Since the launch of the Mainnet six months ago, the Tezos community has seen a brand new baking industry emerge, thousands of peers securing the network, the first amendment proposal, etc. During these two weeks, developers were working hard as usual and a lot of news appeared. Go Tezos — a GoLang driven library for your Tezos node released. Nomadic Labs demonstrated ‘snapshotting’ which will enable you to sync a full Tezos node with 1–2 minutes. Tezos Foundation announced they will support grants for Block Explorers and smart contract languages for Tezos Ecosystem. Tezzigator Receives Grant To Expand Cloud HSM Support For Tezos Bakers. Tezos Korea partners with Konkuk University to create a Tezos focused blockchain course for Master degree. They will also open the Tezos focused blockchain course at Samsung Multicampus. Bitcoin Suisse, located in Zug and one of the main crypto providers in Switzerland, plans to offer Tezos baking services to their clients. Brian Guo, an intern at TQ, launched Michelson Execution Engine. This project will assist in separating and modularizing the individual components of the codebase. Bruce Aldrich (DNAG), launched ‘Payman’, a Tezos batch payment tool for bakers using a golang Tezos library. Payman will make it easier for bakers to distribute batch payments to delegations. Gabriel Alfour provided an update on how the LIGO smart contract language for Tezos is becoming more accessible. As for social encounters, we would like to start off by acknowledging Tezos ‘100th’ Cycle, an absolutely incredible feat for the network, the community, and the broad Tezos ecosystem. The community witnessed a great month for April with events across the globe including a couple of inaugural events for new regions that boasted better than expected attendance. Tezos Boston hosted Kathleen & Arthur, Tezos Vienna had its first meetup hosted by Tezos community developer, Matej. We also saw the first pilot of Tezos on the Road in Brussels, a hands on workshop where attendees setup their own Tezos node. Tezos had its first premier conference in Paris thanks to TQ organizing. As for upcoming events, Tezos community looks forward to the next TQuorum happening in New York. Tezos Commons will sponsor BuidlBoston Hackathon, teams will compete for 10K XTZ during Boston Blockchain Week. Not to mention, the future for Tezos is just as bright with upcoming amendments involving zk-Snarks, Tendermint, and Marigold. Stay tuned!
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
Development
Supporting The Development Of Block Explorers And Smart Contract Languages For The Tezos Ecosystem:
To increase accessibility and spur more open source innovation in the Tezos ecosystem, the Tezos Foundation announced a new area of focus for the near future: supporting the development of additional open source block explorers and smart contract programming languages.
These tools are critical public infrastructure for those building on and using Tezos and the Tezos Foundation thinks they’re important to provide additional stability and product diversity for the community.
Block Explorers
In the months to come, they will fund the long-term development and maintenance of several open source block explorers, giving developers, wallet providers, and others access to a greater set of options to analyze and gather information about the Tezos blockchain.
They will encourage everyone developing these block explorers to collaborate on common standards to ensure the community has the most useful and accessible tools. This collaboration will include: API standards so bakers and other relying parties can query a block explorer and receive consistently formatted data; open source code and quality packaging to allow third parties to run their own public instances of block explorers; and operations and monitoring systems to ensure block explorers reliably provide accurate information.
The development of additional block explorers is already underway. Tezos.ID, a project from Tezos Southeast Asia, has been in operation since June 2017 and is expanding in functionality. Arronax, a project from Cryptonomic, is an analysis-focused block explorer that uses the Conseil API. They are currently in talks with OCamlPro, the developer of TzScan, to provide maintenance funding past its end-of-Q2 grant expiration. These projects, as well as new ones the Tezos Foundation will funds in the coming months, will establish a robust network of block explorers for the Tezos community to utilize.
Smart Contract Languages
Similarly, supporting the creation of new smart contract languages, which enables more developers to seamlessly build on Tezos, continues to be a primary focus of the Foundation. Their objective is to have wide language coverage, which will allow a larger audience of developers to more easily build on Tezos.
Some of this has already started. In addition to several open source high-level language projects, like SmartPy and fi, that have already received funding from the Foundation, Nomadic Labs will continue to work on Michelson, a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts on Tezos, as well as an additional low-level language, Albert, which will serve as a compilation target for other high-level languages. The development team behind LIGO, a simple language designed for relatively large smart contracts, recently announced that the LIGO compiler is equipped to integrate additional syntaxes for LIGO. Currently supported syntaxes are Pascaligo (Pascal-like syntax) and Cameligo (OCaml-like syntax).
