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Tezos: Tenderbake Introduced, A Message From Ryan Jesperson, Core Development AMA, Sony Invested In Securitize, Taurus Group Partnership, A New Version Of The “Mainnet-Staging” Branch, Promotion Phase For Carthage 2.0, A Worldwide University Voting Experiment On Tezos

Paradigm
Paradigm
Published in
13 min readFeb 15, 2020

Biweekly update 1st February — 15th February

Hello, amazing Crypto Community! In this biweekly update, we cover the news of the past two weeks from Tezos teams, Foundation, grantees, and operational entities! This period was pretty eventful both for the development, public, and community side of the project. To begin with, Ryan Jesperson informed the Council that he would not seek reelection this spring, thus leaving the post of the President of the Tezos Foundation. In his message, he mentioned that all his objectives were reached, and “it is now time for somebody else to take this place and continue the momentum.”

Furthermore, the Japanese multinational group Sony invested in Securitize through Sony Financial Ventures and Japan-based VC firm Global Brain. This is another validation of the Tezos ecosystem, as Securitize is in the process of tokenizing $1 billion worth of real estate assets on Tezos through a collaboration with Elevated Returns. Recently, Securitize published a video demonstrating how to issue and manage tokens on Tezos. In addition, Taurus Group announced the first results of its strategic collaboration with the Tezos Foundation, as they integrated the Tezos protocol into its digital asset infrastructure so that its clients can securely store and transfer Tezos-based tokens. The second phase of the collaboration will enhance Taurus’ existing infrastructure to integrate capital markets use-cases and transactions based on Tezos.

As for the development updates, there is a lot to mention! AirGap released the latest report on tezblock, which includes baker charts, CSV exports, and baking & endorsing fees/deposits. Catsigma launched a new version of Misualizer, a tool that allows users to visualize all possible behaviors of Tezos smart contracts and trace all of their internal transactions to get complete pictures of different entry points. DaiLambda stated that SCaml, a language for Tezos smart contracts, is now available as a docker image. It was also included in the LIGO team’s latest update on Tezos smart contract languages. Nomadic Labs published a new paper, “Tenderbake, a Classical BFT Style Consensus for Public Blockchains,” in collaboration with CEA List. Moreover, Cryptium Labs announced that the promotion phase for Carthage 2.0 has now started, and provided resources to learn about it. Check our update for more dev&tech highlights!

Plenty of community events were arranged, and even more, are planned! TQ Tezos, Nomadic Labs, Cryptium Labs, DaiLambda, and others held a Tezos core development AMA on Agora, providing detailed answers for all the topical questions. Additionally, Nomadic Labs hosted multiple days of Tezos training sessions. Tezos India Foundation is organizing TezIndia v. Harappa, a month-long online Tezos hackathon. TQ Tezos announced that the next TQuorum would happen in Paris on 30th March. By the way, Electis, a community-based organization dedicated to exploring all kinds of technologies to push for safe e-voting solutions, announced a new worldwide university voting experiment on Tezos — learn more in our update!

As usual, the Tezos community keeps growing in social networks, chats, and Agora Forum! Stay informed with Paradigm!

Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com

Development

Gitlab metrics

For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io)
  • Nomadic Labs announced Tenderbake, a Classical BFT Style Consensus for Public Blockchains. The paper was published in collaboration with CEA List. In contrast to recent proposals, Tenderbake works with bounded message buffers. This feature represents a countermeasure to spamming and prevents runtime memory errors. For these reasons, they think that Tenderbake is suitable for blockchains aiming to guarantee deterministic finality in a public setting. Learn how this could be included in a future Tezos protocol upgrade.
  • QuipuSwap — liquidity protocol (Update #1). QuipuSwap is an open-source protocol that provides an interface for the seamless exchange of Tezos-based Tokens and XTZ. The best part is there are no intermediaries, the priority is in decentralization and censorship resistance.

What are their goals?

  1. Create an easy-to-use UI for users to interact with the system (Exchange and Providing Liquidity)
  2. Incentivize liquidity providers by adding a fee that they will earn proportionally to their deposited liquidity share
  3. Support all Tezos token standards (Multi-Asset Contract, FA1.2, etc.) to cover as many use-cases as possible
  4. Allow users to exchange tokens and send them directly to another address from the UI

Features:

