Tezos Israel in 2021: A Year in Review
We’ve had quite the year here at Tezos Israel
As 2021 winds down, we wanted to share with our community everything we’ve done in this rollercoaster of a year. There’s been tons of projects, ideas, meetings, conferences, events, and laughter. With this, Tezos Israel presents: 2021, Our Year in Review.
This report is organized into three categories: partnerships, projects, and community engagement. Of course, there are plenty of side-quests to advance the Tezos ecosystem, we’ll try to fit those in somewhere. Let’s start with partnerships.
Partnerships
Our main goal at Tezos Israel is to integrate the Tezos blockchain into the robust, thriving Israeli startup & high-tech ecosystem. In addition to helping individual entrepreneurs incorporate or build on Tezos, we worked with countless companies on implementing Tezos tech into their products. Here are some of the main ones.
Celsius Network
Throughout the year, we worked with Celsius on integrating Tezos onto their platform for lending & borrowing services. Celsius is a platform that “unlocks financial services for consumers worldwide through a compounding yield service and instant low-cost loans accessible via a web and mobile app.” You can read about the Tezos integration from their press release and see our shout-out! Celsius was a pleasure to work with, and we are very optimistic about their incredible progress.
Hub Security
We started off the year working with the publicly traded company Hub Security (TASE:HUB) to develop hardware security modules that allow bakers to store their private keys in a secure cloud or in a separate physical unit to avoid theft and network disruptions. The new device they created works like a server and is powered by a mini hardware security module (HSM) that acts as the user’s “remote control” and software that allows “bank-level” two-factor authentication. This unique solution offers bakers a better alternative to cryptocurrency hardware wallets, which need to be physically connected to the computers running the network. Our partnership was published by CoinDesk.
Team Finest
The advent of e-sports companies adopting NFTs to create a more interactive, engaged user-experience is paramount for an e-sport teams user engagement. To further advance and grow the Tezos NFT sector, we are very excited to have partnered with Team Finest, the top esports team in Israel. Our partnership deals with a range of NFT related integrations for their teams and a growing mainstream adoption of NFTs. Stay tuned in 2022 for more information!
XP Network
Cross-chain applications will rule the blockchain world and to ensure that Tezos remains a massive player in the space, bridges are necessary. XP Network, an Israel startup, is creating an incredible NFT cross-chain bridge that caught our eye the second we laid eyes on it. They are a cross-chain bridge for Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Tron and much more. Since our first meeting, we’ve worked very closely with them to implement Tezos onto their platform. We are extremely impressed by their team and we are very excited for their launch! More information to come in 2022!
Projects
A lot of our efforts here at Tezos Israel are developing projects for the Tezos community both in Israel and around the world. Below are some of the projects that we’ve worked on this past year.
Blockchain Olympics High School Training Program
We partnered with the City Municipality of Bat Yam, a city near Tel Aviv, to build a blockchain development training program, called Blockchain Olympics, for the high school students learning computer programming. Over the course of the 5 month program, Tezos Israel’s blockchain developers taught 70 students how blockchain works, about Tezos, NFTs, how to code basic smart contracts, and showed them the financial infrastructure of the future. This program is part of Tezos Israel’s commitment to strengthening the Tezos community in Israel and teaching these smart young developers how to build on Tezos surely helped in that mission.
DApp and Smart Contract Development for Beginners
The Tezos Israel Research and Development Team created a suite of dApp and smart contract examples for beginners to understand smart contract development across the different languages on Tezos. The team wrote the same smart contracts in three different Ligo syntaxes (ReasonLigo, PascalLigo, and CamlLigo) to teach new developers basic functionality and syntax structures. They wrote a “string” contract that can have it’s storage changed, a “grocery store list” contract to edit a map of a string and integer, a “calculator” smart contract, and a “record” contract that can change it’s record. Interact with and explore the smart contracts here! More information can be found in the announcement. This is a great tool for anyone looking to learn more about development on Tezos.
Draper University
Just before the summer, we partnered with billionaire investor Tim Draper’s Draper University (the accelerator program powered by Draper Associates) for a pre-accelerator program for entrepreneurs building on Tezos. The course had 2 weeks of online classes (3 hour lectures and 5 different 1-on-1 mentorship sessions) and it had 147 participants!
Huge thanks to Tim Draper and his truly remarkable team for this awesome partnership!
MadFish x Tezos Israel Workshop
Just at the fresh start of the year, we partnered with MadFish Solutions (the creators of Temple wallet & Quipuswap) for a 3 day online workshop! We had over 75 participants, and distributed 555 Tez in competition prizes. Also, we issued the first NFT Certificate of Completion for all of the graduates! The workshop was taught by two incredible Madfish Solutions developers, Anastasiia Kondaurova (lead developer of the Quipuswap DEX), and Korney Vasilchenko (CTO of Madfish). Anastasiia walked us through how to build a token and the ins and outs of Defi on Tezos, while Korney took us through testing the token to ensure security. We can’t thank them enough for their work and the knowledge they shared with us. Take a look at a recap of the workshop here.
