Tezos 2020 is right here! As always, we have a lot to tell you about the current state of the project, its progress, and community expansion! Tezos grantees, teams, Foundation, and operational entities performed such a considerable amount of development that you should definitely check out our update not to miss anything! So let’s get started with news of the past two weeks. Baking Bad published a blog post on Netezos, a .NET Standard 2.0 library for working with Tezos; the blog shows use cases of working with local forging and the Tezos Ledger App. They also released and provided the necessary information on their new TzKT block explorer, which now allows you to view raw RPC JSON. Another explorer, TezEdge, was introduced by the SimpleStaking team to provide users with an ability to monitor interactions between the Tezos protocol and storage. The LIGO team published part 2 of R&D analysis on Tezos address naming schemes, focused on choosing a name format. In addition, they posted an update on LabNet to Tezos Agora and a series of posts on Tezos smart contract languages.
Nomadic Labs team was jam-packed, working on multiple projects. They formally verified the spending limit contract, which can now be used with the Android version of the Cortez wallet. Moreover, Nomadic Labs researchers Bruno Bernardo, Raphaël Cauderlier, Julien Tesson, and Basile Pesin combined forces to publish a paper, “Albert, an intermediate smart-contract language for the Tezos blockchain.” Raphaël Cauderlier will present on Albert at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference 2020 in Malaysia. Finally, Nomadic announced that it partnered with Inria to develop a research program dedicated to Tezos and blockchain technology in general. The collaboration has funded four projects and eleven researchers in France so far.
Further on the progress: the CatSigma released the new TezBridge v2.4.1 that enables users to test their operations and check the possible result on-chain before approving a DApp operation request. Cryptium Labs announced that it is developing a new smart contract language, Juvix. Juvix is designed to address the problems that they have experienced while trying to write & deploy decentralized applications. These issues include the difficulty of sufficient verification, the ceiling of compositional complexity, the illegibility of execution costs, and the lock-in to particular backends. Next, Obsidian Systems released a new version of Kiln that fixes logging issues and turns off Ledger connectivity checks by default. Tezos Rio released TezosJ_plainJava v1.1.0, which allows developers to call Tezos smart contracts easily. All of the above seems impressive, right?
Well, the social media and community side of Tezos are impressive either. A lot of events, workshops, and meetups were arranged along with the publication of dozens of articles and blog posts! Tezos Israel was launched; they will host a meetup on 23rd January on the present & future of business solutions in their region. Tezos Cameroon will organize another meetup on the last day of February. By the way, don’t miss an interview with Jonas Lamis, CEO of Tezos Capital, on his new project, StakerDAO, published by Tezos Commons. In order to support and educate community members and developers-newcomers, the Archetype team created a blog post, “Developing a Dapp on Tezos.” Tezsure also shared their own Tezos Developer Guide. Besides, the Tezos Foundations’ weeks were bustling. They will announce the grant recipients from the most recent ecosystem grants RFP soon. They will also issue the next request for proposals (RFP), and encourage all teams eager to contribute to the Tezos ecosystem to apply. In addition to the grantmaking activities, Tezos Foundation Technology Officer, Marco Schurtenberger, recently added an article on “Public vs Private Blockchains” to Bitcoin Suisse’s “Crypto Outlook Report 2020” and gave a speech on the topics at launch events in Zurich and Vaduz. Additionally, this week Tezos Foundation General Counsel Ulrich Sauter is discussing 2020 Market Outlook in a panel at the Protos Blockchain Summit hosted by DLT Capital and Protos Asset Management in Zurich. Tezos public and advancement liveliness attract people! Currently, Tezos has a tremendous number of community members, fans, and enthusiasts; there is also a significant increase in subscribers in social networks. It’s never too late to join the Tezos world! And for you not to forget — the exploration vote period for the Carthage 2.0 proposal will end on 18th January! Stay tuned!
Bake your Tezzies with us — tezocracy.com
Development
For detailed GitLab developer activity click here.
- Reminder: Setting Up Two-Factor Authentication. The Tezos Foundation made two-factor authentication (2FA) optional for fundraiser contributors as part of its verification process. For contributors who enabled this feature, setting up 2FA on a new device requires disabling the active 2FA in order to configure it on the new device. Two-factor authentication varies between platforms and devices, so contributors should be familiar with the unique requirements for their specific 2FA codes.
