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Tezos: Celebrating one year of the Tezos ecosystem, The first amendment will go into effect on May 29th, Chorus Mobility receives support from the Foundation, Nomadic Labs announced a new release for Tezos node — Snapshots, History Mode, and Multi-sig contracts

Paradigm
Paradigm
Published in
16 min readMay 24, 2019

Biweekly update 10th May — 24th May

Athens A, here we come! After about a two month process, Athens will activate, indicating the success of Tezos’ upgrade/coordination experiment. “Promotion” phase for the first Tezos amendment has reached completion and will reach Quorum as ‘yay’. Currently, at 83.15%, 81.39% is required. It will go into effect next week on May 29th, 2019. These weeks the community is celebrating one year of the Tezos ecosystem! To celebrate the upcoming anniversary of the betanet launch, the team announced a number of initiatives to spur even more participation in the Tezos ecosystem. The initiatives include: more development tools for Baking; more guides on how to vote, bake, delegate; real-time assistance for activating tokens. The Tezos Foundation announced that it will support Chorus Mobility, a research and development company working on blockchain solutions for the future of transportation. The co-operation will enable Chorus Mobility to support Tezos smart contracts as payments for autonomous vehicles and drones. Also, Tezos and Coda protocol announced collaboration on zk-SNARK research. Nomadic Labs announced a new release of Tezos Node with snapshots support (boot/sync a node in minutes), new history modes (not everyone needs to run archive) and formally verified multi-sig contracts. After months of hard work, the blockchain analytics tool, Arronax, is available as a public beta. Tplus, a tool to manage Tezos nodes easier was announced. Tezos block explorer, TezosID published the new update. As for social encounters, there were lots of Tezos coverage with talks from Arthur, TQ, Tezos Korea, and Nomadic Labs at Consensus 2019. Tezos Commons hosted the first Tezos Meetup in India. Over 100 people joined with presentations from Bernd, co-founder of Tezure and AJ, senior project manager of Tezos Commons. After hosting their first Tezos events in Zug and Rio de Janeiro, the team has few more premieres this month. Join them in Tokyo and for the first Tezos meetup in New Orleans! During these two weeks Tezos attracted a lot of attention in the media landscape. Arthur Breitman talked of the challenges of changing a mindset in this exclusive interview with Coin Rivet at Paris Blockchain Week Summit. Jonas, a host of Tezonomics Podcast, talked with Jay Lee, co-founder, and consultant to Tz Ventures, the first venture accelerator focused on the Tezos ecosystem about the first class of startups, working with four Tezos Asian foundations, and the Crypto scene in Korea. Tezos community member, Jev Bjorsell, built a Tezos Vote Bot @tezVoteBot) for twitter that tweets every time someone votes on Tezos proposals. Tezos is now available on Blockfolio signal. The ecosystem continues to flourish. Not to mention, the future for Tezos is just as bright with upcoming amendments involving zk-Snarks, Tendermint, and Marigold. More to follow!

Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com

Development

Gitlab metrics

For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.

GitHub developer activity (from Coinlib.io)

Tezos First Protocol Amendment Final Phase

“Promotion” phase for amendment “Athens A” is live!

Bakers, to cast your vote with Ledger Nano S on Tezos Wallet App: ./tezos-client submit ballot for “name of your baker” Pt24m4xiPbLDhVgVfABUjirbmda3yohdN82Sp9FeuAXJ4eV9otd yay

Final Tezos Athens quorum in sight (May 24th, 2019):

83.15%/81.39% quorum with less than 6 days left to go.

Information is taken from Tezos.help.

Initiatives To Increase Participation In The Tezos Ecosystem:

It’s been nearly a year since the launch of the Tezos betanet, and they’re thrilled that the network is robust and the community remains highly engaged. 82% of all tokens from the genesis block proposed by the Foundation are currently activated. One recommended allocation is activated every hour, and that number is on a trajectory to double.

To celebrate the upcoming anniversary of the betanet launch, the team is pleased to announce a number of initiatives to spur even more participation in the Tezos ecosystem.

