I have a question about diversity. 7/9 of your board are white men; 1 out of 9 board members are non-male. The entire executive committee is white men (3/3). 5/6 of the Investment committee are white men. 4/5 of the Audit committee are white men. The entire Technical Advisory Committee is male. To sum – overall, there are 23 individuals listed as part of the Tezos Foundation. 2 are non male - 8%. About 70% white.
This is an astonishing lack of diversity! Nearly entirely white, nearly entirely men.
If Tezos is truly going to succeed as ‘sound money’ it is imperative it is adopted in an equitable manner. Money doesn’t just work for white men, it needs to work equally for everyone. The world is an incredibly diverse place. How can the Tezos Foundation accurately understand the diverse needs of the world when its governance is so lacking in diversity? How is the Tezos Foundation reaching into underrepresented and underserved groups for whom decentralization and other properties offered by blockchain are crucial for overcoming culturally systemic challenges? Ignoring swathes of the world’s populous does not aid Tezos in reaching its goals for mass adoption.
I’d like to hear a clear response from the TF on their understanding of the importance of diversity, an explanation for their laughable diversity, and a clear action plan to creating a diverse Foundation to represent the diverse needs of the world for the equitable financial system which Tezos is striving to lead. And no, citing ‘diverse investments’ doesn’t count. Representation counts. Leadership counts.
Edit: for those flagging, I ask you a simple question - why is diversity not important for a foundation whose expressed goal is " …social, political and economic innovation on a global scale."?
What are some things that the Tezos Foundation wants to be better or more effective at? Is there anything that we as a community could do to help facilitate more good-faith discussions and debates?
TF’s a swiss based foundation, not a US based, people are hired because of their skills here, not because of color of their skin or type of their genitalia
Diversity of ideas matters, not diversity of skin, it’s just racist
More to this point, if the TF could publicize any success OKRs that are agreed to between the TF and grant recipients.
I realize it may not be possible in every circumstance, but it would help the community to see “why” a grant was awarded and what the TF wants to see as the outcome of that grant.
I actually did take your advice and sent an email to Circle and this is what their response was. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Any other suggestions or insight you can offer up would be appreciated. What’s the best way to let them know there’s an overwhelmingly large demand for USDC on Tezos?
Thank you for your questions. Please find the answers below:
The biannual provides an overview of all projects supported by the Tezos Foundation which the Foundation is able to discuss. This includes grants, sponsorships and investments. Some of those investments that are not grants or sponsorships done by the Foundation are listed under the “Industry adoption” section of the biannual report alongside memberships. Going forward, we will reexamine how to better feature investments in the report.
Blokhaus provides marketing and communications services on a global level for the Tezos ecosystem. Blokhaus is an entity that is independent from the Tezos Foundation, and will answer on their own behalf. We invite you to recontact them at reachout@blokhaus.io.
There are several community managers working in the Tezos ecosystem. Each of them specializes in one or several channels, however, there’s no central community management entity or person to defer to. Although thoughtful community feedback is always welcome, it is important to note that most initiatives that require execution take time to bring to completion; Sapling is a good example of this where many teams were already considering this feature and it was the work done by those teams happening in the background that helped move it along, rather than sudden community interest prompting such action. Please also note that various teams are routinely monitoring community feedback and acting, when possible, to address this — in the vast majority of cases, any perceived delay in action is not a matter of willingness, awareness or intention, it is primarily a matter of prioritization and bandwidth allocation which needs to take place to accommodate what is one of the fastest growing ecosystems out there.
New hackathons across the Tezos ecosystem are launching on a regular basis. Just in the last two months there have been several successful hackathons by Tezos Africa, Tezos India, TZ APAC, TZ Connect, Gitcoin, and more. Recently, Tezos Ukraine launched the biggest hackathon in Eastern Europe with a prize pool of 200K USD. There’s also a Tezos Hackathons Discord that will help with knowing and discussing about all hackathons going on in the Tezos ecosystem. In this case, community involvement to help promote these grassroot initiatives (which are key to long term success) are very much needed. Helping raise awareness for hackathons in order to show developers that Tezos is not only growing fast, but consists of active and passionate community members is something that would add value to the ecosystem. Regarding conversion, there have been several successful projects that stemmed from hackathons such as :
In addition to this, the Tezos Foundation is working on improving the collaboration with hackathon organizers in the Tezos ecosystem to support participants in developing projects on Tezos. Entities such as Tezos India and TZ APAC have offered multiple small grants and diverted previous participants to the Foundation’s grant program. Tezos India also offers a fellowship program to winners which includes tooling, support and mentorship in addition to receiving a stipend. Gitcoin mentioned the grant program for its hackathon last summer. Tezos Ukraine follows up with every participant, promoted the grant program for its previous hackathon and will also promote the grant program using multiple touchpoints for the upcoming hackathon. In January 2022, Encode Club kicked off a new 8-months initiative on the Tezos blockchain in collaboration with TZ Connect. This collaboration will start with an educational series, followed by a hackathon and an accelerator program that will seek to assist projects in the Tezos ecosystem to become full-fledged startups through weekly sessions, mentorship, and support.