Small Grant Program
A couple months ago, we announced a small grant program for entrepreneurs in Israel and in the region to build projects on Tezos. We received incredible feedback from the community and are extremely pleased with how it has gone so far. Below are two of the projects that we’ve funded thus far:
BlocksOfTime
BlocksOfTime is a decentralized time capsule built on Tezos. They are building a feed of stories placed into the blockchain built to last forever. The BlocksOfTime team has been working diligently and tirelessly to develop a strong community-based project on Tezos. Their announcement was even featured on MarketWatch, TradingView, Benzinga, and Tezos’ very own XTZ News! They are expected to launch the V1 platform in Q1 2022.
Baking Made Simple
Sam Morrow, a software engineer and blockchain enthusiast, saw a gap between the open-source material made easily accessible by the Tezos ecosystem and what is required in setting up Tezos bakeries. Because of this, Sam decided to develop a simple-to-use Baking SDK (software development kit) for an easy and straightforward setup of a Tezos bakery on Raspberry Pi’s. Additionally, Sam has been improving Tezos developer documentation and Tezos developer training tools.
We are very excited about the future of the small grants program. Not only does it incentivize projects being built on Tezos, but it also allows us to interact with our community more and more. If you are interested in applying for a Tezos small grant, feel free to contact us at contact@tezos.co.il!
Mavryk
This year, we’ve had the pleasure of incubating Mavryk Finance. Mavryk is a one-of-a-kind DeFi banking platform that will create the new era of freedom from legacy financial institutions. By combining a delegated representation DAO mechanism, a decentralized oracle system, and an on-chain Treasury, Mavryk is revolutionizing the way we interact with DeFi, and you can read all of the details on their litepaper! The Mavryk team has been tremendously advancing to bring this next level DeFi platform to life on Tezos, and will be launching in 2022!
Be a part of Mavryk and join them on Discord & follow on Twitter!
Tezla
A proud feature of Tezos is it’s eco-friendly capabilities. One transaction on Ethereum costs about the same as the average electric bill of an American household, while one Tezos transaction is the equivalent of lighting an LED light bulb for 7 seconds.
Because of this, we had an idea to combine our Tezos technology with the eco-friendly car maker that has made headlines all year — Tesla. On July 30th, our CIO Alex Davis and Head of R&D Chaim Lev-Ari, created the first ever Tezos baking Tesla, the “Tezla!” Because of Tezos’ eco-friendly nature, we seamlessly installed a Tezos bakery inside a Tesla, proving that you don’t need to waste tons of electricity to operate a blockchain! The bakery worked without faults and it even endorsed and validated blocks while operating! Take a look at the video, it’s really cool.
TezStats Tweet Bot
One of our developers, Greg Alelov, made a twitter bot to show every four hours some interesting Tezos stats. Big shoutout to TZStats for their API!
Community Engagement
One of the things Tezos Israel prides itself most on is our community engagement. Whether it be through events, articles, speakers, Twitter or Telegram, we are constantly working to promote the growth of the Tezos community. Here are some of our community engagements activities we’ve done in the past year.
Conferences
Alex Davis has spoken at multiple conferences this past year such as the IABC Conference in Dubai to over 2,000 people, the Global DeFi Summit, and at the LA Blockchain Summit which also had thousands of viewers! We were also at the AIBC conference to receive an award on behalf of Tezos for the Best Social Impact Project of 2021!
Additionally, our CEO Elie Terdjman & Alex lectured at the University of Zurich to their PhD students about consensus methods, nodes, how metadata works, on-chain governance, past Tezos upgrades, the community, NFTs and more.
Despite the rollercoaster year of lockdowns in Israel, our team has managed to attend multiple in-person conferences. Most notably, we attended the Israel Crypto Conference just a few weeks ago which had hundreds of attendees. In addition to speaking at Crypto TLV, our COO, Igal Nevo, even led a panel at the Israel Crypto Conference about blockchain regulation. It’s safe to say Tezos Israel has made its mark this year at crypto conferences.
Articles
In addition to all of the partnerships, conferences, and projects Tezos Israel works on, we also write Tezos ecosystem content. In 2021, we wrote 17 articles (and made dozens of pitch decks). Our articles reached over 10,000 views in 2021!
Here are some of our favorites:
- How to Measure the Value of a Blockchain
- On-Chain Governance on Tezos: Simply Explained
- Tezos and NFT’s: A Match Made in Blockchain Heaven
- Starting Your Own NFT Project: Conversation with Kumulus
- Start Becoming a Tezos Developer: A Tezos Tools Directory
- A Beginners Guide to Setting Up A Tezos Node
- Tickets on Edo: Simply Explained
You can take a look at all of our articles here.
Social Media
In addition to written content, Tezos Israel is a very active Twitter account in the Tezos community. Our Twitter has reached over 1.5 million impressions and tens of thousands of profile visits. We even did a NFT giveaway for the Tezos Ecosystem that had hundreds of entries!
Our Plans for 2022
To say we are excited for the upcoming year is an understatement. Our plan is to continue to make strong partnerships in the Israeli startup ecosystem, work on blockchain/crypto regulation within Israel, and develop advanced Tezos based projects for our ecosystem.
If you are interested in collaborating, our inbox is always open (contact@tezos.co.il).
Also, don’t forget to follow our twitter, like us on facebook, and join our telegram group!
Yalla Tezos!
The Tezos Israel Team