Criteria for projects focused on building block explorers and languages to receive funding from the Foundation will be announced in the coming weeks. A full list of those selected as grant recipients for these projects will be announced. Stay tuned for more information.
Tezzigator Receives Grant To Expand Cloud HSM Support For Tezos Bakers:
The Tezos Foundation announced that it has issued a grant to Tezzigator LLC to implement Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud HSM support for Tezos bakers.
Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are physical devices that manage cryptographic keys for greater security. They may be used by Tezos bakers for validation, however, cloud HSM support for Tezos bakers was previously only available via Amazon Web Services. With this grant, the Tezzigator team will make cloud HSMs more accessible to Tezos bakers by enabling support on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
The repo for Microsoft Azure support is open-source and available for public use here. The repo for Google Cloud support is open-source and available for public use here.
The Tezos Foundation’s core mission is to support the long-term success of the Tezos protocol and ecosystem. By funding projects imagined by scientists, researchers, developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, the Foundation encourages decentralized development and robust participation.
Go Tezos Major Release v1.0.0, A GoLang Tezos Library:
Go Tezos is a GoLang driven library for your Tezos node. Go Tezos is split into multiple services underneath to help organize it’s functionality and also makes the library easier to maintain.
Introducing Snapshots and History Modes for the Tezos Node
In this article, the Nomadic Labs team introduces two new features for the Tezos node: snapshots and history modes.
A snapshot is a file that contains everything necessary to restore the state of a node at a given block. A node restored via a snapshot can synchronise and help other nodes synchronise in the existing network. The only difference is that you cannot query the chain context (balances, baking rights, etc.) before the restoration point, but you can still get the full chain history.
In conjunction, the team also introduces history modes, which represent different policies for determining which past data a node should maintain. They propose three modes: archive (the current mode which keeps everything), full (the new default) and rolling. For now, snapshots can fire up a node in either full or rolling mode.
These new features allow a user to spawn and synchronise a Tezos node in a few minutes, from a single, untrusted file of about 150MB compressed with a truncated history, or 800MB with a full history. You can test all of that by using the mainnet-snapshots branch on Nomadic Labs’ Gitlab.
- Spinning up a Tezos node in under a few minutes by Rajath Alex: An introduction to booting up a Tezos node using snapshots and history modes.
- Signing Tezos Transactions with iOS’s Secure Enclave and Face ID by Keefer Taylor.
- LIGO becomes Polyglot: Gabriel Alfour provides an update on how the LIGO smart contract language for Tezos is becoming more accessible.
- Introducing The Michelson Execution Engine by Brian Guo.
- How to Delegate Tezos’ XTZ with SimpleStaking Web Wallet and Trezor Model T by Awa Sun Yin.
- Liquid Governance in Tezos by William McKenzie: How Tezos’ governance structure mirrors a self-adjusting and self-reconfiguring cross between Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy.
- Institutional Demand & Tezos Universal Basic Income (TBI) by William McKenzie: How earning a steady income through crypto may be a hedging bet with interest rates and bond yields at historic lows.
- The Whats & Whys: Basis Price In Grain Markets and Decet’s Tezos Solution by Gordon Speagle.
- High Frequency Tezos ICO password cracking with NVIDIA GTX/RTX by Cal Naughton Jr.
- Fast and targeted cracking approaches for longer Tezos ICO passwords.
Social encounters
Speakers:
- Arthur Breitman, Tezos
- Patrick Nielsen, Clovyr
- Lane Rettig, Crypto NYC
Moderator: Brett Hemenway, The Wharton School
Penn Blockchain Club is a premier student club at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. They facilitate great conversations between Blockchain enterprises, students, and academics to further the knowledge of Blockchain in the Penn community and beyond.
Arthur of kicks of another packed-out coinscrum. Pitching the case for public ledgers.
- Interview Arthur Breitman — CTO and Founder of Tezos by Bitcoin Magazine NL.
- Tezos Co-Founder: ‘Applications Will Multiply on the Tezos Blockchain This Year’: BeInCrypto Interview.
- A message from Ryan Jesperson, President of the Tezos Foundation: video.
- Ryan Jesperson: «Making Sure We’re Getting Tezos Foundation Right: Tezos is moving on from a messy public controversy over control, with the cryptocurrency project singled out by a major U.S. crypto custodian and a key voting process underway. finews.com checks in with foundation president Ryan Jesperson.