Thank you for the feedback — we understand and share some of this frustration. To our knowledge, the integration is still pending and we encourage community members to direct concerns to the Opensea team. Please note that timelines and execution on these types of integrations are not one-sided, and primarily rely on the bandwidth of the vendor/partner integrating. While the various ecosystem teams do make regular and consistent outreach to promote the prioritization of such integrations, it is still the decision of the vendor/partner whether they complete such integration. It is also important to note that the category is experiencing an extraordinary amount of growth and various vendors are finding they have to scale their teams rapidly in order to meet all the demands from their users —all these variables come into play when such integrations are executed upon.
New integrations with data providers, oracles and other infrastructure providers in the web3 space are announced regularly in the Tezos ecosystem. Specific products and platforms that are of particular interest to Tezos developers and users are routinely identified by adoption and business development teams in the Tezos ecosystem. Community members are also always encouraged to push forward opportunities for integrations and reach out to specific organizations or projects to support integrating Tezos. On a regular basis there are numerous integration discussions and opportunities brought forth by various entities in the ecosystem; it is important to recognize that business development is a task that happens largely under strict NDAs and therefore should not be expected to be regularly communicated in order to stay compliant from a professional and contractual standpoint. This means that although information may not be available to preemptively share broadly (since doing so would likely jeopardize the potential deal or worse, violate some type of NDA or even potentially give competing projects an advantage in negotiations) it does not mean that they are not happening. It is the day-to-day nature of this type of activity to require careful coordination and strict information control in order for partners and teams to be comfortable enough engaging in discussions.
Technical development of the Tezos protocol is driven by various teams in the Tezos ecosystem that leverage Tezos’ unique on-chain governance to allow for community participation and involvement in order to help decide how the Tezos protocol should evolve. It is important to keep in mind that the Tezos Foundation is not Tezos — it is simply another team that is part of a broad ecosystem. The most recent innovation to the core protocol is Tenderbake, a new consensus mechanism that will increase transaction speed and lower finality times. Research and development teams across the Tezos ecosystem are working on additional innovations such as zk-rollups, optimistic roll-ups and more.
Teams across the Tezos ecosystem are routinely embarking on discussions and business development activities with partners and companies across the globe. In these activities, it is paramount to have strict adherence to confidentiality, through enforceable NDAs and contractual parameters. These are fundamental requirements when conducting this type of activity since partners expect professionalism and discretion as negotiations take place. In addition, revealing potential ongoing integration or business negotiations taking place would not be advantageous in the negotiation process as it would simultaneously alert and give an advantage to competing projects who can then canvas deal opportunities and interfere with such discussions. Unless it has been publicly announced through close coordination with the partner, we are not able to provide any detail on whether there are ongoing discussions with any particular team; however, we are able to indicate that historically, partners do tend to look for active community interest and genuine requests for integration in order to help gauge priority of projects to pursue. Although the Coinbase NFT marketplace has yet to be released we encourage community members with genuine interest in their marketplace to express this to the Coinbase NFT team.
Thank you for your question. Yes–please note that as previously indicated the cadence of response is set for a weekly basis. Also note that the teams working to provide clarity and responses are engaging in a genuine way to take and apply learnings from the community as well as be genuinely helpful. We appreciate your understanding and patience regarding this process…
The Tezos Foundation is working towards its purpose of promoting the Tezos protocol through grants and other funds. To do so, the Foundation is also working on simplifying the grant process for new grantees as well as communicating more about its work.
Sharing knowledge about grantees work and the Foundation’s grant program with entities or people or projects wanting to build on Tezos could be of help for the ecosystem and help support the Foundation’s work. If arising, additional requests for support will be shared with the community on the Foundation’s channels (i.e. social media, website…).
According to the latest bi-annual report, the Tezos foundation spent $233 million in the 6-month period concerned, with a treasury of $1.2 billion, or a remaining runway of about 2.5 years (subject to fluctuations in crypto prices). Is there a strategy for improving the sustainability of Tezos foundation funding?
When does the foundation plan on sunsetting the operation of its bakers? This would drastically decentralize the network and likely attract new ecosystem participants.
Here’s a legitimate question for you Tajme, you orchestrated an entire disinformation campaign based on completely bogus chain analysis, what was your motive exactly?
The Tezos Foundation invested funds as an LP in Draper Goren Holm’s fund to further investments in the Tezos ecosystem, in line with the Foundation’s mission of promoting the Tezos protocol through grants and other capital deployment vehicles.
When next AMA for the Tezos Foundation? Also to increase visibility and more participants you should tweet out the link to the new ama agora thread once its live
