- Name: Tezos Nigeria
- Email or contact method: tezosnigeria@gmail.com
- Geographic location: Lagos,Nigeria.
- Are you applying on behalf of a company, or as an individual: This application is on behalf of a company.
- If company, provide company name and website: Registered as TEZOS TECHNOLOGY FOUNDATION a.k.a Tezos Nigeria (https://twitter.com/tezosnigeria)
- Name of project or idea: Tezos Code Gang,Community & baker support.
- Detailed description of your project or idea and why you believe it deserves funding: Our project focus on curating new breeds of developers from school leavers & undergraduates leading to build Dapps on the Tezos Blockchain.Revamping of the Community website and funding will also contribute to covering the running expenses of the community baker.
- What type of background or experience do you have, and your team have in building out a project like this: Adebayo Adelekan (Country lead & Head of Operation of Tezos Nigeria), Silas Ogar (Blockchain Developer), Chimeize Chuta (Technical Advisory)
- Social handles of project, if any: (https://twitter.com/tezosnigeria)
- Funding amount being requested (please make sure the DAO treasury can currently support it, suggested range is 500–20,000 tez depending on project requirements and value): 12,000 tez
- Tez address to be funded (please verify accuracy): tz1e3jafLnY18dexFyqv9494f4FeKMsr4s2b
- Proposed goals/GPIs to deliver for the requested funding:
Build a community of 50 developers to build Dapps on the Tezos blockchain.
Organise both online & offline community and technical training events to grow the ecosystem.
Revamping of Tezos Nigeria Website whose domain name hosting have expired
Operational support in terms of Internet connectivity & electricity cost for the Tezos Nigeria community baker.
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How can we find more details about the plans to attract the developers?
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Your baker is closed, the website listed on Twitter is no longer active (I see you do mention that in the funding request), and you haven’t tweeted anything specific from Tezos since May. Most recently, you have even used your Tezos Nigeria account to tweet out Cardano based projects. Seems odd.
If there is a good reason for the statements above, you need to justify 12,000 XTZ. What will you actually spend the money on?
What are the costs associated with revamping the tezos nigeria website? What will you spend to bring in the 50 developers to build dApps? I’m down with supporting other communities, but if you cannot provide details here then how do we know if you have even thought this out?
Good examples of expense would be: internet cost per month, electricity costs, food expense per meet up.
Kirk, the reasons for these issues you’re criticising are not apathy nor anything that should preclude them from the grant. On the contrary…
The whole point of this is that in the past Tezos Africa Foundation was funded by TF, which then dispersed that funding to the Tezos Africa communities that needed it. Budget cuts by TF are nothing new or unique to Tezos Africa (rather they’ve been across the board due to crypto winter and how that affected the treasury) but it disproportionately affected the communities of Tezos Africa because they relied on that funding for even basic utilities. Hence the need for an ecosystem DAO grant.
The challenges to the baker have been maintaining enough delegation to sustain baking rights. This has been a specific problem that we’re collectively solving with the Kuoka project.
I have chatted with TC for a decent amount of time on the ecosystem DAO. I’m very aware of the purpose.
I’m asking basic questions here based off of a couple minutes of research. If there are valid responses then they just need to speak up.
It’s a shame what they have to deal with just to start a baker but the bottom line is this is not a giveaway and funds are very limited. We need to focus on projects that can bring value to Tezos and the ecosystem DAO.
If they can provide value then they just need to outline how. That’s not criticism. That’s a basic expectation for any grant request.
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I think that expectation is totally valid. And any would-be criticism can be phrased as a question. That way we can get answers that can prove/change/invalidate the conclusions we’d come to otherwise.
No one is calling this a giveaway. It’s important to cultivate these communities as they become independent. This will fund workshops, and projects, all on the way to self-reliance.
We’ve seen in Tezos how tiny amounts of funding in unexpected parts of the world by even single individuals can lead to world-changing movements and an enormous ROI for the Tezos ecosystem (e.g. Hic Et Nunc).
West Africa is one of the strongest hubs of crypto activity, where cryptocurrency is used as currency and there is a massive interest in Tezos. Nigeria alone has an extraordinarily large Tezos artist community.
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No one is saying it isn’t important to cultivate a community from multiple cultures. I think it goes without saying that we obviously should. I’m saying they need to have a stronger proposal to justify funds.
You obviously feel very strong about this. You should dedicate some time to help them and give recommendations.
Thanks for the several observations and I would address them one by one.
As regards our baker, we had issues with delegators unstaking their tez and we lost many baking rights moreso we had relocation of the baker to a new site, internet connection and electricity cost was a major challenge, my partner proposed to buy his own starlink internet and plans are in place we share the cost of purchase and monthly subscription.
We already have someone in the Tezos ecosystem willing to remotely help out to bring up the baker. The initial plan was to get support from kukao project to fund all bakers in Africa with the required amount for baking i.e 6k xtz. To avoid persons unstaking their tez
We need to renew the domain name and hosting of the website, hence no funds to do that.
However I have never promoted cardano project using XTZNG Twitter page, what you saw there was a retweet from my personal Twitter account to it both are following each other.
Activity on Twitter page would a function of events that is ongoing which involves funds to execute them.
However the first thing to do is to revamp the website. Renewal of the domain name & hosting,SSL and redesign of the website to update ( a budget of $250)
My focus this period is strictly developers community (Tezos Code Gang) so 60% of the proposed funds would be assigned to this purpose.
