What is the long-term business model of Nomadic Labs? I assume funding by the Tezos Foundation will stop at some point in time.
1 Like
Metastate:
[1] Do you see a conflict of interest in Cryptium being one of the world’s biggest for profit validator businesses and its spin-off Metastate being a Tezos not-for-profit-funded core development entity? Will you not naturally go and implement features that help your business, at the end of the day?
[2] What feature of those that you currently have in your pipe line are you most excited about and will this be something to be included in the upcoming 007?
1 Like
The past protocols are listed in the Tezos doc, on the left there is a list under “Protocols” section. There are also several blog posts on the NL and CL blogs.
For future protocols there is no clear roadmap, there are different actors working on several topics, each with a slightly different roadmap. At Nomadic Labs we are mostly working on Michelson and Sapling for the next proposal.
2 Likes
For the current state of development I will refer to @klakplok 's answer below since he included the relevant links to GitLab.
It is difficult to but a fixed ETA on a new proposal, but we are getting closer every week to a few possible proposals for 007 (of course there could always be a secret one that I don’t know about that is injected tomorrow 
). I think the ETA is going to be more on the order of weeks rather than months though. However it is important to remember that we are upgrading a live financial system currently valued rather highly and hence we are very focused on reliability and testing. A good analogy to think about upgrades is that we are currently all sitting in an A380 at 10,000 feet altitude and the core developers are upgrading the engines so that we can reach Mars instead of New York.
2 Likes
Generally we spend a lot of time exchanging ideas and thoughts about how to further develop decentralised, permission-less and censorship resistant protocols with people from Nomadic Labs as well as with researcher and implementers from the wider ecosystem (Tezos, Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, Celo, Cosmos, Bitcoin). Currently a lot of this exchange is happening in digital format, but I am very much looking forward to the moment when we can attend and host academic/industry conferences.
This answer makes it look like you have no interest in asking the tezos baker community for feedback and ideas for improvements, some might criticize you for overlooking features like a method to stop over-delegation ( which many bakers have been waiting for a long time, meanwhile, a tezos-fork has already implemented this ), instead, you focus on features no baker known to me has asked for, like Stateful Baking Accounts ( which is opposed by many bakers ), do you expect bakers to vote in favor of whatever you come up with, without question, if you do not listen to their concerns?
EDIT: to make a more concise question: given that currently your development efforts are funded 100% by Tezos Foundation ( presumably ) do you feel you have an obligation to the tezos community, or do you feel free to implement things that benefit big bakers like you more than small bakers?
2 Likes
Hi Robert!
Metastate is an R&D organization focusing on three key technical areas, which are core development (protocol and shell), programming languages (Michelson and Juvix), and cryptography (zero-knowledge proofs for computational privacy and compression).
We initially communicated about our work on Tezos using the Cryptium Labs brand. Cryptium Labs will continue to share information and communications related to its baker operations, as well as contents that are relevant for its delegators, such as governance activities.
Going forward, we will use the newly created Metastate profiles to communicate about our work in furthering the Tezos protocol and its ecosystem. In order to stay up-to-date on all our technical work (core development, programming languages, and cryptography), and our community development activities, please follow the profiles below:
4 Likes
I’d rather stay in the topic of this AMA, that is core development and 007.
We did answer similar questions about NL’s funding structure in our last AMA on reddit.
1 Like
Thank you! Good luck!
Hello and thank you for hosting this AMA.
I would like to raise a concern I have about Tezos decentralisation.
Looking at the current shares, I found out that 13 bakers are representing 53.95% of the network.
Since the 8 Tezos Foundation bakers do not vote, can we assume that if the 5 biggest bakers vote for the same thing, the proposal is either accepted or refused regardless of what other “small” bakers are voting.
If so, are we really having a decentralised network? What could be the solutions?
Thank you
1 Like
We should split voting rights from delegation rights.
2 Likes
I would also like to know the answers to Justin’s questions.
7 Likes
I would also like to know the answer to Justin’s question
4 Likes
Ok. Thanks. I wasn’t aware of the AMA you linked and I found your answer in it after searching for a few mins.
1 Like
Is the decision process what is included or what is not included in a proposal intransparent or is there the possibility for the community to have a say in what features they would like to be proposed?
2 Likes
Can we imagine giving the rights to each delegators to vote as well?
At the moment, let’s say Binance or someone injects a proposal to increase the roll size to 20 millions tez and have the top 5 bakers approving. can we assume that these bakers take control of the Tezos network?
2 Likes
Also want to hear the reply on Justin’s question!
5 Likes
Maybe I should have made it more explicit in my above answer that by wider Tezos ecosystem I meant entities such as bakers, client implementers and smart contract developers. Features such as the Delegation Toggle were developed in order to help bakers manage their delegation status. Furthermore an often requested feature was the ability to rotate a baker’s consensus key which is implemented by stateful baking accounts. Moreover a feature often requested by smart contract developers was the ability to have access to hash functions, Sha3 and Keccak, which is hopefully going to be included in 007 as well.
2 Likes
The delegation Toggle was requested even before babylon.
The stateful baking accounts does seem more like a precursor to burebrot 2.0, than a simple solution to the key rotation, which could have been implemented in a way that would not raise any of the concerns Justin has mentioned.
1 Like
