More and more Projects shutting down

Philosophy and Economics
1

  • Giganode Announcement, gone

  • TezEdge Announcement, whatever happened after closing? Wasnt there a plan that someone else should take this over? Gone

  • Nautilus Cloud Announcement, some more information to the closing here. Cryptonomic that is here for a long time soon gone too.

  • Probably Galleon Wallet soon too, see comment

  • Tacode dev also closing

  • TzStats indicating about possibility to leave too…

Seriously is this a bad joke? Noone can expect teams to fund public infra out of their pocket I understand that. But I am not sure how to feel about it, if people are expecting public infra operators to generate revenue (especially in Tezos & this market) then good luck. At this pace we will be left with one public mainnet node - is this the decentralization people aim for?

I am afraid that under this market conditions, we have not reached max pain yet…

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I think there was a baker who quit recently too.

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Sry to disappoint, but TzStats is not leaving. We’re just a bit quiet because in fact we’re working a new DEX/DeFi/NFT API service and we’re rethinking the way we operate.

My Twitter comment comes out of observing Tezos and other blockchain ecosystems for the past several years. Right now there’s no sustainable business to be made in Tezos running explorers, public nodes, public data APIs or building open-source libraries / software since nobody else is making any sufficient money who would be willing to outsource hosting or data services. Every team builds their own stack, there are no business relations across silos (that I’m aware of). You can argue that’s good because its maximum decentralized. The downside is libraries and tools get abandoned faster because maintenance costs are high, dev time is expensive and opportunities for good devs elsewhere are higher due to larger user bases and volumes. It doesn’t help that new and ever more complex feature are pushed from core in a race against other chains. More complexity + higher maintenance costs + lack of user growth + lack of paying customers leads to the most expensive teams throwing the towel first. Lean teams survive, but lean teams are probably also not the type of company structure an off-chain business would trust to stay around for long enough to build their apps/services on top. Core is paid by TF and has zero incentive to optimize for adoption. We + all other infra teams receive grants which is great because TF understands common goods need to be subsidized. We’re grateful for that and we hate it at the same time, because frankly, it’s the only thing that keeps on the lights. If your business cannot survive without grants, the moment sugar daddy shuts off the supply all your tools become obsolete with the next protocol upgrade. That’s what’s happening here.

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I am not disappointed, in fact I am relieved about you statement not leaving! I might have interpreted your Twitter comment different and I think I am not the only one. So its great to hear this.

Also the problem you described is very good, I agree with everything and could not put it better into words myself. Thank you for that. Its just sad to see the process of people/projects leaving…

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Next one is Tezgraph: Support for TezGraph Ends January 6, 2023

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I am hearing rumours that now TZConnect is closing shop?
https://tzconnect.com/
Is this true?

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Lets add the sudden, without a further warning or notice, kill of PascaLigo.
Thats really rough and does not help Tezos to gain more developers.
You are just letting them down.
But let me be clear, If a certain entity cut the funding then SHAME ON YOU!
The community is working hard to convince users and devs onto Tezos…

The statement read for yourself:

Hi all,

About PascaLIGO

The documentation is broken. This is a bug from the doc website, we are currently fixing it.

We do not intend to remove past things that worked, and will obviously not remove PascaLIGO from previous versions.

It is being deprecated.
Starting from V1 (next version), it won’t be part of the compiler any more. We will of course keep the docs and PascaLIGO in older versions.

All of this was going to be explained in the next version’s changelog + Twitter announcement, where we communicate all of our changes, as usual. But V1 has been postponed by two weeks. As you can imagine, there are a lot of breaking changes, and will bring with it V1 of LIGO.

Why PascaLIGO is being deprecated?
This was asked to us many times by our funders. The preferred strategy was to focus solely on CameLIGO and even more so on JsLIGO. Similarly, the PyLIGO project is also cancelled for now.