However My plan is to work with a
1.A Tech NGO named Nigerian Global Blockchain Consortium that focuses on Blockchain awareness & training with close to a membership size of 500, the idea is to collaborate with NGO to organize training for members interested in Tezos Blockchain development and give some XTZ incentives at the end completion of the training with the idea curating workable XTZ based projects for possible funding in future
2. Work with at least one of the university campuses in Nigeria to train willing undergraduates. We would accommodate 15 coders from the school. Both physical meet ups and virtual CV classes would be done. For physical classes, a training space would be rented, light refreshment would be provided as running cost. We would adopt more virtual sessions without prejudice to having physical meetings. Trainees would be motivated by subsiding their internet cost. ( Budget of $350/meet up for physical and $200 for virtual)
We are open to work with other liked minded web3 community to train them.
We are been informed that this grant is not for absolute for funding baker but to have a functional Tezos community in our domain. But since we would need our baking node to start working.
Considering the high cost of expenditure, what we requested for would be maximally utilized. As I mentioned earlier and based on past experiences we are focusing on building a Dapp developers. I am willing to answer more questions. Thanks
Kindly check one of the replies from us to get a well detailed answer to this question as someone asked the same question and other issues. Based on past experiences we have to channel our attention on the developers community
We actually proposed to do an NFT fashion & Art road show last year, first of its kind in Africa, already had a team working behind the scene, organized several spaces on NFT artists, a telegram group was opened for that purpose all proved abortive as the budget was not considered
How many tezos devs has come out of Africa in the 4 years of your existence and what have they built?
I share some of the same concerns as others above. I have mixed feelings about giving funds to run a baker. On the one hand, we do need more bakers and growing the community is always a good thing. On the other hand, bakers already have their own means of securing 90% of the funds needed to become a baker, through delegation. Whats being requested here is more than double the amount of other projects looking to build new applications, to achieve something that bakers achieve on their own.
There are many bakers that do innovative things to attract delegation. Bakers launch their own NFTs that bring rewards to holders, hold raffles, use their own rewards to purchase NFTs to later sell for profit thats reinvested etc. I’ve not seen anything on Twitter or reddit by this baker attempting to do/promote anything such as this.
As you’ve said there was trouble with people undelegating, but this is likely do to instability. Looking at the baker, I see lots of user accounts leaving and then increasing their XTZ balance. So its not a case of people undelegated in order to sell (maybe some did), but more likely people left because of instability. I also see lots of Quipuswap pools leaving, investing in DeFi tokens in order to vote for pools, rather than focusing on costs ensuring the baker can remain functional, is a bad use of funds. The address requesting the funds above, is also not even currently delegating to the baker in question.
There are a number of proposals from African teams of different countries all asking for funding to run bakers, all citing the same issues, all asking for the same funds. Have you looked into trying to combine efforts here? Create a shared mulitsig and run 1 baker together under the banner of “Tezos Africa”. I think securing delegation and requesting additional funding would be much easier for a group that can demonstrate a good track record on their own steam first. I understand the challenges you are facing, but from outsiders perspective, people will have concerns with such inactivity. Again back to the initiatives above. Why not band together and make PfP projects or submit a proposals to use your combined skills to build something for the ecosystem, then take those profits and launch a baker from that.
Tezos desperately needs new applications, and to attract people with better skills in UI/UX. The other proposals, building games, new dApps, tools that dApps need etc, are all extremely critical to the survival of the network at the minute.
The issue of funding of Baking nodes is already been addressed by the Kukao African project to make every individual country independently run their nodes and to solve the problem of undelegation. What can really impact loss of Baking rights or inactive state could be the issue of Unstable internet connection. At our personal level we are getting a starlink internet access.
Really appreciate this thoughtful response.
Out of curiosity, what happen with the Kukao funding?
Also, how long do you think this funding would last and do you have any estimations on how many people could be trained?
I’m not sure if you will meet the voting requirements this round, but I do think you should look to submit another request with all these questions answered in your grant proposal.
This is the way.
I’m not aware of the kukao project, if they are filling one of the gaps then this is great news. But, in-spite of this, we still have 4 nearly identical proposals asking for funding to support bakers. I stand by my idea mentioned previously. It makes no sense for this kukao project to divide its funds supporting multiple efforts, that still leaves bakers unable to perform their function. The 4 proposals (maybe even more could be found), would be better served by pooling their resources and paying for 1 internet connection, 1 electricity supply, 1 set of minimum funds needed etc. Get 1 service up and running and profitable first, and have an agreement in place that after funds are secured, that the 1 baker, splits into 2 bakers, and then 3 and so on.
The total proposals amount to more than half of the total funds currently available in the DAO. This is not an effective use of funds when their are better options on the table
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As i eariler said, the initators of the Kukao project aim to solve the problem of inadequate funds on the node to start validating transactions on the network however i am not in the position to say or determines the duration of the funding, the initiators determines that.
As regards training of would be tezos blockchain developers, i estimated 50 people to be more realistic in a year, if we aggressively follow through with our plans to engage the various channels to get them, also note that there is high competition in the space as regards developers staying put to one platform, so we encourage them to be versatile across board so that when opportunities comes, they would be able adapt to them and get the jobs done.
The content of our grant proposal was not to seek for funding to get our node working which Kukao project intends to help out to resolve the issue of delegators un-staking their XTZ on the node. A dedicated 6000 XTZ would allocated to each node across African countries and also we need to maintain individuality as nodes when seen in Tezos map. We were the first to start running a node without any support from TF and we got funds from people to achieve the minimum threshold to start baking and that have a choice to exit if it is not serving their interest. Our focus is on building a community of developers. However with discretion, funds would be required to support the community running cost which is not out of place to seek. Currently my partner has secured starlink as it is avaliable in Nigeria, the cost of getting it and monthly subscription is been sorted by us not because of any Tezos related use but for personal use, but when we decide to plug the node , cost to run electricity and monthly subscription would have to be factored in the proposed grant request. Anyways thanks for your contribution thus far