- Tezonomics Podcast #6 — Alessandro De Carli of Airgap Wallet: On this week’s episode, sponsored by Tezos Commons, Jonas Lamis sits down with Alessandro, the founder of Airgap Wallet. Airgap, a grantee of Tezos Foundation, is an innovative new open source cryptographic hardware wallet that takes advantage of a second phone to serve as your private key vault.
These weeks events:
- April 27th: TEZOS On The ROAD Tour: Brussels — Onepoint Academy Chaussée de la Hulpe 120, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium.
- April 29th: Tezos Seattle Meetup — SURF Incubator. 999 3rd Ave Suite 700 · Seattle, WA.
- May 7th: Tezos UK Meetup — Monzo 38 Finsbury Square, Finsbury, London EC2A 1PX, UK.
- May 2nd: Tezos x Adopthon Series, Amsterdam: Real Estate on the Blockchain
- May 7th: Tezos London — featuring Arthur Breitman
- May 10th: Tezos Hackathon Prep Workshop (BuidlBoston Hackathon)
Upcoming events:
- May 11th-12th: Tezos Boston Hackathon
- May 14th: Tezos TQ NYC — Celebrate Tezos during NY Blockchain Week
- May 18th: Tezos India — Bangalore (details will be posted)
- May 21st: [Indonesia] TSA x Exabytes ID Workshop
- May 22nd: [Indonesia] TSA x Triv Meetup
- May 23rd: Tezos Zug — lets make crypto valley great again!
- May 25th: Tezos on the Road — ‘Baking Day’, London
- May 29th: [Singapore] TSA x Exabytes SG Workshop
- June 15th: TEZOS On The ROAD Tour: Berlin — Die Wiesenburg Wiesenstraße 55, 13357 Berlin, Germany.
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:
- An Introduction to Coase | Kathleen Breitman.
- Meet the Visionaries | Q/A with Kathleen Breitman, Meltem Demirors, and Alison Mangiero.
- Finding the “but why” for Tezos | Meltem Demirors.
- Some Founding Fathers Sh*t | Alison Mangiero.
- Meet the Builders | Q/A with Stephen Andrews, Bernd Oostrum, Sony Joseph.
- Making Blockchain Friendly | Stephen Andrews, TezTech.
- The Future of Insurance is Decentralized | Bernd Oostrum, Tezsure.
- Our Journey from DeFI CeDeFI | Sony Joseph, Kalhatti.
Finance
Information from Tzscan.io:
Information from Coingecko.com (May 10th, 2019):
- XTZ listing on DX.Exchange confirmed.
- Payman — A Tezos Batch Payment Tool by Brice Aldrich.
Payman is an opensource free to use tool under the MIT License. If you are a current or upcoming baker participating in Tezos this tutorial may be helpful. This tutorial will focus on how to use Payman to payout batch payments to your delegations. There are existing tools in the Tezos ecosystem that do the same thing, but I believe that Payman is easier to use, and more configurable.
Paytomat has now successfully launched its integration with Tezos, based on the community vote that took place during March. Users will now be able to store, transfer, and spend Tezos using the Paytomat infrastructure.
Paytomat is an infrastructure platform enabling to use cryptocurrencies in everyday life. A set of Paytomat solutions opens the possibilities of the decentralized world to the wide masses, hedging the risks, increasing speed and enabling instant payments in multiple cryptocurrencies. Paytomat products include a multicurrency wallet with EOS dapps, various plugins for Point-of-Sale and e-commerce systems, as well as standalone crypto payment solution.
For more information on how to get started, please visit Paytomat.
Partnerships and team members
- Bitcoin Suisse, one of Switzerland’s main crypto service providers located in Zug and a partner of the Tezos foundation during the crowd sale, plans to offer Tezos baking for their customers.
- Tezos Korea Foundation X Graduate School of Information Communication, Konkuk University:
TKF partners with Konkuk University to create Tezos focused blockchain course for Master degree.
Rumors
Twitter:
Active Reddit discussions:
TzScan and Liquidity projects at OCamlPro.
Magnum Wallet Android App is available on Google Play.
Why am I hyped about recent news of Bitcoin Suisse.
A Stack Of Tezos Plastic Wallets.
Fun fact: Tezos is the only coin in top 16 that is not on Binance.
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