The main reasons are:
• There is a regular feedback that too many syntax is confusing
• There’s a cost to maintaining extra syntaxes
• It is better to focus resources, training, documentation on fewer syntaxes to maximize adoption
• PascalLIGO had very quirky syntax and did not make for a good onboarding language
• A major reason for why PascaLIGO still had use was the presence of imperative features, which have since then been ported to JsLIGO
Furthermore, we did it in the past for ReasonLIGO a while ago, given the low relative usage. Similarly, our latest poll shows that CameLIGO and JsLIGO are the main choice by far (90%) new projects

*While we historically were against the removal of PascaLIGO, this is a period of bear market, accompanied with budget cuts, and we must focus. *

More on this last point: major changes are coming on V1, which will significantly improve onboarding and dev experience. Porting them to PascaLIGO will delay it

—

We understand this is hard for many users. To help the transition, we will help any project written in PascaLIGO to migrate to JsLIGO.

Source: Telegram: Contact @LigoLang

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Lets add to the list:

Blokhaus gone
TzConnect gone
Tezos Ukraine gone
https://twitter.com/TezosUkraine/status/1621141622615588866

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I am hearing rumours that Blockwatch is no longer funded by the Foundation and that TzStats and TzGo will be shutdown? Is this true @Alex?

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Not so fast! They haven’t been paying us since Kathmandu, that’s right (where is the money Lebowski!?), but I attribute this to structural inefficiencies. Let’s wait for their decision on funding TzGo and TzIndex for this year. We’ll hopefully have news sometime mid April. If not, we have options.

TzGo is not so high maintenance and it’s easy to just not support bleeding edge Tezos features with unproven market fit (remember when Sapling was the big thing? … not trying to step on peoples rol^H^H^Htoes). TzIndex is much higher maintenance, but it is the only indexer that is really storage efficient and does not require an external database server to work (something you may find useful in a few years when archive nodes are 5TB+ in size and indexing consolidates to centralized providers). We’re planning to move to a new more modular architecture, but this will likely happen as a closed source commercial-only project.

TzStats will not shut down for now. We have been funding most of its development and hosting ourselves for the past 3 years, some has been offset by a community grant, but since this is denominated in tez its not even enough to pay for server rent anymore.

What’s going to happen this year is that we’ll replace the free TzStats API with a new and more powerful API that covers the entire token, DeFi and NFT universe on Tezos. This will be a paid service with a low entry-level. We’ll also move further away from protocol details to isolate ourselves from the stress of rapid protocol upgrades and will focus more on analytics.

Expect some big announcements very soon.

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Thank you for the clarification. I hope you will receive funding and I am sure i speak for many that it would be a shame as many of use use your services!

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What is unfolding recently has been quite a shock and a disappointment to the majority of the community, especially the shutting down of many awesome organizations like TzConnect and Tezos Ukraine who helped build up an amazing community over the past couple of years and the amazing work done by Blokhaus in places that i’m sure if i tried to name them all it’d take me quite awhile haha.

This all could be summed down to quite a few things. We cannot expect the foundation to always be there for us, most of what is being developed is free and open with no means of relying on the community. Giving every single initiative or project a single point of failure, without the Foundation they can no longer operate or maintain such. And well, with the recent restructuring… It started to unravel.

It seems to be a weird, unsavory idea for many to rely on the community more, to be completely open, be sponsored by the community for some reason despite having literally no other choice. We should be relying on the community more, they are literally almost always our focus. If whatever we’re offering has meaning to them then there’s no reason not to be open, to clarify that we need their help to sustain our offering. And they will deliver, as they always did in any form of contributed value, monetary or other.

We should be learning from others who do this as opposed to outright rejecting the possibility. I for one wonder if the people who decided to close shop and leave would’ve had a different fate if they discussed their next steps with the community. Moving forward with a new plan to sustain themselves.

I can only hope to wish for a bright future of the only chain that can prove itself to truly be what it claims to be. :butterfly:

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