Since the Tezos Betanet launched on June 30, activity in the Tezos community has skyrocketed as contributors activate their ICO tokens and begin using the network. Here is a look at all the important news of the week in case you missed any of the activity.

One thing to note is that the Betanet has been running without issue despite all the increased activity and real-world testing. That is no small feat and worthy of mention since the underlying technology of Tezos will be the bedrock of the platform for decades. Bravo to the team in Paris for their diligent work in producing such strong product.

TezBox Wallet

The TezBox wallet, a Tezos wallet written by Tezos Community Foundation (TCF) board member, and community legend, Stephen Andrews, has announced that the Tezos Foundation is funding a high priority code audit on the software:

Great news – @TezosFoundation have contacted me and we are working on getting TezBox completely audited ASAP, funded by the foundation. Great stuff ahead for tezos and TezBox – thanks again TF! — TezBox (@TezBox_Wallet) July 6, 2018

TezBox is the only fully functional GUI-based wallet for the Tezos network right now, though the Cryptonomic wallet should be released shortly as well. If it were not for TezBoz, and some other tools written by Andrews, Tezos contributors would have been stuck with command-line tools at Betanet launch which is not ideal for many users. You can check our wallet page for details on other wallets as they go into release. Also, please consider supporting the rest of the Tezos projects being developed by Stephen Andrews.

Development Update

Arthur Breitman, founder of the Tezos project, released a development update on Thursday detailing some of the plans for Betanet over the coming weeks, and outlined some of the ways he sees the future of the project unfolding.

There has not been a technology update from Arthur for several weeks leading up to the Betanet launch so getting this post-launch update was important and informative.

Cake Wars

The market for delegating your Tezos tokens has started to become a reality as several baking services have come online for the Betanet and started competing for delegated tokens. For most Tezos holders, if your account holds less than 10,000 tokens, you’ll want to delegate them to a larger account to earn baking rewards by validating transactions on the chain.

A new website called My Tezos Baker has collected information on many delegation services currently available including fees, reputation, payment model and much more. Please check them out if you’re in need of a baker to start putting your tokens to work. As always, please make sure to do your own research into any baking service before choosing them as a delegate.

The Tezos Foundation is the sole baker, earning no rewards, for the first 7 cycles (cycles 0-6). After that point, baking will become open to all Tezos holders. Your tokens must be delegated 7 cycles in advance (e.g. delegate in cycle 0 to have rewards start in cycle 7, delegate in cycle 1 to have rewards in cycle 8, so on and so forth) so if you have not done so yet, please follow one of these simple community guides and get your tokens delegated! If you do hold 10,000 tokens or more, and wish to self-bake without a delegation service, check out the Bakechain project, another masterpiece from Stephen Andrews.

Exchange Trading

The only exchange offering a genuine Tezos market right now is gate.io, which is leaving many Tezos owners locked out due to residency restrictions. However, despite warnings that residents of the United States, Canada and Japan cannot use the exchange, some users have reported, albeit sarcastically, that they were able to use the exchange once they went through two forms of KYC compliance. Your mileage may vary and it may be best to wait for an exchange with fewer restrictions and higher trade volume.

Here is the Tezos chart on gate.io as of 9:00 AM ET:

The price has taken a beating due to gate.io’s restrictions and limited volume. Look for exchange trading to improve once larger exchanges begin adding Tezos to their trading pairs.

OTC Trading

If you can’t participate in exchange trading, there is another option. Tezos OTC has been providing over the counter trading for Tezos owners since Betanet launch. We contacted Tezos OTC for some basic stats and here is the breakdown of activity.

According to Graham, the Tezos OTC founder, his market is currently processing 20 to 30 traders per day, which translates into 200,000 – 300,000 XTZ per day in volume. Trades are currently being limited to a maximum of 10,000 XTZ during the Betanet period for precaution.

As far as OTC pricing, trades started with Tezos OTC at the HitBTC IOU price earlier in the week, but have now been pegged to +/- 10% of the current gate.io price at the time of the trade.

You can check the activity of Tezos OTC trades on their account page and get a sense for what kind of volume is happening.

That’s all for this week, can’t wait to see what next week holds in store for the Tezos project.