The Tezos Foundation’s Funding Outlook for 2024

Firstly, a thank you to the various community teams for all their hard work this year to drive adoption of the Tezos blockchain.

We are excited for what is to come in 2024 thanks to a pipeline full of transformative projects and a strong community of developers and partners. However, to fully capture these opportunities, we’ll need to bring yet more focus and cost-efficiency to our activities. Over the past year, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across all areas to align funding with the highest priorities for the Tezos community and ecosystem. The new foundation budget for 2024, which was approved by the council yesterday, reflects that.

At the heart of our activity, we will support core development around Tezos 2.0, the next generation tech stack that positions the Tezos blockchain as the strongest technological offering for dApps and users. The launch of smart rollups, and the one million transactions per second demonstration at the annual TezDev conference, were among the first milestones towards Tezos 2.0. Upcoming improvements include latency reduction, a scalable data availability layer, and Etherlink (a state-of-the-art EVM compatible layer 2 solution), among other innovations.

Arts & Culture, DeFi, and Gaming continue to remain focus areas for funding based on the market opportunity, existing community involvement, and promising signs of adoption. The foundation moved away from sports sponsorship in Q1 2022, and while we have and will keep honouring existing commitments, we will not be extending them when they come to an end. Nonetheless, we are still keen on organically growing sports collectibles and fan engagement on Tezos using our existing platforms.

Attracting more developers is a key part of our strategy. Here the focus is on providing a delightful developer experience by publishing clear documentation, developing great tooling and infrastructure, and strong relationships with developers. Furthermore, the Tezos 2.0 roadmap can uplevel developer experience by bringing support for mainstream programming languages such as Javascript and Python.

We are also bringing marketing close to engineering and other adoption teams to drive better impact. The aim is to do more with less compared to our past experience using agencies. A new marketing team is still being assembled and is already demonstrating a marked improvement in community engagement.

The foundation’s mandate is to sustainably deploy resources to support the long-term success of the Tezos blockchain and community. To fully support the mandate, we’ll also need to make tough funding choices with cost effectiveness and return on investment as key metrics. We know the community has been asking for greater accountability and value-driven spending, and we agree.

This will mean reducing the number of grantees we can support, impacting across projects including infrastructure, engineering, and adoption. Despite the obvious quality of some of these grantees, and what they bring to the ecosystem, funding is not always warranted based on a cost-benefit analysis.

As a six-year-old foundation, we’re bound to go through these transitions to adapt to the fast changing nature of our industry. These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct capital to our highest priorities. As we head into 2024 we also want to add a new year’s resolution of our own: The foundation will be much more active on social media and you will see more of our operational team at AMAs and in chat forums. Should you have any questions for us, please submit them here and we will aim to respond in January next year.

Finally, a big thank you to all of you working to grow the Tezos ecosystem further. We wish you a festive holiday season and a successful 2024.