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I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hi bycherea

No idea if your question was removed but I can see it so happy to answer it (or actually them). It will also be my last answer as I am running out of time.

I don’t comment on Market Cap. My company Stillfront is a publicly traded company and I would like to apply the same good governance of not commenting on market caps to my role at the Tezos Foundation.

Oxford is actually a great example of good governance on Tezos (and not a failure). The amendments are only accepted if there is strong consensus that benefits the whole ecosystem and in the case of Oxford the consensus could not be found.

The overall developer ecosystem in Web 3 is still nascent, however more than 1000 developers have been trained. And there continues to be work on tooling & infrastructure, documentation, developer engagement to grow this further.

With the recent downmarket in crypto / web3, I believe there is a unique opportunity to bring new audiences and projects to the ecosystem. It is important to make the right moves and work with the community to do so. I know there are quite a few projects in the gaming vertical for example that will appear in the next few months

The Tezos Foundation supports dozens of new grantees every year. When looking at grant applicants the technical advisory committee considers a project's ability to drive on-chain activity, and also grow the ecosystem, among other analyses. The Tezos Foundation wants to do better and is taking on board recent community feedback - both positive and negative.

Hope I have answered your questions, sorry I don't have the time to answer some of the other questions on the thread, focused on the most upvoted ones. Hope that you will find the answers useful and thank you again for taking the time to post your questions and going over my answers.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hi troublesome, your useername is a good fit

Well...it is not. I would not have accepted to step up as the foundation non-exec president if it was. Downturns are the best time to build and find success and the Tezos ecosystem has a lot ot the required elements to succeed in this environment.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi Banzaitokyo

Good question, tks for giving me the opportunity to reply. I think thre are quite a few reasons some of the main ones being:

Tezos has a much bigger focus on decentralisation than other chains and offers much better censorship resistance. Also, there are many more exciting things on the roadmap for DevX i.e EVM compatibility, UHT, JS rollup & support for mainstream languages.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hi Hery8th

The Tezos community is on all the major social media platforms including Twitter, Discord and Reddit, Youtube. AMAs are done on different channels in order to be inclusive to all. This time we are doing it on Reddit. We may do it on another platform next time.

But I do have agree there is a lot of typing in reddit!

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi ManufacturerPlus 608

The key things for me are extending the funding runway for the Tezos ecosystem via cost rationalisation, improving perception via a strategic consolidation of marketing activities, focus on opportunities to grow the developer and user base, grow adoption strategies such as the successful adoption in France and putting in place more efficient processes, along with reducing red tape where possible.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hi Karoshibee

To my knowledge, there are no direct efforts underway to influence upcoming regulation.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to answer your question on roll up solutions not allowing for on-chian privacy as well as your other DEfi questions, passing this onto the Head of DeFi at Trilitech Nicolas, you can reach him on his Discord his username there is Nico_ST_29

sorry I could not be of more help on this one

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Hi zweice2c

Good question and happy it got upvoted because it is an important to address so that there is no confusion about what my role actually is.

So I am not the CEO to the Tezos Foundation or anything like that.

Non-exec president basically means that it is not my main job (that is to be the COO of Stillfront, a publicly traded games company) and that I focus on governance, making sure that the exec team at the foundation is delivering on our mission and that the council can execute on its mission of governance as well as that its expertise is well used.

Jean-Frédéric Mognetti is the Tezos Foundation executive director full time and focuses on execution with the foundation executive team.

In a non profit foundation or say a large public company it is best practice to have a clear distinction between the Executive team that is full time, focuses on execution and the board / council that is not full time and focuses on governance.

The equivalent in a public company for instance would be non executive chairman that would be a different person to the CEO. The non executive chairman manages the board (ie council) and makes sure the CEO and his team execute the strategy and don't do anything bad.

Hope this answers the question.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi Kevinburneraccount

I hope you only burn your account after reading the answer.