1. The Tezos Foundation will actively support the development of more enhanced tooling and software intended to make baking more accessible to a wider audience. Baking not only helps secure the Tezos network — it also allows participants to more easily avoid token dilution through inflation that results from block rewards. Check out the resources below to learn more about baking and how to participate either directly or indirectly (via delegation).

2. One of the defining features of Tezos is that it follows a formal process to upgrade itself and more effectively evolve over time. Contributors to the Tezos Foundation’s fundraiser who activate their recommended allocations are eligible to bake and participate in Tezos governance. The Foundation will publish resources about voting, how it works, and how to participate so that token holders are equipped to take part in Tezos’ evolution. The resources below may be helpful for those looking to participate in Tezos governance.

3. To help as many fundraiser contributors as possible access their recommended allocations of Tezos tokens, the Tezos Foundation is developing a suite of tools to help fundraiser contributors more easily navigate the activation and retrieval processes (fundraiser contributors may only participate in baking and governance if they have access to their recommended allocations).

In the coming weeks, the Foundation will release an Activation Help Desk where fundraiser contributors can receive real-time assistance in activating their recommended allocations. For the few contributors who need help with password recovery, there are several tools built by community members that they will directly support in order to make them easier to use.

Fundraiser contributors can currently contact support@tezos.com for help. The resources below may be helpful for fundraiser contributors who have yet to activate and access their recommended allocations.

Release of Mainnet May:

Nomadic Labs announced a new release for Tezos node — Snapshots, History Mode, and Multi-sig contracts.

The main features present in this release are:

  • node support for snapshots (boot and synchronize a node in minutes),
  • node support for new history modes (not everyone needs to be an archive),
  • client integration for a multi-signature contract.

Remember that besides major features there are always a myriad of smaller improvements, have a look at the changelog.

The team encourages bakers to switch to history mode “full” using a snapshot before the activation of Athens to speedup the validation of the transition block. Detailed instructions are available on the release page.

History modes — Gitlab MR

History mode, together with snapshots, is a feature that has been in the works for quite some time. For a full dive have a look at the original in-depth post. In a nutshell, the Tezos node now supports two additional history modes other than archive, allowing for a drastically reduced disk usage.

The archivemode keeps the whole history of the chain, that is all the blocks and all the contexts resulting from their application. For example it is possible to check that the block at level n had a transfer from Alice to Bob and query that the balance of both accounts in the context were updated. This mode is particularly useful for a block explorer or an application that needs to query the past.

History mode full still has the whole history of the chain but only keeps the blocks. This means that it is possible to replay the whole history from genesis and verify the integrity of the chain but it’s not possible to inspect a context far in the past. In the example they would be able to find the transaction from Alice to Bob at level n, but not query the effect on their balances. Note however that, if needed, it is possible to reconstruct an archive node from a full node by replaying the application of each block and obtaining each intermediate context. This mode is the new default for all newly deployed nodes.

History mode rolling pushes the concept further and permits to delete altogether all the data from a given cutoff point. In this case it’s not possible to access the entirety of the chain from genesis but the disk footprint is reduced even further.

At this time the team discourages baking from a rolling node as not all necessary information might be available.

Baking from a full node is supported and recommended. Indeed, not only does the baker performance benefit from the reduced disk usage, but it also has no need for the archives. If a baking service needs the archives, they should consider deploying both a full node for baking, and an archive node for other purposes.

For more details refer to the documentation.

Snapshots — Gitlab MR

Snapshots are a compact and portable way to store the status of a Tezos chain. They can be easily transmitted and used to setup new nodes without the need to re-synchronize the chain as showcased in a recent blogpost from Rajath Alex of TQ.

When importing a snapshot from a third party, it is particularly important to verify that the block hash of the snapshot is correct and consistent with respect to several independent sources (block explorers, wallets, …). An attacker could provide a snapshot representing an alternative chain history to fool your node.

It is good practice to regularly take a snapshot of a node, for example with a cron job every night or week. The files produce are relatively small, especially when compressed. As of today a full snapshot takes 1.8GB (1.1 gzipped) while a rolling snapshot takes 417MB (137 gzipped).

For more details refer to the documentation.

