Hello, and welcome to our fresh biweekly report on Tezos! With the growth of the Tezos Ecosystem and community, a lot of news and events appear on a daily basis. We are here to cover all the essential recent updates to keep You informed. So let’s first have a short overview of what was up in Tezos over the past two weeks!
Luke Youngblood and Keefer Taylor released Harbinger, a self-sustaining price oracle for Tezos. As we know, in Tezos, delegators receive a share of the block rewards they earn by helping to secure the Tezos network. In Harbinger, an account that pays for fees to update the price oracle can be delegated and pre-funded with tez. This enables the development of self-sustaining price oracles, where the rewards for participating in proof of stake consensus offset the fees required to keep the oracle data current. Next, Madfish Solutions released a new update of their Solidity to LIGO transpiler. MIDL.dev launched version v1.1 of their Tezos baking infrastructure software suite with monitoring and alerting built-in. Payzos released the WooCommerce Plugin v3.1.0. For those unaware, Payzos is a set of plugins for different E-commerce platforms that lets you set up Tezos as a payment method for your online store.
Moreover, Runtime Verification Inc. published a short summary of their work on K-Michelson, verifying Michelson in Michelson, on Agora. Tezos and Spruce Systems have begun working on adding decentralized identity capabilities built using the latest W3C standards. The first efforts will result in extensible open-source identity products built on Tezos, including tools for the issuance, storage, verification, and governance of trusted information to allow any Tezos account to demonstrate who (or what) they are on their terms, without sacrificing privacy.
Furthermore, tZERO, a leader in financial innovation and liquidity for private companies, announced that secondary trading of the St. Regis Aspen digital security commenced on the tZERO ATS, marking the platform’s first third-party security. In addition, this is the first digital security trading on a regulated platform that utilizes the Tezos Blockchain. The shares represent approximately 19 percent of ownership in the St. Regis Aspen Resort, a five-star, 179-room luxury hotel that is located in Aspen, Colorado.
Tezos public life was also pretty active over this period. TQ Tezos hosted the TQuorum virtual event featuring Stephane de Beats from Elevated Returns and Scott Bambacigno from AlphaPoint. They additionally hosted a Tezos Town Hall as part of its TQuorum event series. What’s more, TQ Tezos’ Sebastien Mondet presented on “OCaml Under the Hood: SmartPy” at the OCaml 2020 Workshop. Tezos Commons released TezTalks episode 7, featuring a discussion on protocol 007, zkChannels, STO developments, and more. They also published TezTalks Radio Episode 8 featuring a conversation with Vishakh Null of Cryptonomic.
Significantly, on August 27, 2020 the Honorable Judge Seeborg approved the Final Settlement Order for the Tezos class-action lawsuit. It has been a long, tumultuous journey, almost three years worth of litigation, and finally, the litigation has come to an end — no more legal clouds hanging over the project.
For more news and details, please, check the report below! See you in two weeks!
Development
For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.
Harbinger is a project aimed to deliver signed price feeds based on market data from multiple exchanges to the Tezos network — and, hopefully, a sign of what is to come.
Tezos is a liquid proof of stake cryptocurrency network, so account holders can delegate their Tezos to a validator (referred to as a “baker”). Delegators receive a share of the block rewards they earn by helping to secure the Tezos network. In Harbinger, an account that pays for fees to update the price oracle can be delegated and pre-funded with tez. This enables the development of self-sustaining price oracles, where the rewards for participating in proof of stake consensus offset the fees required to keep the oracle data current.
Article dives into oracles and how they’re a key building block of Decentralized Finance or “DeFi”. Authors also provide an overview of the Harbinger Price Oracle and why it marks an important step towards creating a Decentralized Finance ecosystem on Tezos.
The 20,000th Smart Contract milestone on Carthagenet was reached! More and more developers are getting onboarded and numbers are growing on Mainnet too.
Dalphanet is a test network of the upcoming Tezos protocol amendment. You can connect to the testnet with https://dalphanet-tezos.giganode.io. Follow the details about the Dalphanet on TezosAgora forum.
- Off-chain events and Tezos tokens indexing by Baking Bad team
In this article an approach to the token balance accounting is presented. This is a development of the ideas presented earlier taking into account the upcoming contract metadata standard TZIP-16. In a few words, there is a problem when indexing operations that alter token balances: if the invoked method is not standardized (currently there are only FA1.2/FA2 transfer), or if there is an initial token distribution at the origination — it’s not possible for the indexer to determine which particular balances have changed and how. And so the goal is to get the list of changed token balances from the operation content and result. Learn more via the link above.
This version is officially listed in the WordPress plugins store. Payzos is set of plugins for different E-commerce platforms that lets you set up Tezos as a payment method for your online store. Plugin link on WP; GitLab source.
Payzos Features :
- No Third Party — All Payzos payments will be directly sent to your own address. No intermediaries.
