Update: Week of 29 July 2019
Dear Tezos community, There was a lot of activity this week within the Tezos ecosystem. We were excited to announce several grants that will improve the Tezos development experience to make it easier to build applications on Tezos.
Additionally, on the developer engagement front – B9lab launched an updated version of its Tezos 101 course with new content. The course is completely free and 100% online. This is also a good time to remind everyone that registration for B9lab’s Tezos Blockstars program is still open. The Blockstars Program features a full Tezos Developer Course that is more intensive than the 101 course and will teach participants LIGO and SmartPy. We are sponsoring 500 developers to take this course for free – sign up here for a chance at a free seat.
In more news of strong developer engagement – IDEO CoLab and TQ Tezos hosted an online developer workshop with participation from Tezos developers Matej of Stove Labs and Vishakh of Cryptonomic. We also announced that the team behind the Truffle Suite received a grant to integrate the Tezos protocol and accompanying smart contract languages with their development environment. Lastly – we are excited for a Tezos-based blockchain development training camp happening next month in Tokyo. I can’t wait to see what they build!
Shipping began for the first wave of Tezos-engraved special edition Ledger Nano S hardware wallets. Included in this round are all of the fundraiser contributors who completed the activation process and interacted with the Ledger gift smart contract by 23:59 on 15 July. We’re very excited for people to begin receiving their devices! Remember that we’ll be checking the smart contract interactions on a monthly basis, so there’s still time to claim a special edition Nano S. If you need to see the instructions, you can find them in our original blog post.
Best regards,
Ryan
Grantees & Funded Entities
Here are some updates from our grantees and funded entities this week:
- Johann Tanzer received a grant to continue to develop and improve the Tplus development environment.
- TezTech Labs, led by Stephen Andrews, received an additional grant for Tezos development.
- Cryptonomic will host a Tezos-centric hackathon this weekend.
- TQ Tezos ran a developer workshop with IDEO CoLab.
- B9lab launched an updated version of its free Tezos 101 course.
- Nomadic Labs, Cryptium Labs, and The Marigold Project will submit an updated version of Babylon to make integration easier for bakers and developers, if it is approved via the Tezos governance mechanism.
- Obsidian Systems released an updated version of Kiln to allow users to sync nodes in minutes.
- Crytonomic released an update to its Galleon wallet.
- Tezos Commons and TQ Tezos hosted a Tezos one-year celebration event in Berlin.
- Tezos Southeast Asia and MyTezosBaker concluded a Baking Day workshop in Hong Kong.
- TQ Tezos announced that it is a founding member of POSA, the Proof of Stake Alliance.
Our Activities
The Foundation has been hard at work this week. A few highlights that we can share:
- Work continues on our first biannual report to provide more transparency into the Foundation’s finances and operations and to review of how far we have come so far this year. This will be released next week.
- The Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) concluded its review of the latest batch of ecosystem grant proposals. The Foundation Council will soon vote on over 30 new proposals.
- The first batch of Tezos-engraved Ledger Nano S hardware wallets were shipped by Ledger. Fundraiser contributors can still interact with the giveaway smart contract to be eligible to receive free Ledger Nano S devices!
FAQs: Why doesn’t the Foundation release individual amounts for grants?
We strive to be as transparent in our actions as possible but if we released individual amounts and terms of every grant, we would lose leverage in attracting future grant proposals. If the terms of our grants are always made public, we will not be able to efficiently and effectively disperse funds. More importantly, given the sensitive nature of money, we respect our grantees’ right to keep their finances private. We will include grant allocations for each category in our upcoming bi-annual report.