With a long holiday weekend in the States this week, and many noteworthy pieces of Tezos news dropping in the past ten days, I think it’s worth gathering everything for a week in review article. In summary, we’ve learned that the Tezos Foundation is prepping for a Betanet launch within weeks, and that Obsidian Systems will soon be rolling out their suite of tools and guides for home baking and delegation. We also learned that Ledger, the company which produces the most popular crypto hardware wallet, has officially recognized their work on supporting Tezos.

1. Tezos Foundation announces preparations for Betanet launch

The Tezos Foundation released an announcement on May 29 alerting followers to the impending Betanet launch as final preparations are underway:

After reaching fundamental milestones in recent months, the Tezos Foundation is excited to announce that final preparations for the Tezos beta network («betanet») are underway. As launch approaches, the Foundation will make further announcements with additional details on this website.

Perhaps the most noteworthy detail included in this release was the information about ICO contributions which were made under the original threshold of 0.1 Bitcoin:

A genesis block will be proposed by the Tezos Foundation at betanet launch. To prepare for this, it is imperative that all contributors verify their donation—regardless of size—to confirm that it was received by the Foundation. The Foundation intends to recommend allocations in this proposed genesis block for donations of any size that were received during the fundraiser, but they must appear in the «Check Your Contribution» tool.

Since late last year, it has been discussed as to how the Foundation would handle contributions which were below the minimum. Originally a refund process was being presented as a possibility, but it looks like they have decided to simply honor every contribution with a corresponding amount of Tezos tokens regardless of contribution size. This is a win for many contributors who inadvertently made multiple contributions below the threshold or simply made an error and didn’t meet the original terms.

The Foundation also urged contributors to use the contribution check tool to verify their tez allocation will be included in the Betanet launch.

2. It’s a baker’s life for me

Last Friday, May 25, Tezos founder Arthur Breitman released a blog post on Medium outlining the baking process and discussing some of the benefits and drawbacks involved with home baking:

Bitcoin has mining, Tezos has baking. In Bitcoin, miners compete to publish blocks containing a proof-of-work stamp by repeatedly hashing block headers. In Tezos, block creation is done by bakers. Rather than deriving the right to create a block by finding the solution to a proof-of-work problem, bakers obtain that right when a Tezos token (or rather a roll) they own (or that is delegated to them) is randomly selected to create a block. Since not everyone holding tokens is interested in being a baker, tokens can be “delegated” to another party.

Among the noteworthy topics, Arthur stated that the initial bond requirement when Betanet launches will be set at 0% initially and ramp up over time to help build the network:

To help bakers get started, the protocol initially ramps up deposits linearly from 0% to 8.25% over a period of six months. This ramp would give enough time to popular bakers to acquire the additional tokens they might need in order to bake all the blocks that they are allowed to bake. Delegates should monitor their treasury and be ready to react if they suddenly experience a surge in popularity.

It’s good to see some of these questions get answered directly from Arthur and his renewed blog activity means we’re getting close to a launch. Looking forward to more posts and articles from Arthur as time permits.

3. Benefits and Risks of Home Baking

Another blog post on baking was published on May 30 by Obsidian Systems, the software company which was hired by the Foundation to develop Tezos baking tools and guides:

You might be interested in baking yourself so that you can maximize the power of your tez. When you participate in making blocks, you reap the rewards: each block creates some new tez, and you also collect the fees from the transactions in that block. If you use a delegation service, you may still get a lot of these rewards, but ultimately the service provider decides how to divide them up.

The Obsidian article was rather broad and didn’t get too specific about details. The company, however, has stated that more details will be coming soon along with software built specifically to make baking accessible to the average user.

4. Ledger Confirms Tezos Support

As we previously reported, the Tezos platform was built to easily support the Ledger hardware wallet, however, Ledger as a company stated that they had no plans to officially support Tezos. Well, that has changed in the past two weeks and we now have confirmation that Ledger is in fact working with Tezos:

Apologies for the incorrect message. Tezos support is on our ongoing project board and we are working on it. Sorry again for the wrong information. — Ledger (@LedgerHQ) June 1, 2018

The exact date for releasing a wallet update with Tezos support is unknown, but we’ll keep following developments on this topic of great interest to the Tezos community.

5. Community Petitions Against Lawsuits

A group called the Tezos Community Organizers (TCO) launched an online petition last week aimed at stopping the ongoing lawsuits over the Tezos project. We previously reported on this back on May 22, but a new press release was issued on May 30 which detailed the effort:

Ten days ago, on May 20, 2018, a group known as the Tezos Community Organizers (TCO), which advocates for the larger Tezos Community, launched a petition to clarify that the majority of the Tezos Community does not support the lawsuits against the Tezos Stiftung, Dynamic Ledger Solutions, and various other defendants related to Tezos. The “Stop the Class Action Lawsuits Against Tezos” petition denounces the 6 plaintiffs and the cases, calling them baseless and not representative of the larger community. The lawsuits have made operations inside the Tezos ecosystem among parties difficult and has nearly put a gag order on everyone in an official capacity. Communication and executive actions have proven difficult. Despite the many impediments, Tezos intends to launch its 3rd generation blockchain by the end of June, 2018. To date, the petition has received over 700 signatures from Tezos contributors, quickly garnering more anti-plaintiffs in a few days than the plaintiffs have collected in the past 6 months. This lopsided outcome may undermine the ongoing lawsuits’ representation to the court that they represent a larger class.

If you’re interested, click here to sign the petition and add your voice in opposition to the lawsuits which have bogged down the Tezos project for months.

This was a great week for Tezos news and Betanet launch information. Can’t wait to see what next week will bring as Betanet inches closer day by day.