Update: Week of 28 October 2019
Dear Tezos community, This past week, the Foundation announced a partnership with Alliance Investments, tZERO, and Megalodon to tokenize £500m of UK real estate over the next several years. Alliance’s River Plaza property will be the first real estate-backed security token offering (STO) in the UK, and one of only a handful worldwide. This is a step forward for the Tezos ecosystem in piloting transformative real world blockchain use cases.
The Foundation also announced a new strategic investment in Berlin-based Fundament Securities GmbH to introduce a legal-tech solution for tokenizing regulated financial products on Tezos. Their 250m EUR real estate-backed STO, which was structured as a bond, was the first of its kind with approval from the German financial regulator, BaFin. Fundament provides end-to-end infrastructure for digital securities. Moving forward they will build on Tezos as a default blockchain solution. The partnership between Fundament and the Tezos Foundation is also the beginning of an effort to build a strong Tezos community and developer network in Berlin, Germany. More information will be coming on that topic in the future.
We are constantly impressed by the ingenuity of Tezos community members. This week Tezos Capital founder, Jonas Lamis, announced a new platform, StakerDAO, to be built on Tezos with support from Polychain Capital. The platform is designed specifically for governing financial assets in a secure, decentralized, and compliant manner, and plans to deliver financial assets that make it easy to participate in Proof of Stake networks.
We are excited to see members of the Tezos community continue to build and launch such innovative projects.
Best regards,
Ryan
Grantees, Funded Entities, and Other News
Below are some updates from the last week:
- Nomadic Labs and Cryptium Labs co-released a retrospective on the lessons learned from the Babylon protocol upgrade.
- Happy Tezos’ Tezos as a Service (TaaS) endpoints can now be generated by all community members at TezosLive.io.
- Tezos Help released a sneak-peak of its upcoming web interface with a new design.
- Tezos India Foundation’s Om Malviya will speak at Blockchain Saturdays in Bengaluru on Saturday, November 2.
- Baking Bad and Norn Community, with P2P Validator and Paradigm, will host the first Tezos meetup in Moscow, Russia on November 7.
- SimpleStaking created a guide to help community members use their Trezor wallets after the Babylon upgrade.
- TzStats now displays baker reward splits for past and future cycles.
- Stove Labs and Nomadic Labs hosted a LIGO training workshop in Paris.
- Tezos Hong Kong has its first meetup on Tuesday, November 19.
- Nomadic Labs is sponsoring a mini hackathon in Lisbon from November 8 to November 10.
- TezBox has hired a new community manager, Jovan Smith.
- TQ Tezos’ Jacob Arluck will speak at Oppenheimer’s Disruption Innovation Summit in San Francisco on November 12.
- Baking Bad released a Telegram Faucet Bot as a resource for community members.
- Nomadic Labs will operate a Tezos booth at Blockchain Paris, and invites community members who attend to stop by!
- Tezos Mid-West will host its inaugural meetup on November 8 in Urbana, Illinois, featuring TezBox’s new community manager, Jovan Smith.
- camlCase announced a new update to Dexter, with upgraded smart contracts for Babylon and a fresh UI.
- Nomadic Labs announced its first Pitch Day in Paris on November 8. Interested projects should apply before November 6.
- Tezos Commons released a helpful guide to some Tezos community events in November.
Our Activities
This week, the Foundation announced new grants to Figment Networks, a Tezos baker and the team behind the popular Hubble block explorer, and Papers, the team behind the tezblock block explorer and AirGap wallet. The grants will go towards making analysis of the Tezos blockchain more advanced and accessible.
In addition to its grantmaking activities, the Foundation made multiple announcements of strategic partnerships this week.
On the partnership with Alliance Investments, TZero, and Megalodon to bring real estate-backed STOs to the UK, Foundation CFO Roman Schnider said, “this one building, a large multi-storage development, [is a] first for Alliance, but represents a large pipeline that they intend to fund using STOs.”
On the partnership with Fundament Group to develop digital securities infrastructure, TF council member Hubertus Thonhauser commented: “We look forward to working with Fundament Group as it is providing end to end infrastructure for the lifecycle of securities. We are aligned in our vision to challenge the current financial system and we very much look forward to a productive and fruitful partnership.”
FAQs: What are the benefits of moving all transaction fees to tz accounts?
Moving all transaction fees to tz[123] accounts makes it possible to bake without executing a smart contract. While the system currently requires transaction fees for baking, it does not necessarily have to be that way with simple tz[123] accounts. For more details, refer to a post on the subject on Tezos Agora.