Tezos issues 21 new ecosystem grants in third cohort

The Tezos Foundation, the overseer of the Tezos blockchain with a mission to support long-term success and development of the protocol, today announced that 21 new ecosystem grants have been issued to projects submitted in response to its most recent request for proposals (RFP). A total of 90 grant proposals were submitted to this RFP.

The Foundation considered proposals targeting the following categories as part of this RFP:

• Applications built using Tezos smart contracts (with a special interest in Decentralized Finance, or “DeFi”, and digital securities applications)
• Tools for Tezos smart contract development (e.g. smart contract testing tools, smart contract templates, etc.)

  JavaScript libraries for building applications on Tezos and development kits for using such libraries

• Educational/training resources covering Tezos (e.g. Kauri, CryptoZombies, etc.)
• Online resources usable for self-training
• Example applications with detailed tutorials showing technology selection and implementation
• Marketing and other initiatives to help increase awareness of Tezos and its ecosystem
• Other proposals for projects targeting categories not listed above that may benefit the Tezos ecosystem

The third cohort of Tezos ecosystem grants (listed in alphabetical order):

• Atomex STO Gate, BetterCallDev [Hub], and IMichelson by Baking Bad: Baking Bad is an active Tezos development team that will complete three projects: 1) Atomex STO Gate – a collection of flexible program modules to provide various atomic swap implementations for digital securities (“security tokens”) and other Tezos token standards; 2) BetterCallDev [Hub] – a tool to help developers manage all of their Tezos projects (i.e. a decentralized GitHub); and 3) IMichelson – a Jupyter (interactive notebook) kernel based on a custom Michelson interpreter with runtime type checking, syntax coloring, and basic autocomplete functionality.
• Cross-University Vote by Electis: Electis is a non-profit organization aiming to promote new usage of technology for democracy and voting, with particular expertise on blockchain technology and enabling concrete voting projects. The Electis team will use this grant to organize a cross-university electoral vote in 2020 using a common Tezos-based application.
• DeFi Developer Experience by Protofire: Protofire is a blockchain and smart contracts development team that will build upon its previous liquidity pool project by adding functionality for lending and borrowing.
• Ejara by Nzinghaa Lab: Ejara is a mobile platform that supports cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets uniquely tailored for the African market. With this grant, the Ejara team will develop and integrate smart contracts to its product to enable secure wallet backup and key recovery, Bitcoin-Tezos atomic swaps, and a cross-chain key registration and recovery system on Tezos.
• eth2tez, QuipuSwap, and Thanos by Madfish Solutions: Madfish Solution is a Ukraine-based company with over 3 years of blockchain development experience. The team will carry out three separate projects: 1) eth2tez – a transpiler from the Solidity programming language to LIGO, a Tezos smart contracts programming language; 2) QuipuSwap – a protocol enabling a seamless exchange of tokens/assets on Tezos in a secure, decentralized, and censorship-resistant manner; and 3) Thanos – a fully-featured wallet focused on user experience (UX) with integrated support for various Tezos token standards, dApps, explorers, etc.
• Golang Support for Tezos Smart Contract Development by Anchorage: Anchorage is a qualified custodian that provides an advanced platform for cryptocurrency custody. With this grant, the Anchorage team will expand the scope of its open-source library to support creating and invoking Tezos smart contracts in the Go programming language.
• Go Tezos by Brice Aldrich: Brice Aldrich is an active Tezos developer and the creator of Go Tezos, a popular Go library that exposes and builds upon the Tezos RPC. With this grant, Brice will continue to improve Go Tezos by adding additional features, such as smart contract deployment and more RPCs, and increasing test coverage.
• Sotez by Andrew Kishino: Andrew is a long-time Tezos community member and developer, working mostly in JavaScript as a Senior Software Engineer at Twilio. Sotez is a barebones JavaScript library for simply and intuitively interacting with the Tezos blockchain. This grant will accelerate the development of Sotez and add additional functionality to the library to make it more advanced and suitable for wider adoption.
• TaaS (Tezos as a Service) – GraphQL by Agile Ventures: Agile Ventures is an in-house software development team and consultancy group that has worked on a number of projects since 2016, most recently Happy Tezos, a Tezos delegation service, and TaaS, a service that provides a WebSocket endpoint allowing application developers to collect real-time information from the Tezos blockchain. With this grant, the Agile Ventures team will create, and provide a free instance of, an open-source solution exposing a GraphQL API endpoint.
• Tezos Academy and Tezos Link by OCTO Technology: OCTO Technology is a French consulting and IT realization firm within Accenture Digital. The OCTO team will complete the following projects: 1) Tezos Academy – a freely available online platform that will teach LIGO smart contract development in a fun and user-friendly manner; and 2) Tezos Link – an HTTP API to the Tezos network.
• TezosKit by Keefer Taylor: Keefer Taylor is an active Tezos developer and the creator of TezosKit, a Swift SDK that powers Tezos on iOS and macOS. This grant will help Keefer accelerate the development of TezosKit to take advantage of smart contract features introduced in recent protocols and improve dApp development on mobile. Additionally, Keefer will build-out secure key storage on mobile and productionize the SDK through an independent external security audit.
• Tezos-nodes Mobile Apps by Tezos-nodes team: Tezos-nodes is a service that rates public bakers and monitors the node performance of non-public bakers. The Tezos-nodes team will use this grant to create iOS and Android applications for its service to help stakeholders more effectively evaluate Tezos bakers.
• Tezos Package Manager by Blockdaemon: Blockdaemon provides blockchain infrastructure and node management services for developers and enterprises. With this grant, the Blockdaemon team will create a CLI-based application that is capable of downloading, configuring, and running a Tezos node. The application will be plugin-based so that it can be easily extended for a wide variety of use cases.
• Tezster 2.0 by Tezsure: Tezsure is a Tezos-based insurance platform. This grant will help the Tezsure team continue to build Tezster, a testing tool for Tezos development, by implementing more advanced features, producing tutorials and explainer videos, and adding example smart contract templates.
• TezTracker by Everstake: TezTracker is a Tezos block explorer built by the Everstake team. This grant will help advance the development of TezTracker to add greater analytical capabilities and insights about Tezos on-chain activity for users.
• Zombies in the Room by BUIDL Labs: BUIDL Labs is a blockchain R&D lab under The Vantage Project, a team focused on solving user and developer adoption hurdles of decentralized networks. With this grant, the team will launch Zombies in the Room, an interactive code school that will onboard Tezos developers by teaching them to write SmartPy smart contracts through building their own games.

“The Foundation is excited to see these projects contribute to the advancement of the Tezos project and grow the larger blockchain ecosystem. Thank you to all the applicants who worked with us throughout the review process. The next RFP for Tezos ecosystem grants will be issued this Wednesday (22 January 2020), at which point areas of interest will be announced.”

– The Tezos Foundation Team