Multisig — Gitlab MR

Tezos client now integrates a few commands to originate and interact with the multi-signature smart contract written in Michelson. The client supports originating the contract with the specified keys and the required threshold to unlock the funds. It is also possible to change existing keys, remove them or change the threshold. Being only a friendlier interface to a standard smart contract, it is still possible to interact with the multisig by performing a normal transaction from your favorite client or wallet.

More importantly, the contract has been formally proven to comply with the functional specification of a multisig using our Coq framework Mi-Cho-Coq. While this verification does not exclude the possibility of bugs in the specification or the Michelson interpreter, it gives a very high level of confidence in the correctness of this smart-contract. More details on the multisig and its verification will be available in future posts.

Originating a M-of-N multisig in Tezos is now as easy as:

tezos-client deploy multisig <contract-alias> \
             for <manager-account> \
             transferring <amount> from <source-account> \
             with threshold <M> \
             on public keys <signer-1 ... signer-N> \
             --burn-cap 100

These weeks updates:

Social encounters

Tezos’ Arthur Breitman on changing the way people think about money: In this exclusive interview with Coin Rivet at Paris Blockchain Week Summit, Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman talks of the challenges of changing a mindset.

Tezonomics Podcast Ep7 — Tz Ventures With Jay Lee: Jonas talks with Jay Lee, co-founder and consultant to Tz Ventures, the first venture accelerator focused on the Tezos ecosystem. They talk about the first class of startups, working with 4 Tezos asian foundations, and the Crypto scene in Korea.

These weeks events:

Tezos TQ NYC — Celebrate Tezos during NY Blockchain Week

  • May 15th: TQ President Alison Mangiero and Bruno Bernardo from Nomadic Labs was giving a Tezos ecosystem update at Consensus 2019.
  • May 21st: Indonesia TSA x Exabytes ID Workshop
  • May 22nd: Indonesia TSA x Triv Meetup
  • May 23th: Rio Meetup.
  • May 23th: Tezos Zug — lets make crypto valley great again!

Upcoming events:

TezTalks videos:

TezTalks speaker videos are now live. Over the course of the next 3 weeks, the team will be publishing a series of videos around a specific theme each week.

In case you missed it, TezTalks is an all-day Tezos conference that features curated 15 minute talks within the Tezos community. The first conference took place at Draper University in San Mateo, CA with close to 100 tez-heads in attendance. Speakers included a wide variety of experts within the ecosystem including Kathleen Breitman, co-founder of Tezos.

You can check out the videos at TezTalks.com or on Tezos Commons YouTube channel.

Videos published during these two weeks:

Jacob Arluck of TQ unveils a new governance platform that will feature a new governance dashboard and a discussion forum. This project is in collaboration with TQ, Tezos Commons, and various Tezos community members TezTalks is an all-day Tezos Conference of 15 minute curated Talks from a variety of experts in the ecosystem. Our inaugural event was hosted at Draper University in San Mateo, CA on March 23rd, 2019.

Tune in to the first Tezos Meetup in Eastern Europe hosted by Vitalii and Vlad. This meetup took place in Kyiv, Ukraine on April 23rd.

Finance

Information from Tzscan.io:

Information from Coingecko.com (May 24th, 2019):

Partnerships and team members

Chorus Mobility Receives Support And Seed-Funding From The Tezos Foundation:

The Tezos Foundation announced that it will support Chorus Mobility, a research and development company working on blockchain solutions for the future of transportation. The co-operation will enable Chorus Mobility to support Tezos smart contracts as payments for autonomous vehicles and drones.

Chorus Mobility’s core focus is blockchain based peer-to-peer payment protocols and decentralized applications for connected vehicles. Applications of this technology could, for example, include human to vehicle connections such as decentralized autonomous taxi hailing, vehicle to vehicle connections to combat congestion and improve traffic efficiency, and vehicle to infrastructure networks to create decentralized and instant V2X (vehicle to anything) payments, such as paying per second when using a paid priority lane.

“Tezos is one of the most advanced public blockchains to date,” said William Vorobev, Founder and CEO of Chorus Mobility. “It is built with security in mind, and with the support of Formal Verification, which is a critical requirement for software development in the Automotive Industry. We are thrilled to have the support of the Tezos Foundation, which will allow us to build more secure smart contracts for human-to-machine interaction.”