- Tooltips, aggregated baking & endorsing rights — tezblock Update #14
- tezblock introduces tooltips with explanations for a better understanding of the Tezos protocol in a simple manner. In the next step, the missing tooltips will be added and a glossary will be compiled out of these tooltips.
- Baking and Endorsing Rights are now aggregated for each cycle and can be drilled down to view the individual rights with their details. This is a major improvement to just listing the individual rights unfiltered in the table.
- Additionally to the Baking Bad “Payout Accuracy” and the MyTezosBaker “Baking Efficiency” rating tezblock introduces the Tezos Nodes efficiency rating of the last 10 cycles
- Improvements & changes — Additionally to the features many small changes have been done.
- Atomic wallet has been listed under Wallets Resources
- search for block-level is now possible
- Endorsement Details have now deposits & rewards
- Baker names and payout addresses have been added
- Many more performance & stability improvements
- Tezos Foundation Faucet Release — The Tezos Foundation is pleased to release a faucet for the Tezos mainnet. This faucet allows developers and users to request Tezos tokens for development and testing purposes. To acquire tez for development and testing purposes, enter a Tezos address and complete the captcha prompt at faucet.tezos.com. The faucet releases 0.01 tez every 10 seconds. Tezos addresses registered to receive tez from this faucet are added to a queue with a maximum length of 10 addresses. Addresses that have been in the queue the longest are at the front of the line and are removed from the queue once they are through. Addresses that have received tez from the faucet are blocked for 12 hours before they can be re-added to the queue.
- The new TezBridge v2.4.1 now enables users to test their operations to check the possible result on-chain before approving the DApp operation request. See post.
- Are you working with Tezos RPC data or just wonder how operations look in a raw format? Then TzKT Explorer is definitely for you because now it allows you to view raw RPC JSON.
- Developing a Dapp on Tezos. This article presents a simple Dapp developed as a POC for the blockchain workgroup at Cap digital (the main French business cluster). It illustrates a basic architecture of a Dapp on Tezos and may serve as a starting/study point for any new developer in the Tezos community.
- Baking Bad team released a new version of the Baking Bad API (v2)! Get the most complete list of public bakers with unique data such as payouts accuracy&timing, service health, free space, ROI and many others. It’s fast. It’s free. It’s awesome!
- An update on LabNet:
- Primitives to bring the OVM and ZK Rollups to Tezos
- Smart contract features like Views and Events
- Hot and Cold storage to drive higher performance
- In addition to validation and protocol development, in the past several months Cryptium Labs has embarked upon a new project: research & development of a novel smart contract language, Juvix. Juvix is designed to address the problems that they have experienced while trying to write & deploy decentralized applications and that they observe in the ecosystem at large: the difficulty of effective verification, the ceiling of compositional complexity, the illegibility of execution costs, and the lock-in to particular backends. In order to do so, Juvix draws upon and aims to productionize a deep reservoir of prior academic research in programming language design & type theory which they believe has a high degree of applicability to these problems.
Juvix is not (directly) an alternative to Michelson but rather a higher-level language that will be able to target Michelson (compile to it). Should Tezos add support for other execution environments such as WebAssembly in the future, Juvix will be able to target those as well without much difficulty. The frontend language will look a lot like Haskell or ML, with variables, functions, closures, user-defined algebraic data types, etc. Juvix has dependent types 1, which allow you to express properties of terms in the language itself (by defining a type which captures the property), and prove those properties by inhabiting those types.
After many months of R&D and continuous progress on the Juvix project, the team decided to post more updates, interesting reads on the project motivations, design and research.
Here’s the list of articles:
More resources:
- Discover Albert, an intermediate smart-contract language for the Tezos blockchain. It was published by Julien Tesson, Raphaël Cauderlier, Bruno Bernardo and Basile Pesin, one of the interns at Nomadic Labs. More details in this paper.
- New January 2020 Conseil release — 2.7
{Code}
- Support for Babylon-like airdrops using regex-based account refreshes at configured block heights
- Storing all available future baking and endorsing rights in addition to current rights
- Handle Babylon additions to Michelson
- accounts and accounts_history tables have isBaker field
- Add cycle and governance period to bakers and rights tables
- Rationalization of accounts_history fields (#630)
- Minor documentation updates
- Bugfix: Fix issues with OR in queries
{Database}
- There are schema changes to accounts, accounts_history, baking_rights, and endorsing_rights.
