will bring more community members into Kiln’s development and promote wider participation in the baking process within the ecosystem.”
In discussing the updates to Kiln, Tezos Commons Technical Project Manager Corey Soreff said, “Kiln is a vital resource for the Tezos community that lowers the barriers to entry for baking and monitoring. We’re thrilled to be a part of the consortium that will handle ongoing development and maintenance of the Kiln software.” As Kiln’s development continues with its new, collaborative, governance model, community members with relevant interests and skills in contributing to Kiln development can propose their ideas and features to the GitLab repo.
They dive in the latest announcements from Elevated Returns regarding STOs and the work Stephane has been doing in Southeast Asia .
- Approaching Tezos From an Ethereum Developer’s Mindset — Our Journey by Chain of Insight team
Coming from an Ethereum background they first approached problems with an Ethereum developer’s mindset which got in the way a bit, but their journey also led to the first happy accident — the creation of “Proof of Puzzle” and the PoP Machine Glow zero-knowledge prover.
Here’s a few key points they learned about Tezos while developing PoPMG:
- Tezos is uniquely suited for blockchain oracles
- It pairs well with games and cryptography
- And has more flexible storage possibilities
Read about the long story of the project, its main milestones, development and features fully in Russian.
Upcoming events
TezTalks Live is the virtual meetup series that is streamed in real-time with the actors of the Tezos ecosystem. TezTalks Radio is a video podcast that finds the “why” behind the latest Tezos news and discovers the stories behind the people of Tezos. See more on the website.
- 19th August 2020 — Tezos Town Hall with Adrian Brink, Arthur Breitman, Benjamin Canou, Jacob Arluck, Gabriel Alfour
- 24th August 2020 — TezTalks Radio #8 — Cryptonomic
- 27th August 2020 — TezTalks Live #10 — Payzos
Finance
Also see amazing Tezos Explorer by Baking Bad team — TzKT.
- Tezos Joins #ZeroFeeFamily on Phemex
Partnerships, integrations and team members
QR Capital — Brazil’s largest crypto hedge fund is to launch a new Legal Receivables and Precatory Bonds digital asset exchange on the Tezos blockchain. This will “allow access to legal receivables for specialized funds, family offices and high net worth individuals interested in investing in this high yield asset class.” QR Capital was qualified by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) as an asset manager and is looking to distribute blockchain investment funds in 2020 under the name of QR Asset. It is described as a fund with 100% exposure to blockchain/crypto assets. The fund is regulated by both the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) and ANBIMA (the Brazilian Financial and Capital Markets Association).
- Tezos Foundation joined OpenVasp
Other
FAQs shared by Tezos Foundation
What are the biggest hurdles to encourage developers? I know a lot of the community feels that there isn’t a huge “Boom” in development of the Tezos chain. I understand that it’s not an overnight process but I would love some insight on how the foundation is encouraging developers to jump in with both feet.
While the Foundation’s early focus revolved around tooling, infrastructure development, and institutional adoption, especially given the fact that Tezos as a blockchain has been gas-constrained to date, we have been encouraged by recent developments in the dapp ecosystem as development efforts shift from infrastructure and core development to end-user applications.
We have undertaken a number of initiatives both recently and in the past to encourage development on Tezos. For example, we highlighted some of the training courses and resources available to developers of all skill levels in a prior update. As we noted, the Foundation supports a diverse mixture of introductory courses, developer trainings, and other resources to bolster the Tezos developer community.
Beyond training courses, we also recently had the Tezos + CoinList Hackathon, which had over 1,000 registrants and 30 projects submitted in a variety of categories, including DeFi, Games & Collectibles, and Oracles. The hackathon also featured 11 developer workshops hosted by teams in the Tezos ecosystem that can be accessed on YouTube. We look forward to more hackathons and other events to drive developer engagement.
We also continue to support teams that build end-user applications using this infrastructure. For example, the newly announced Magic and Beacon SDKs and the Thanos web extension make it easier to connect Tezos wallets to dapps on Tezos, Truffle makes it easier to develop, test, and deploy Tezos smart contracts, Dexter will enable decentralized asset exchange (which is a critical decentralized financial primitive), and projects like tzBTC provide the opportunity for a wide range of assets on Tezos and facilitate novel financial applications.
Of course, we are always thinking about new and creative ways to encourage developer activity, and welcome suggestions from community members on how we can continue to do so. If you have ideas on how to expand developer engagement with the Tezos protocol, you can email them to contact@tezos.foundation.
What is the foundation focused on at this point? Developers, updates, partnerships, etc.?
The Foundation deploys capital in various ways to achieve all of the above and has a number of focus areas, some of which have room for improvement, and some which are progressing well. A main priority for the Tezos Foundation is to improve coordination of tech teams within the ecosystem in order to strengthen core development to end-user applications and developer UX. We will continue to invest heavily in efforts to facilitate the technical growth and development of the Tezos protocol.
What happened with the grant to Cornell LLC?
In September 2018, we approved a grant to United Networks LLC, associated with Cornell LLC, and issued the first of six grant installments to perform research on sharding and develop tangible product solutions for Tezos. Since the outset, we have deployed funds for research projects that we feel will accelerate the development of the Tezos protocol and build stronger and more efficient infrastructure. This is a project that proposed to do just that. Unfortunately, after repeated requests and conversations with the team, they have not produced and shared with us reports or results from their research activities. We have therefore commenced measures as per our established process and stopped making any further payments.
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 Ukraine: Website, Twitter
- 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
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