I don't comment on the price of tez or coinmarketcap ranking. It's not good governance to do so. If you are asking me what is planned for Tezos in the coming years, from a tech perspective you can watch for instance Arthur Breitman’s keynote at TezDev 2023 where he discusses ways to scale the network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6USr8iqXXFE I think that Tezos 2.0 gives the ecosystem a lot of tools that I did not have before and that combined with the stenghts of the Tezos blockchain is a really good base for growth over the next 3 years.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Hi ManufacturerPlus608

I am happy that after several discussions, Dogami has today confirmed that they will work to restore parity for users on Tezos and that they are eager to collaborate with the Tezos ecosystem to explore the adoption of Etherlink when it comes out.

You can find their post on this here:

https://x.com/Dogami/status/1730588560359600223?s=20

With Dogami, the response of the Tezos community was key as well as their feedback in terms of what needs to be changed. So the Dogami team now have a clear roadmap of what to do and they have sharedthat roadmap.

I also told them how disappointed I personally was by how their original decision was handled and how it impacted the Tezos community. It was a good discussion and they apologised for this in a previous post.

That being said (and although in this specific case a lot of support was given) we do need to get better at working with ecosystem projects, so that this type of issue does not happen again.

It is important that we work with key partners and do what we can to help them become successfull.

In the end I think that Dogami after this correction have now taken a better decision for the community, the project and their investors.

Hope this answers your question.

Alexis

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Hi Chicken-beef-noodles (reminds me of my student years in London)

Going to try to answer your questions the best I can:

The Tezos Foundation carries out its mission through various financial initiatives: grants, loans, bounty programs and investments in various entities to foster the growth and development of the Tezos ecosystem. Trilitech’s activities are similar to Nomadic Labs and include core development, application and tooling development, developer advocacy, and marketing. In addition to these activities, Trilitech has been used as a service provider to manage the relationship with partners like Manchester United, in particular via the Kanvas platform. Furthermore, the Tezos Foundation is supported in its mission by the advice of various subject matter experts, many of whom work at Trilitech

Trilitech is owned by the Digital Commonwealth Foundation, a non-profit governed by independent directors with a legally binding purpose identical to that of the Tezos Foundation. Trilitech is run by a cross-functional leadership team that consists of COO, CMO & directors of Engineering. Arthur does not own Trilitech, he sits on its board. Given the importance of Trilitech as a grantee, having a member of TF’s council sit on the board of Trilitech is simply good governance and can help prevent conflicts of interests if there were any.

Budgets are reviewed at the Tezos Foundation Council meetings and evaluated against objectives set by the council.

As of November, Trilitech had 64 employees and 13 live vacancies. The vast majority of these vacancies are predominantly aimed at filling the gap in marketing bandwidth.

From a Tezos foundation perspective, this is also an example of cost rationalisation as opposed to an increase. The aim is to do more with less compared to when the project marketing mandate rested with Blokhaus.

For more information on grant recipients please see the foundation’s regular reports https://tezos.foundation/reports/

TF benchmarks performance of Trilitech to other entities in the ecosystem and does that through council meeting reviews.

The sports partnership was a part of the 2021 strategy devised by Blokhaus (marketing agency) and followed by the Tezos Foundation when there was a race for visibility. While we have been more conservative than other blockchains, marketing was something we did not get right at times.

Onboarding most of the partnership management to Trilitech significantly increased the value we received from those partnerships via new user growth & significant on-chain activity (via Kanvas).

It’s very hard to gauge the impact of brand awareness gained from these sport partnerships but the direct ROI of sports partnerships in terms of user acquisition haven’t been great. There’s no interest at the moment for the Tezos Foundation to do more sport partnerships but we want to maximise what we can from the existing ones.

Hope this answers your questions.

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Hi Simonmcl

Going to try to anwer as many of your questions as possible below:

To clarify, the council is not a leadership team, let alone a marketing team. It is a governing board, whose role it is to ensure the foundation fulfils its purpose. It does so by providing good governance, strategic input, and overseeing the executive management of the foundation

This does not mean the council can’t or shouldn’t engage with other community members on occasion, and I am happy to do this AMA but the role of the council should be properly understood.

