Update: Week Of 16 December 2019 – The Year In Review
Dear Tezos community, As we near the end of 2019, we thought that, in place of our usual weekly update, we could take some time this week to highlight all that happened this year and how far this community has come.
Let’s start with a brief overview of 2019 by the numbers:
- Over 430 bakers securing the Tezos network
- Over 1,300 Tezos developers trained
- 3 new Tezos smart contract languages introducing 6 new syntax varieties
- At least 5 new regional community organizations – India, Africa, Brazil, Ukraine, China
- 39 Meetup groups around the world
- 2 upgrades approved by stakeholders via the Tezos governance process
- 3 international TQuorum events with over 300 participants at each one
2019 was also the year that Tezos became the first blockchain to automatically upgrade itself without requiring a hard fork. Here is an overview of Tezos governance in 2019:
- The first amendment proposal, Athens, was injected into the protocol on 28 February
- On 29 May, the Tezos protocol successfully amended itself, activating Athens
- Babylon, the second proposed amendment to Tezos, was injected by Nomadic Labs
- Tezos Agora, a governance explorer and discourse forum, was launched
- The Tezos protocol successfully self-amended for the second time, activating Babylon, on 18 October
Additionally, 2019 was a landmark year for the Foundation’s strategic partnerships. All of our partnerships are aimed at creating real-world use cases on Tezos. Below is an overview of some of the key strategic partnerships that we have entered into over the past year.
Strategic Partnerships
Elevated Returns
Elevated Returns, a financial group focused on digitizing traditional financial assets, announced that it will tokenize a pipeline of real assets in excess of 1B USD on Tezos.
BTG Pactual
BTG Pactual, a leading LATAM investment bank announced that it will launch Security Token Offerings (STOs) on Tezos, including an ongoing one for its REITBZ STO. BTG will tokenize a pipeline of assets in excess of 1B USD on Tezos. The first issuance should go live in early 2020.
Fundament Group
Berlin-based Fundament Group will launch the first STO in Germany, regulated by the financial market authority BaFin. Fundament provides end-to-end infrastructure for digital securities and will build on Tezos as their default blockchain going forward.
Globacap
The Foundation entered into a strategic partnership with Globacap, a London-based primary issuance platform for digital securities regulated by the FCA.
Securitize
The Foundation partnered with Securitize, a leading platform to deliver trusted global solutions for creating compliant digital securities, including funds, equity, fixed income and real estate.
Property Alliance Group
Alliance is a leading property developer in Manchester, UK, who announced that it will tokenize £500m of UK real estate assets on Tezos. It partnered with the Foundation, tZero, and STO advisory boutique, Megalodon, for a first STO project, the River Plaza in central Manchester (volume £43m).
French National Gendarmerie’s cybercrime division (C3N)
C3N records judicial expenses on Tezos, which it started back in September— this marks a historic first time that a government entity has developed an operational smart contract and deployed it on a blockchain.
Grantees, Funded Entities, & Other News
The primary role of the Tezos Foundation is to support the long-term success of the Tezos protocol and ecosystem. As the steward of the funds donated to its fundraiser, the Foundation distributes its assets in a responsible and accountable manner to help advance the Tezos project. In 2019, the Foundation supported the work of community members around the globe. Below is a brief list (in rough chronological order) of some accomplishments that our grantees and other funded entities have made in the past year:
- TQ Tezos launched
- Marigold Layer-2 scaling was announced
- Obsidian Systems released Kiln, a tool for baking and monitoring on the Tezos network
- Stove Labs released Granary, a Tezos development environment
- SmartPy launched its Tezos smart contract language and platform
- LIGO, a friendly smart contract language for Tezos, was born
- TQ hosted the first TQuorum conference in Paris during Paris Blockchain Week
- TulipTools released Tplus, a tool to make Tezos development more user-friendly
- Baking Bad launched its Tezos smart contract explorer, Better Call Dev
- Obsidian Systems released Flextesa testing tools
- TQ, Serokell, and Nomadic Labs published an interface for fungible assets
- The TzStats block explorer went live
- The first cohort of Tezos Foundation ecosystem grant recipients was announced
- SimpleStaking began development on a Tezos node implementation in Rust
- Launch of the Tezos Developer Portal
- camlCase announced DEXter, a Uniswap-like decentralized exchange on Tezos
- Satoshi’s Treasure started its Tezos Treasure Hunt
- Truffle began to integrate Tezos to its popular smart contract development environment
- catsigma added sample dapps to the documentation of TezBridge, a tool that allows users to interact with applications built on Tezos.
- Cryptoeconomics Lab in Tokyo received a grant to build Plasma on Tezos
- Archetype, a smart contract language with a focus on formal verification, was announced
- Tezos India Foundation was established to help grow the Tezos community in India
- Stove Labs began its work on a non-fungible token standard for Tezos
- Tezos China Foundation was established to advance the Tezos ecosystem in China
- Taquito, a TypeScript library suite for development on Tezos, was released
- Second cohort of Tezos Foundation ecosystem grant recipients was announced
- The TQuorum Global Summit hosted more than 500 participants in NYC – the largest global Tezos conference to date
- B9lab completed two rounds of its Tezos developer course
- Papers/AirGap released tezblock, a simple and user-friendly Tezos block explorer
- Tezos Ukraine was formed to grow the Tezos ecosystem in Ukraine and Eastern Europe
- Cryptonomic launched Nautilus Cloud, a self-serve site for getting access to integrated development infrastructure of Tezos and Conseil nodes
- Ejara.io from Africa won the Tezos-specific prize in the CoinList-IDEO hackathon
- Tezos Brazil was established to advance the Tezos project in Brazil
- Baking Bad released a preview of its indexer and API for TzKT, a lightweight, API-first, account-oriented block explorer for Tezos
- Ledger, in collaboration with TQ and Obsidian Systems, announced support for Tezos transactions and delegation directly in Ledger Live
- Tezos Commons announced its involvement in LabNet, a new Tezos testnet aimed at layer-2 experimentation and rapid iteration driven by user feedback
This is just a small amount of the many accomplishments achieved by Tezos community members throughout 2019. We will provide more detailed information about the second-half of 2019 in our next Biannual Update, due for release in Q1 2020. View our first Biannual Update here.
Here is to an even better 2020!
Best regards,
Ryan