- Zero cost — Low fees and fast confirmation because of using the Tezos blockchain
- UI / UX — The pleasant experience of working with a modern payment service
Take your Michelson skills to the next level with a more complex project. In the last tutorial about Michelson programming language (the miniTez token), Claude Barde explained a creation a simple token that was just transferring an amount of tokens from one account to another with minimal verifications. For this tutorial, he will use the notebooks with the Michelson kernel developed by Baking Bad as it will give the flexibility necessary to test the code while writing it. The tutorial will be divided into multiple parts: this first part is an introduction to the TZIP-7 standard and presents the values used for the parameter and storage of the smart contract. The different entrypoints of the contract require their own articles, which will be the subject of the following parts of this tutorial.
Part 2 is availbale via the link.
Currently the onboarding process for new delegators can turn out to be cumbersome. Imagine you’re looking for a new baker and you end up on the website of “bread & butter”. What you usually is one or multiple guides for various wallets on how to delegate to “bread & butter”. But why not just a “Delegate Now” button on the “bread & butter” website that display a QR code you could scan with your mobile wallet? Or automatically connects to your browser extension?
This is now possible with the Beacon SDK. You can easily integrate this functionality into your website, even if it’s just a simple landing page or for example a Wordpress website.
Ecosystem Updates
- Madfish Solutions released a new update of their Solidity to LIGO transpiler.
- MIDL.dev released version v1.1 of their Tezos baking infrastructure software suite with monitoring and alerting built in.
- TQ Tezos’ Sebastien Mondet presented on “OCaml Under the Hood: SmartPy” at the OCaml 2020 Workshop.
- Baking Bad published an article covering common reasons Tezos community members fail to receive their staking rewards.
- Runtime Verification Inc. published a short summary of their work on K-Michelson, verifying Michelson in Michelson, on Agora.
- Serokell published a blog post on Peer to Peer Networking in Tezos on Agora.
- TQ Tezos hosted a Tezos Town Hall as part of its TQuorum event series.
News and Social Encounters
On August 27, 2020 the Honorable Judge Seeborg approved the Final Settlement Order for the Tezos class-action lawsuit. It has been a long tumultuous journey, almost 3 years worth of litigation (by unscrupulous/unsavory people that needlessly slowed the project and caused irreparable harm), and on, August, 27, 2020, the litigation has come to an end. There are many people have been waiting for this day. We are now 100% of the way done. No more legal clouds hanging over the project. The project moves on. Sign, sealed, and delivered.
Following Spruce’s launch this week and announcement of their collaboration with the Tezos ecosystem, Tezos Foundation sat down with Spruce’s Founder & CEO, Wayne Chang, to learn more about the company and how it will advance the Tezos project.
Kukai underwent an update recently, and then the Foundation decided to catch up with Kukai lead developer Klas Viktor Harrysson from Tezos Commons to discuss the evolution of the Kukai wallet and the new features he and his team are working on.
In the eighth episode of TezTalks Radio, hosts Brian Li and William McKenzie sit down with Vishakh Null of Cryptonomic Tech to discuss Conseil, Nautilus Cloud, Protocol 007, and more.
Read a bi-weekly update featuring Tezos related news, upcoming events, new projects, featured articles, interviews, tutorials, and oh so much more.
Upcoming events
TezTalks Live is the virtual meetup series that is streamed in real time with the actors of Tezos ecosystem. TezTalks Radio is a video podcast that finds the “why” behind the latest Tezos news and discover the stories behind the people of Tezos. See more on the website.
- 2nd September 2020 — Staking and baking on Tezos with Kiln. At the next TQuorum Session, the features of Kiln will be explored, including the recent release of Kiln for MacOS. Other features of the application include the ability to monitor nodes and bakers, as well as offering users a convenient UI to set up a node.
- 5th September 2020 — ChainCamp in Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic
- 11th September 2020 — TezTalks Live #11
- 21st September 2020 — TezTalks Radio #10 — Carlo Van Driesten from ENVITED Group
- 29st September 2020 — TezTalks Live #12 — Andrew Paulicek on Domains
Finance
Also see amazing Tezos Explorer by Baking Bad team — TzKT.
tZERO, a leader in financial innovation and liquidity for private companies, announced that secondary trading of the St. Regis Aspen digital security commenced on the tZERO ATS, marking the platform’s first third-party security. In addition, this is the first digital security trading on a regulated platform that utilizes the Tezos Blockchain. The shares represent approximately 19 percent of ownership in the St. Regis Aspen Resort, a five-star, 179-room luxury hotel that is located in Aspen, Colorado.
- Deep Dive into STO’s — Current State on Tezos by William McKenzie
It’s clear Tezos being chosen as the platform for several companies and institutions to conduct their STO’s on is not a trend that should be left disregarded. As announcements of STO deals on Tezos begin to manifest into actuality, what will unfold in the coming months/years in the space will be worth watching. Learn more in the article above!
Current Planned STO’s and Infrastructure on Tezos:
- Elevated Returns and Securitize
- BTG Pactual and Dalma Capital
- tZERO and Alliance Investments
- Fundament Group
- Equisafe
- Vertalo
- Andra Capital and TokenSoft
- QR Capital
- Citadel.one Staking guide: Tezos
Partnerships, integrations and team members
Tezos and Spruce have begun working to add decentralized identity capabilities built using the latest W3C standards. The first efforts will result in extensible open-source identity products built on Tezos, including tools for the issuance, storage, verification, and governance of trusted information to allow any Tezos account to demonstrate who (or what) they are on their own terms, without sacrificing privacy.