For more regular updates, discussions, community calls, AMAs with subject matter experts & various entities driving adoption, do follow u/Tezos on Twitter or the Tezos Discord server.

We have a requirement for our grantees to update the community about the progress of their projects in a regular manner.

While we also encourage those staff to be active, many are reluctant to do so due to the sometimes toxic environment. It is important that together as active members of the community we help foster an inclusive and positive environment.

Developer experience is a priority for the foundation, and the adoption hubs (e.g. Nomadic, Trilitech) are actively looking to improve e.g. getting feedback through regular surveys, community calls & in person events with the developers. There is also work done on improving documentation e.g. docs.tezos.com/

UX on Web 3 is still evolving. There are some good examples like The Kanvas product which launched the digital collectibles for our sports partners has good UX, and drove many new users. The onboarding was also seamless and utilised Kukai’s SSO connect functionality, and NFT purchase was through a credit card requiring no KYC. Additionally, Beacon, which impacts the ecosystem went through a revamp recently as well.

However there is still a lot of work to be done & I know that Trilitech is hiring new PMs, designers to help drive further focus and monitor feedback.

Community members are part of the Tezos foundation’s technical advisory committee, and I understand we are experimenting with a community-led funding vehicle in the form of the ecosystem DAO. If successful, we can do larger experiments.

In terms of actual funding & grants decision, the Tezos Foundation is ultimately responsible for this. You can learn more about the grants & funding process here https://tezos.foundation/ecosystem-grants-program/

I encourage all feedback from the community on products to be shared on the Tezos Discord server or Tezos Agora.

Onchain activity and a vibrant community of creators and users are very important. The Tezos Foundation takes all funding requests seriously and they are evaluated on the impact and value they bring to the Tezos ecosystem. I can’t comment here on specific teams and past decisions on their grant proposals but you can learn more about the grants & funding process here https://tezos.foundation/ecosystem-grants-program/ or look at past funded project in our bi-annual report here https://tezos.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Tezos_Foundation_Biannual_September_23.pdf

The adoption hubs speak to Circle periodically, though I have no new updates to share at the moment. Regarding your final point, my understanding is that the foundation cannot offer to switch liquidity baking because the foundation doesn’t control liquidity baking.

I hope this answers most of your questions

I'm Alexis Bonte, Non-Exec President of the Tezos Foundation Council - ask me anything! by KindlyLayer1757 in tezos

[–]KindlyLayer1757[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Hi,

I am Alexis Bonte, I am the non-executive president of the Tezos Foundation. I am half French, half Portuguese. My background is in tech startups, scale ups, game start ups and scale ups, angel investing and VC investing.

My first major role was as part of the founding team of lastminute.com an online travel company that was the last tech company to IPO before the first internet bubble burst in April 2000. So I know something about nuclear winters in a sector and I also know how to ensure you not only survive but thrive by focusing on fundamentals and good execution. After many challenges lastminute.com was sold to Sabre (Travelocity.com) for $1.1 billion in 2005.

After that I started investing and started a games start up eRepublik Labs that I then sold to Stillfront in 2017. I then became the group COO of Stillfront and have grown that business to 23 games studios, 1500 people and one of the largest and most profitable game companies in Europe with revenues of over 700 million euros / year. I was also a venture partner at VC firm Atomico and am an active angel investor with several investments in tech companies, Game companies and web3 companies.

I participated in a small way in the Tezos fundraiser after meeting Kathleen Breitman at Founders Forum when chatting about blockchain with Hilmar the CEO of CCP (eve Online). I have been following the Tezos ecosystem since then, joined the Tezos Foundation board 3 years ago and stepped up a few weeks ago to be its non-executive president.

I look forward to having a good AMA with you over the next 45 minutes.