  1. Local Forging — allows you to forge operations without relying on a Tezos node RPC.
  2. Composite Forger — allows you to forge an operation using more than one forging method, such as nodes forge RPC and Local forger.
  3. Batch Operation API — allows you to group many operations into a single operation.
  4. Taquito minified build published to unpkg.com CDN — Developers can now use Taquito using a <script> tag instead of using a package manager such as yarn or npm.
  5. Michelson encoder validation — Taquito now type checks data passed to the Michelson encoder prior to calling the RPC, providing better developer UX and faster error surfacing.
  6. Subscribe to operations (experimental)
  7. Other changes
  1. A new page displaying the health of the Tezos node and the Conseil instance connected to the explorer has been introduced.
  2. A new page displaying the protocols constants has been introduced.
  3. Accumulated Baking & Endorsing Rights for each cycle show now the deposits and fees. Also the individual Baking Rights show now the relevant fees and deposits, the Endorsing Rights display now the relevant Deposit.
  4. In addition to the baker overview with their most important metrics a pie chart was introduced showing the top 25 bakers in the Tezos ecosystem by staking balance.

{Improvements & changes}

Additionally to the features many small changes have been done.

  1. readme: updates readme instructions
  2. chart-item: better hover management and more relevant data in label
  3. tezblock-table: refactor to predicate or
  4. app: local caching of external API calls
  5. header-item: hiding dropdowns upon leaving them with cursor
  6. baker-table: always show 30 days in chart-item
  • LIGO team regular update on Tezos smart contract languages, including new sections on SCaml and Archetype.
  • Thanos. Metamask-like wallet for Tezos.Thanos wallet is yet another project they are actively developing at Madfish. The idea of this wallet came to dev’s minds back at the EETH hackathon held in Kyiv in Fall, 2019. The goal was to build a Chrome extension based wallet with the ability to call smart-contracts right from the DApp webpages similarly to the way it’s implemented in Metamask for Ethereum.
  • BCD2 — Tezos smart contracts hub — Evolution of the Better Call Dev explorer. The global goals are to give developers a tool to manage all their Tezos projects and make the dapp ecosystem more transparent to the community. Check what’s new about the explorer in the article! Besides the new features, some existing functionality is to be extended as well. Better operations displaying and filtering, rich code viewer, switching between different representations, and of course a cleaner UI.
  • A new version of the “mainnet-staging” branch released by Nomadic Labs. It fixes a bug that caused endorsements to be discarded if they arrived in a node’s mempool before the endorsed block itself was validated. Upgrading to this new release will let the baker include more endorsements! The network will improve as more users deploy this version of the node. More Information including their plan to discontinue support for the “mainnet lmdb” branch in the post on Tezos Agora forum.
  • Catsigma launched Misualizer version 0.0.6. The diff page can display the difference between the two Michelson data in the graph.

Two smart contracts used in camlCase, which will serve as critical components of the decentralized Dexter digital asset exchange, are currently being formally verified. You can read more about Dexter in camlCase’s blog post.

  1. Nomadic Labs visited Cobra, short for the Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus. Due to their similar interests in academic research, they discussed possible collaborations and gave a technical Tezos presentation.
  2. They attended The annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2020) in New Orleans. Michel Mauny, Germán Delbianco, and Bruno Bernardo were present to answer Tezos-related questions.

Nomadic Labs sponsored the Southwestern Europe Regional programming Contest (SWERC) 2019–2020, which was organized by the “Institut Polytechnique de Paris” and took place at Télécom Paris on January 25th and 26th. Mehdi Bouaziz from Nomadic Labs was the judge during the “Problem analysis session”. A few lucky winners went home with a brand new ledger hardware wallet. You can view the video including the award ceremony here.

  1. Pietro Abate from Nomadic Labs attended the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona.
  2. They are equally proud to be one of 11 founding members of ADAN, the “Association for the Development of Digital Assets”. By bringing together French industry actors and representing them, ADAN aims to promote the development of digital assets in France and Europe.

And a lot more!

{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}

  1. Cryptonomic released Galleon 0.9.3b for macOS following the Apple app notarization process.
  2. DaiLambda announced that SCaml, a language for Tezos smart contracts, is now available as a docker image.
  3. IMDEA Software Institute hosted chainrEaction, a blockchain hackathon for environmental action in Madrid.
  4. TezosKit published an update following its grant from the Tezos Foundation to build additional features for Tezos on mobile devices.
  5. Tezos Commons released its February community update with a schedule of upcoming community events around the world.
  6. TZ Ventures announced that the Tezos Combinator Demo Day will be on Thursday, March 19 in Singapore.

