Update: Week of 8 July 2019
Dear Tezos community, It was another big week for the Tezos ecosystem. Last week, we announced that BTG Pactual & Dalma Capital will tokenize a deal pipeline of $1bn USD of assets on the Tezos blockchain. Additional STO deals in various categories are in our pipeline and the Foundation is working hard to advance these. In addition, the Foundation is evaluating a number of strategic investments in companies and projects; watch out for further information soon.
This week, TokenSoft, a leading provider of institutional-grade compliance tools for issuing and managing digital securities, announced support for security tokens on Tezos. Mason Borda, CEO of TokenSoft, specifically cited formally verifiable contracts as a major reason why they chose to support Tezos. These announcements, coupled with the previous Elevated Returns deal, show the strength of Tezos as a platform for tokenized assets and we will continue to work hard to lead this space.
In this week’s FAQ section, we will tackle some of the most pressing questions that we have seen regarding STOs.
Look forward to seeing you all at TQuorum: Berlin and some of the Tezos 1-year celebrations happening this month!
Best regards,
Ryan
Grantees and Funded Entities
Below are some highlights of the work that Tezos Foundation-funded teams have been doing in the past week:
- Jointly with TQ, the Foundation announced our status as launch partners for IDEO CoLab’s new Startup Studio program. Tezos will be featured as one of the primary layer one protocols for Startup Studio projects to build on.
- Nomadic Labs published an update on some of the many projects it is working on in its “Meanwhile at Nomadic Labs” series.
- Cryptium Labs gave an overview of their migration strategy of script-less contracts for their upcoming amendment proposal (in collaboration with other development teams).
- TQ announced that registration for TQuorum: Berlin, a full-day Tezos event during Berlin Blockchain Week, is now open. Get your tickets today!
- Tezos Commons announced that they are organizing events around the world to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of the Tezos betanet launch. Find an event near you.
- Cryptonomic rolled out a July release of Conseil with metadata enhancements, bug and performance fixes, and dockerfile and script for container runs.
- Stove Labs released a tutorial on how to deploy a Tezos smart contract on the alphanet with Granary.
- Cryptium Labs published part three of its Liquidity tutorial series, this time writing a contract that publishes authenticated data.
- Tezos Southeast Asia began its training program at the Faculty of Information Technology, VNU University of Engineering and Technology (Hanoi, Vietnam).
- Catsigma updated TezBridge with some patches and released a more simple bridging method for remote signing. Application developers can now view some examples of how to integrate TezBridge.
- Baking Bad released an explainer to help users get started with Netezos.RPC, a .NET Standard library for interacting with Tezos.
- Pocket Network announced their Pocket Core MVP 1.7 update, officially adding support for REST API calls on the Tezos network.
- TzStats published a blog post introducing their project, a blockchain analytics explorer for Tezos focused on high-quality blockchain data.
- Baking Bad released ConseilPy, a Python library providing SQLAlchemy-like query syntax for the Conseil blockchain indexer.
- TezTech announced “Rise of the Magni,” a simple strategy game with a digital collectible element.
- The Marigold Project issued an update on LIGO and Marigold, a high-level smart contracts language and layer-2 scaling technique, respectively.
- AirGap published the third weekly TezBlock update; the project selected Conseil as the protocol indexer and has made some front end improvements.
- Cryptonomic released an initial version of Minimax, a minimal retro block explorer for Tezos.
Our Activities
This week we continued to work hard to provide support to entities looking to tokenize assets on Tezos, review grant proposals, and maintain normal administrative and operational duties. Below are a couple of specific details that we can share:
- The Tezos Foundation Council has a quarterly council meeting today where a variety of topics will be discussed, including strategy, governance, grant processes, financial matters, etc.
- Our Ecosystem Grants RFP submission period closed. We had many great submissions and look forward to announcing our next cohort of grantees shortly.
- Continued to work with the Ledger team on the engraved Nano S giveaway.
- The Foundation president recorded a podcast with community member, Ken Garofalo, at CryptoLiveLeak. Look for it to be released in the next week or two.
FAQs: Why are so many firms choosing Tezos as the blockchain for their tokenized assets?
The short answer is that: 1) the protocol has many key features that make it ideal for high-value assets that need a secure, reliable, long-term oriented platform, and 2) we are working hard to build tools and provide technical expertise/support to make it simple for entities to issue tokenized assets on Tezos.
Regarding the first point, the two major advantages that Tezos offers over other smart contract platforms are smart contract security and platform longevity.
Michelson, the domain-specific language for writing smart contracts on Tezos, was designed to facilitate formal verification. To quote Mason Borda of TokenSoft on the general idea, this means that “prior to sending a billion dollars over the blockchain, you can run a formal test to simulate it. If anything has changed since deployment (libraries, protocols, etc.), you will know.”
In terms of platform longevity, upgradability and a means to fund development are key. We have spoken at length about Tezos’ governance mechanism, but one feature of Tezos that is often overlooked is inflation funding. If a software upgrade is approved via the Tezos governance mechanism, the new implementation can mint Tezos tokens and issue them to the developer (individual or team) behind the upgrade. This helps mitigate the free-rider problem that open-source projects and other public goods often face. For more on inflation funding, check out this explainer video from Tezos Commons.
For more on the advantages of Tezos when it comes to tokenized assets, check out this post from TQ’s Charlie Wiser.