Tezos Foundation FAQ

The main purposes of the Tezos Foundation are to allocate funding to various independently operating entities in the Tezos ecosystem, as well as to manage its own treasury. The Council (also sometimes referred to as “Board”) Members don’t have a day-to-day operational role (with the exception of the Chair ad interim) at the Foundation but define the funding and asset-management strategy of the Foundation including its organisation, and mandate the operations team to put this strategy in place and supervise the progress and ultimately control the funding allocation. As such, the Foundation Council is the ultimate responsible body at the Tezos Foundation. Council members have been selected from various industry backgrounds in order to accomplish the Foundation’s mission.

According to the Foundation Charter and in line with Swiss foundation law, the Foundation Council is responsible for electing its new members. Since the beginning of this year, the operational process for recruiting new Council and executive team members is delegated to the Nomination and Remuneration Committee of the Foundation, which makes initial suggestions of candidates based on criteria defined by the Council. Sourcing of candidates is supported by an international recruitment agency and candidates, on a case by case basis, are vetted by various external sources lice including key people within the Tezos ecosystem. As a general guideline in place since the beginning of this year, Council members, including the Council Chairperson, should be accomplished individuals with a solid professional track record in industries relevant to the Tezos ecosystem. In addition they should be financially independent and in the position to take an unbiased view on the Foundation and the Tezos ecosystem. The Executive Committee is elected by the Foundation Council, also as defined in the Foundation Charter. More information on the Foundation committees can be found here.

The remuneration of Council members is allowed by Swiss law and proportional to responsibilities and workload. Institutional partners, the Foundation’s independent external auditor (PwC Switzerland), and the Swiss Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority have never raised concerns about the Council’s compensation. As such, and in line with our general views regarding personal privacy, we will not disclose Council remuneration.

When the Foundation first started baking, it was an important factor to ensure the stability of the chain.  Now that the chain is more mature and stable, we are having ongoing discussions to determine how tez (Tezos tokens) should be used and how the Foundation should approach baking moving forward, taking into account a number of considerations. To be clear, this answer represents a snapshot of our thinking at this moment in time, but we continue to have discussions about the present and future of TF baking.

The Foundation’s first priority is to support the security and the stability of the network. To that end, all TF baking operations are conducted on Amazon Web Services with the highest level of security.

Additionally, because the Foundation abstains from voting on any proposed protocol upgrades, our baking activities have zero effect on the governance of the network, meaning that core development teams can inject protocol amendments whenever and however they see fit.

Another factor to consider is that in a PoS system, the primary incentive to bake is to retain one’s proportionate share of the total money supply. Baking in Tezos directly transfers ownership from those who don’t participate to those who do. Thus while rewards may go down as a result of TF baking, everyone still retains their proportionate share of the total money supply.

In any case, all Foundation baking rewards will be distributed back to the ecosystem to advance our mission to support the long-term success of the Tezos project. In fact, funds from TF baking are already being used to support programs like the community rewards program administered by TQ Tezos and Tezos Commons.

There are a number of key marketing efforts underway. For example, TQ Tezos and other ecosystem teams are working hard to completely overhaul tezos.com so that there is a clearer and simpler developer and ecosystem onboarding process. This won’t be completed overnight and will require iteration, but will be worth the effort to position Tezos as the leading blockchain protocol. TQ Tezos has also been running regular virtual events through TQuorum and Tezos Commons has a number of marketing initiatives, including their successful TezTalks series. All that being said, there is no question that there is more project marketing and awareness that can be done for Tezos, and we are constantly soliciting new ideas to promote the protocol as widely as possible.

A new brand asset kit for Tezos should be released in Q1 2021, as we are in the process of updating it. Community members who would like access to the current kit should reach out to @Rob_Font on Twitter.

TQ Tezos and Tezos Commons have rolled out a community rewards program that will allocate some treasury funds for community disbursement. For this program, we will allocate tez to a multisig contract each month. That tez will be disbursed as rewards to community members for contributions they’ve made to the project that month. TQ Tezos and Tezos Commons have released further details about how the program will work and we look forward to seeing how this new initiative sparks community engagement and incentivizes participation in the ecosystem.

Our new grants platform is live for all current grantees. We have solicited their feedback that we will incorporate into future, more feature-rich versions that will be more widely available to the Tezos ecosystem and also allow prospective grantees to submit grant applications.

Of course, some features of the grant platform will remain only available to existing grantees so that they can monitor their progress easily and securely. As always, we will publish detailed information about our grant-making activity in our next Biannual Update.

There are a number of resources available to help fundraiser participants access their tokens and get involved in the ecosystem, including https://check.tezos.com/ and https://tezos.com/get-started/#activate.

There are a number of desktop, web, and mobile wallets built exclusively for Tezos that are currently available to use including Kukai, Galleon, Magma, Thanos, AirGap and more. For hardware wallets there is support for both Ledger and Trezor. That being said, we are always evaluating our funding priorities and have allocated further funds for additional wallets to make Tezos even more accessible.

This topic is being discussed but no final decision has been made yet. There are a number of considerations we need to take into account, particularly non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and other legal frameworks in place surrounding the audit.

The Foundation takes network security very seriously and has been having an internal discussion over the last few months about ways to dedicate more staff to the security of the chain and ecosystem. We will provide further information about our efforts to ensure the security of the network shortly, but rest assured that security of the chain and ecosystem is one of our highest priorities.