Recently Chorus Mobility came in first place at the BMW-hosted tech blockchain competition, MOBI Grand Challenge, for its project involving road space and right of way payments for autonomous vehicles to reduce congestion. The Tezos Foundation is also a member of MOBI, the nonprofit smart mobility consortium, which is focused on using blockchain and related technologies to make mobility safer, greener, cheaper and more accessible.

By funding projects like Chorus Mobility and other decentralized developers and collaborating with groups like MOBI, they are helping to further the adoption of blockchain technology into automotive projects.

Tezos and Coda in partnership on zk-SNARK research:

Coda Protocol, CoinList, and DeKrypt are partnering to launch a $100k global public research challenge to dramatically speed up zk-SNARKs. They expect the contest to produce huge advancements in the state of the art. They’ll be contributing all of those advancements back to the public domain with a permissive open-source license that allows them to be used by the broader crypto ecosystem.

SNARKs have been developing rapidly in the past few years, and in crypto they’re one of the most promising ways to bring scalability and privacy to blockchains. But in many ways they’re still at the surface of what’s possible. This gap between opportunity and current state is due to the significant increases in SNARK performance that remain to be unlocked. For example, while many of the computational steps involved in SNARK proving are perfectly parallelizable, this property hasn’t yet been fully implemented on hardware designed to exploit it, such as GPUs.

In the open and collaborative spirit of the crypto space, they’re partnering with teams from around the ecosystem to improve zk-SNARKs and share the resulting research with the broader community. CoinList and DeKrypt will be co-organizers, and sponsors include the ZCash Foundation, Tezos, and Protocol Labs. In addition to the contest, they’ll be hosting regular office hours from top researchers and practitioners and sending out online tutorials. There will be tracks to improve zkSNARKs through both cryptographic improvements and optimizing existing implementations. Sign up here if you’d like to get involved.

Rumors

Twitter:

Another Voynich special on this historic day for #tezos. $btc $bsv $xtz

Active Reddit discussions:

Bangkok based securities broker plans to offer tokenized real estate on Tezos by summer.

A new licensing model for Liquidity.

Local contract origination forging, and everything else.

Hitbtc disabled withdrawal of Tezos, do not trust them.

Tezos Wallet Delegation Series | Magnum: Cryptocurrency Wallet linked with Ledger Nano S.

Fred Wilson and Brian Armstrong talk about staking Tezos as an offer to institutional customers.

CALL TO ACTION: Let’s get #Tezos and #Athens trending on Twitter the day before Athens goes live!

Tezos decentralization comparison:

Other:

Follow Tezos on Blockfolio Signal.

Tezos (XTZ) is now available as Blockwatch analytics database including a full index of accounts, smart contracts, and supply.

tezblock — A Tezos Block Explorer Concept by Pascal Brun in AirGap blog: how the data of the Tezos protocol could be displayed to the users in a more accessible way.

Seven Trends in Blockchain Computing (Spring 2019) on a16z youtube channel: Olaf interview mentioning Tezos around min 12. He seems to like it and enjoy talking about it. Too bad the guy interviewing him is constantly interrumping! Just skip those parts until Olaf starts talking again.

Tezos — Welcome to Athens, the Birthplace of Blockchain Democracy on Blokt.com

The Giant Is Back: Tezos Imminent Arrival of its First On-Chain Protocol Upgrade on Cryptopotato.com

Is Tezos (XTZ) The Next Ethereum? But better? on Coindaily.co

Dogecoin [DOGE] coming soon on Payment processor Paytomat, Tezos added: Estonian payment processor, Paytomat added Tezos.

Social media metrics

Social media activity
Social media dynamics
Social media dynamics

The 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:

Learn about key operational entities

Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com

This is not financial advice.

Check our biweekly Tezos updates! Twitter. Telegram.

Eat Me. Drink Me. Bake Me.

Subscribe to detailed companies’ updates by Paradigm!

Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.

Blockchain
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Paradigm
Paradigm

Written by Paradigm

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