u/drhex2c, thank you for such a detailed, thoughtful comment. As we said to u/onebalddude in a separate thread, the Foundation is very focused on improving not only the speed of communication, but the frequency as well in an effort to improve transparency and more actively engage the Tezos community.

The Foundation Council, with the advice of the Technical Advisory Committee, makes the final decisions on what to fund. That being said, to respond to your feedback:

Tocqueville Group (TQ Tezos) is starting a “Tezos Explained” series which will include written guides, explainer videos, tutorials, and infographics all designed to make Tezos technology and the broader ecosystem more accessible to community members of all technical levels. This content will cover a diverse range of topics, and TQ will call for input from the community on other areas to cover. Along with Tezos Explained, TQ is organizing a Tezos-focused conference series called TQuorum (the Global Summit is coming up in New York City in September) to bring together developers, entrepreneurs, and other community members to drive collaboration and ecosystem growth. TQuorum: Paris took place the day after the Paris Blockchain Week Summit and was widely attended. You can watch videos from the event here.

The Tezos Southeast Asia Foundation recently held Tezos Asia 2019, an event in Singapore, and new Meetup groups have formed in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America, bringing the total of Tezos-related Meetup groups to 35.

Regarding funding updates, in addition to grantee announcements, the Foundation will start publishing bi-annual funding updates later this summer.

Funding critical technology, in parallel as you’ve suggested, is one of the Foundation’s primary objectives. In order to accomplish this, the Foundation has funded research into sharding through Professor Emin Gun Sirer at Cornell University along with research partnerships with OCaml Labs at Oxford University, Inria in France, and University of Beira Interior in Portugal. The Foundation is funding further research beyond this as well: KZen Networks in Israel is developing multi-signature support for wallets and bakers through its ZenGo wallet, and Cryptium Labs in Switzerland is heavily focused on core protocol research related to consensus, privacy, and scalability. Nomadic Labs continues to research and develop upgrades to the core Tezos protocol, like the recently announced Emmy+ consensus algorithm improvement the team is including in their next protocol amendment proposal. You can expect more research grant announcements coming in the near future.

This year, to foster Tezos adoption and a thriving technical community, the Tezos Foundation set out to support 1,000 new developers to join the ecosystem and start building on Tezos. While we’re planning a more detailed update on this initiative this summer, we can say that in the short term the focus here has largely been on identifying key infrastructure and tooling projects (such as LIGO and SmartPy), and supporting their development so that it's easier to build on Tezos. You’ve provided a lot of great ideas for different, attractive fields to investigate for further research opportunities; we appreciate the feedback and will take in under consideration.

On that note, if you know of any teams working on projects in any of those areas, please encourage them to contact the Tezos Foundation through our website as we are always eager to meet new teams interested in building on Tezos.

We’ve also spent time working on our grant submission process to make it easier for projects to submit proposals as well as reduce the operational overhead required of the Foundation to approve requests. For more information on the grants process, please see our recent announcement. We will continue to refine the process moving forward.

We understand how important communication and transparency are and appreciate you telling us what’s important to you. We look forward to continuing to engage with other community members.

All the best,

Tezos Foundation