- With the Unique HTTP Request ID implementation, everyone can locate a failed request quickly, providing their team with your Unique CF-RAY ID. Moreover, now all developers can easily check their request processing time to address all needs better. The link is here.
- Play with Tezos — Tezos_crypto module and Ed25519 elliptic curve by Danny Willems. Read a small article on how to use the Ed25519 module from the codebase of the Tezos OCaml implementation.
- TezosJ_plainJava v1.1.0 just released. Now features the “callContractEntryPoint” method, which allows developers to easily call Tezos smart contracts. All the Micheline parameter creation is done on-the-fly.
- Tezos Dev Guide | All you need to know — an article that will give you an intuition on why and when to use Tezos as your Dapp development network. An overview of the technology stack that will make you familiar with this blockchain protocol. It features Tezos uniqueness, the difference from Ethereum, common jargons and resources for further reading & forums to reach out.
- State of the Languages updates:
{LIGO}
The LIGO team was pelted with GitLab issues and spent most of their time keeping up. Developers made suggestions as well as bug reports via Gitlab — a lot of them — so LIGO will adjust their process to sort bugs and suggestions into different categories in order to prioritize better.
They:
- changed the calling conventions in CameLIGO and ReasonLIGO to make them more similar to OCaml/Reason.
- fixed a bug that prevented using fail within both branches of a conditional.
- improved many unhelpful “not a X” type errors, along with errors related to typing built-in operators (e.g. “wrong types”, “bad X”.)
- added a record update operation to all syntaxes, e.g. {r with b = 2048; c = 42} in CameLIGO.
- added support for Tezos key and signature literals as type-annotated base58 strings. For example (“edpk…” : key).
- added syntax for ‘attributes’ to all syntaxes, including an “inline” hint which will encourage the compiler to inline a particular definition, even if it is used more than once.
{SmartPy}
The SmartPy team shipped its first open-source release this week!
Now they are back to working on SmartPy core current projects:
- the testing framework
- Michelson static analysis/decompilation.
{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}
Below are some updates from the last week:
- Baking Bad published a blog post on Netezos, a .NET Standard 2.0 library for working with Tezos; the blog shows use cases of working with local forging and the Tezos Ledger App.
- CatSigma released the new TezBridge v2.4.1: it enables users to test their operations and check the possible result on-chain before approving a DApp operation request.
- Cryptium Labs announced that it is developing a new smart contract language, Juvix.
- Nomadic Labs formally verified its spending limit contract, which can now be used with the Android version of the Cortez wallet.
- Nomadic Labs published a blog post detailing its projects from December.
- SimpleStaking released its Tezos Node Explorer, TezEdge, to view interactions between the Tezos protocol and storage.
- Tezos Commons published an interview with Jonas Lamis, CEO of Tezos Capital, on his new project, StakerDAO.
- TzStats released a new API with full support for Carthage.
{Foundation Activities}
Tezos Foundation Council Member Hubertus Thonhauser appeared in a CV Labs video to explain TF’s mission and invite anyone interested in the Tezos project to attend the CV Summit in Davos. The Foundation will present on Tezos real-world use cases including STOs.
{Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News}
Below are some updates from the last week:
- Baking Bad provided more information on its TzKT block explorer.
- camlCase is nearing completion on Dexter, a decentralized exchange for Tezos.
- Cryptonomic released an update of Conseil, its query API for Tezos.
- The LIGO team published part 2 of R&D analysis on Tezos address naming schemes, focused on choosing a name format.
- Nomadic Labs published a paper on Albert, an intermediate smart-contract language for Tezos.
- Obsidian Systems released a new version of Kiln that fixes logging issues and turns off Ledger connectivity checks by default.
- SmartPy announced a new release, which is its first open-source release.
{Foundation Activities}
The Foundation will announce the grant recipients from its most recent ecosystem grants RFP early next week. They will also issue the next request for proposals (RFP), and encourage all teams eager to contribute to the Tezos ecosystem to apply.