{Foundation Activities}

The Foundation is still soliciting applications for the next ecosystem grants RFP in the following categories:

  1. Applications built using Tezos smart contracts (with a special interest in Decentralized Finance, or “DeFi”, and digital securities applications)
  2. Tools for Tezos smart contract development (e.g. smart contract testing tools, smart contract templates, infrastructure, etc.)
  3. Educational/training resources covering Tezos (e.g. Kauri, CryptoZombies, etc.)
  4. Projects focused on using Tezos in new markets (industries and/or geographies)
  5. Marketing and other initiatives to help increase awareness of Tezos and its ecosystem
  6. Tooling around Tez as money
  7. Projects which are uniquely possible on Tezos
  8. Other proposals for projects targeting categories not listed above that may benefit the Tezos ecosystem

Prospective applicants have until February 21 to submit their proposals.

{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}

  1. Cryptium Labs published Chapter 2, Part 1 of its series “Meanwhile at Cryptium Labs” on enhancing baking accounts.
  2. Cryptium Labs announced that the promotion phase for Carthage 2.0 has now started, and provided resources to learn more about Carthage.
  3. Madfish Solutions published a quick overview of how Solidity gets translated into LIGO.
  4. Nomadic Labs hosted multiple days of Tezos training sessions this week.
  5. Tezos India Foundation is hosting TezIndia v. Harappa, a month-long online Tezos hackathon.
  6. Tezos Rio released version 1.1.5 of the TAPS automatic rewards payment system with improved payout accuracy.
  7. TzStats added 25 new endpoints to its Tezos block explorer.

Social encounters

  • Tezos Core Development AMA — Nomadic Labs, Cryptium Labs, DaiLambda. Check the answers from development teams that work on the core protocol.
  • Tezos Southeast Asia tweeted “Starting the morning at FC20!”

“Wrapping up Financial Cryptography and Security 2020 with Philippe and Raphael from Nomadic Labs! Raphael is also here to present his research paper on Albert, an intermediate smart-contract language for Tezos!”

  • Electis is kicking off a worldwide university voting experiment powered by the Tezos network. Electis is a non-profit, community-based organization. They arrange the “Cross-university vote project”, an impartial, international and academic project in cooperation with universities, students and scientists. An open-source voting platform is being developed by a group of blockchain and e-voting experts and with the involvement of students. The goal is more than the development of another e-voting application: it is to prove the suitability of blockchain for secure e-voting in principles. It will be tested in cooperation with a network of universities worldwide to provide visibility, scientific scrutiny and bring safe e-voting to academic institutions all over the globe.
  • Nomadic Labs’ Tezos dev training:

Topics included:

  1. Introduction to the structure of the project and ecosystem
  2. Consensus
  3. Fees and gas in Michelson Smart Contracts
  4. Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  • Bakers Summit Recap — On February 7th, 2020, 43 bakers spanning across 13 different countries made their way to Vienna, Austria to convene and hold a Bakers Summit.

Speakers of the night (FOR THE SUMMIT):

  1. Tezos Isreal showed about what they’re doing in Israel and some of the upcoming events that have planned. Tezos On the Road and community building;
  2. Baker Tools; Tezos Reward Distributor(“TRD”) by StakeNOW; Daniel showed some cool things he was building on which will make batch reward distribution a lot simpler for bakers.
  3. TezosUK showed about some of their upcoming events and some of their partnerships. Very neat stuff!
  4. Jonas from Tezos Capital and StakerDAO showed his plans for Staker DAO and how they’re pushing forward with sophisticated smart contract building using the Tezos network.

Upcoming events:

Visit Tezos Foundation Events page to learn more.

Finance

The information is taken from TzStats
The information is taken from Tezos.ID
The information is taken from Tezos.ID
The information is taken from Tezos.ID

Partnerships and team members

Securitize Inc released a video demo demonstrating how to issue and manage tokens on Tezos.

“When I became President of the Tezos Foundation in February of 2018, I had two main objectives. The first was to get the Foundation back on track and the second was to help, along with the rest of the Tezos community, to move the Tezos project forward. I have finished what I came to do and it is now time for somebody else to take my place and continue the momentum we have built over the past two years. To this end, I have informed the Council that I will not seek reelection to the Council this spring.”

  • Strategic cooperation between Taurus Group and Tezos Foundation. Taurus Group SA (“Taurus”) announced that it has integrated the Tezos protocol into its digital asset infrastructure that includes TAURUS-PROTECT, its leading digital asset custody solution for banks, asset managers, and exchanges, as well as TAURUS-EXPLORER, its blockchain as a service connectivity infrastructure. This is the first step of several strategic initiatives.

Social media metrics

Social media activity
Social media dynamics
Social media dynamics

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:

Learn about key operational entities

Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com

This is not financial advice.

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Paradigm
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Written by Paradigm

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