Spruce collaborates with the team at TQ Tezos to bring digital identity to life, and they are also looking forward to working with ecosystem projects such as Tezos Domains, Taquito, Beacon, Kukai, and Agora in order to augment their initiatives with Tezos-based decentralized identities.
Other
FAQs from Tezos Foundation
How is the search for the new TF president (Executive Director) going on? When can we expect to hear about this hire?
The hiring process of a new Executive Director of TF is a long process which requires a lot of diligence. It is being handled by a UK based executive recruitment firm. We expect to have the hiring completed towards the end of 2020.
When is the new biannual financial report going to be published?
We are currently in the process of finalizing content for the latest biannual update and expect to have it published in September.
Why hasn’t the Tezos Foundation ceded baking rights to the community yet? Surely by stepping back from baking, there would be an increase in bakers coming online to capture the newly freed up share of block and endorsement inflation? Wouldn’t this be a good step towards greater decentralization of the protocol? And wouldn’t it give more power to the community? Why not step back gradually by removing 1 Foundation Baker every 3 months or so to get an idea on how this would impact the security of the network?
As we’ve stated before, we do not currently have plans to shut down Foundation baking operations but this question regularly comes up in Foundation deliberations and is consistently being evaluated. The Foundation’s purpose is to support the Tezos ecosystem, and all baking rewards that the Foundation receives will eventually be used to further support the advancement of the Tezos project.
What sort of outreach is the Tezos Foundation making to increase awareness of the Tezos protocol, either through general marketing, or through business development?
We have undertaken a number of initiatives to increase awareness of the Tezos protocol, both from a general marketing perspective and via business development outreach. On the general marketing front, the Tezos Foundation has provided funding to a number of entities around the world who focus on coordinating marketing efforts and driving awareness for Tezos. Tezos Commons, Tezos India, Tezos West Africa, and TQ Tezos, are prime examples. We believe global alignment across regional marketing efforts within the ecosystem help consistently position and scale awareness for Tezos. The goal is to ensure that Tezos is seen as the blockchain of choice for developers and teams building on a blockchain in the future. That said, if you have a specific marketing opportunity and would like to be considered for funding, please reach out to us at grants@tezos.com. On the business development front, the Tezos Foundation and entities around the world are entering into a number of partnerships with well-known entities to drive industry adoption for a number of valuable use cases. While our early focus was on improving the protocol’s tooling and infrastructure to make building on Tezos easier and more secure, we are focusing more every day on the development of end-user applications and high-value business applications. We are committed to aggressively and effectively deploying funds to grow the Tezos ecosystem globally and make Tezos easy to adopt.
Do you plan to put in place any community ambassador/outreach or some such program to allow the TF and the Tezos community to work together?
The Tezos Foundation is part of the Tezos community and takes into consideration community feedback when making decisions. We are open for discussion and regularly interact with numerous ecosystem participants and frequently solicit feedback from the community. While there are no specific plans for a community ambassador/outreach program in the immediate future, we will certainly consider doing so. In the meantime, we encourage community members to reach out to contact@tezos.com with ideas for more ways we can be transparent and inclusive of the community.
Recently there was a request to the Ethereum community to provide an accounting of the total outstanding supply of Ethereum apparently not an easy question to answer for Ethereum. Do we (Tezos) have a command/script to output this number?
The current protocol does not keep track of a tally of all XTZ on the network, so there is no node RPC that will give you that information. There have been some public discussions about the inclusion of an RPC in a future proposal and, as with all Tezos amendment proposals, we leave that decision to the community. However, some block explorers, like tzstats.com, do keep track of total supply. As of today, the total supply is 846.8m XTZ, but this number will grow with the protocol itself.
What courses/bootcamps are available for developers?
As we covered in a previous update, we support a diverse mixture of introductory courses, developer trainings, and other resources to bolster the Tezos developer community. For those who want to receive an introduction to writing smart contracts on Tezos, Blockmatics offers a self-paced online developer course that teaches the basics of SmartPy and the SmartPy IDE and lets students compile and deploy smart contracts to a Tezos testnet. Tezos Academy, another excellent introduction to Tezos smart contracts created by the OCTO Technology team, hosts a fun interactive tutorial to the LIGO language.
If you’re interested in Dapp development, the BUIDL Labs team created Cryptoverse Wars, an interactive code school to build Dapps on Tezos using SmartPy. We are also supporting two new training resources. Tezos Kitchen by the Stove Labs team, a comprehensive and up-to-date curriculum of content for developers to learn how Tezos can be utilized for a variety of use-cases, and Tezos Labs, an interactive Tezos developer training program from Baking Bad.
Finally, entities from the entire Tezos ecosystem including Baking Bad, Beacon, Cryptonomic, the LIGO team, Magic, SmartPy, Stove Labs, Tezos Taquito, Tezos Commons, Truffle, and TQ Tezos contributed their own workshop webinars as part of the Tezos + CoinList Hackathon that wrapped up earlier in July.
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 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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