In addition to the grantmaking activities, Tezos Foundation Technology Officer Marco Schurtenberger recently contributed an article on “Public vs Private Blockchains” to Bitcoin Suisse’s “Crypto Outlook Report 2020” and gave a speech on the topics at launch events in Zurich and Vaduz.
Additionally, this week Tezos Foundation General Counsel Ulrich Sauter is discussing 2020 Market Outlook in a panel at the Protos Blockchain Summit hosted by DLT Capital and Protos Asset Management in Zurich.
Social encounters
- Tezos Foundation’s mission is to grow and broaden Tezos’ ecosystem through R&D, smart contract development and partnerships. Tezos Foundation is the presenting partner at the Crypto Valley Week events in Davos 2020.
- Tezos Korea hosted its first meetup of the year on January 16 to share its 2020 initiatives.
- Michel Mauny presents the distinguishing features of the Tezos blockchain technology and the decentralized ecosystem supporting its development.
- Tim Draper backed this project as “1 of the top 5 to watch”. Kenneth Garofalo, the TezosCommons Boston Chapter President, joins Jessica Walker to share why Tezos is such an appealing cryptocurrency investment. Watch the video via the link.
- IMDEA Software Institute and Nomadic Labs organized the first IMDEA-Tezos Workshop on January 16.
- Marco Schurtenberger, Tech Officer of Tezos Foundation explaining why a public blockchain is a future:
- Tezos in India: 2019 in a Nutshell. Check some of the most crucial highlights of Tezos expansion in India!
- Continuing with the Tezos India, on the 21st of December, they organized the “Blockchain Saturday with Tezos” meetup in Hyderabad. This place is well known as the City of Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy abbreviated as HITEC City. The Global meetup had broad business and tech elements to engage people beyond the Tezos and blockchain communities. Tezos India received lots of interest from the attendees. Thought leaders and experts on digital assets, capital markets, proof of stake networks, blockchain development, and more, gave presentations and sat on discussion panels covering a wide range of topics.
- SmartPy.io announced the availability of the new version which happens to be their first open-source release.
- Repository
- Announcement
- Live
- Former version moved here
- Tezos Commons’ first AMA on Tezos Telegram with OKEx! Here is a recap of the 10 questions selected from the community and answers.
- StakerDAO — A New DAO Built on the Tezos Blockchain — an article with a high-level overview of the upcoming decentralized governance platform — StakerDAO, and how it seeks to combine the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) with decentralized governance.
Upcoming events:
Visit Tezos Foundation Events page to learn more.
- 21 January 2020 — Tezos and STO update featuring Ryan Lackey in Tokyo, Japan.
- 22 January 2020 — Tezos Commons will be hosting the 2nd AMA on Tezos Telegram. This AMA will feature a major Tezos ecosystem contributor, the incredible Baking Bad team. (Reply with a question, if your question is selected, you will be rewarded with 10 XTZ.
- 23 January 2020 — Tezos Israel Innovation Lab: The present & future of Tezos Business Solutions
- 25 January 2020 — GCC Meet-up with the Tezos Commons Foundation in Thessaloniki / Greek Cryptocurrency Community
- 25–26 January — Om Malviya and Jignesh Vasoya from Tezos India will be speaking at Genesis Block Conference about Tezos activities in India and the plans for 2020.
- 29 February — Meetup in Yaounde, Cameroon
Partnerships and team members
- Ecosystem Announcement: Tezos Israel Launch. Zug, 09. January 2020 — With the launch of Tezos Israel, the Tezos Foundation is delighted to announce a new addition to the rapidly expanding Tezos community. Tezos Israel is an entity and Innovation Lab supported by the Foundation with a mission to educate, train, and grow the Tezos ecosystem in Israel. “I am excited to see the Tezos ecosystem grow all over the globe. I am especially happy that the Tezos Israel team is up and running as Israel continues to be an international hotspot for entrepreneurship and technological innovation,” commented Hubertus Thonhauser, Member of the Foundation Council.
- Nomadic Labs partnered with Inria to develop a new research program dedicated to Blockchain technologies. As a result of their collaboration, 4 projects and 11 researchers were funded in France.
- Also, Nomadic Labs and IMDEA Software signed an agreement that puts Spain at the forefront of research in the ecosystem of Tezos. See post.
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 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
