Teia Newsletter #3 - 7 Mar 2022

Crossplatform charity, defining structures and talking DAO

It was another week of a lot of internal progress for the Teia community. In this newsletter we have updates on: Hic et Nunc’s birthday, the charity initiative for Ukraine, our application for the Prix Ars Electronica, our project team organisation and discord structuring, the plan to move forward with the marketplace smart contract, and the launch of our Teia wiki!

Happy Birthday Hic Et Nunc!

One year ago (1st March 2021) the experimental dApp Hic Et Nunc was launched and started an incredible journey for us all. You can learn more about the history of Hic Et Nunc here

Tip: If you want to take a trip down memory lane, you can visit a (limited) snapshot of hic et nunc from the launch day on archive.org

As announced in the last Newsletter, the domain “hicetnunc.art” is now handed over to hicetnunc and points to the same site as hicetnunc.xyz. This means that hicetnunc is hicetnunc again. Teia features like the collab contract, friends feed and future updates as well as the upcoming new swapping contract can only be accessed through “teia.art”.

Community update twitter space recording

As announced on our blog, we held multiple twitter spaces to update the community and chat about the current state of the project around February 22nd, you can find a recording of the first english space on youtube:

Ukraine Fundraiser

The current Invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Army has resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Ukraine. The broader Tezos Art community joined forces and started a fundraiser initiative to collect money for civilian relief. Versum in conjunction with FxHash set up a shared donation contract that will redirect tezos to multiple charity orgs (Find a list of the supported Orgs on our wiki). The organisations chosen are all non-military (medical, aid, journalism, etc.) and the list can be changed later on if necessary.

The Teia Community wants to help support this initiative alongside Versum, FxHash and objkt.com, who all joined in donating to and promoting that contract.

If you want to help, you can:

Mint a OBJKT with a collab contract that automatically directs gains and royalties to that address (Find a guide on how to do that on our wiki)
Donate tezos to the fundraiser address directly (please don't send NFTs directly to the contract address!)
Buy and promote fundraiser NFTs
Raise awareness for this and other charity initiatives
Support Ukrainian Artists (https://nftbiker.xyz/event/ukraine)

NFTBiker set up an overview Page for this initiative, where you can see the amount of money raised, the money already sent out to the orgs, and the OBJKTs minted with the collab contract: https://nftbiker.xyz/event/supportukraine

The first batch of donations has already been sent out on 1st of march, according to this tweet by fxHash:

The splits are now set on the donation contract: https://tzkt.io/KT1DWnLiUkNtAQDErXxudFEH63JC6mqg3HEx/storage/

We triggered the first donation a few minutes ago: https://tzkt.io/ooTBaR8TkMpBu4W7XpS76GskCK1oCAyzSaY7d2416DqrVFUerG8

25900 ꜩ were sent (~84000 €) !!!

So about 12000€ to each of the 7 organisations we picked

Access to Teia from the Russian Federation

Teia.art relies on the indexers by Teztools that are currently not available in the Russian Federation. The User Interface is not affected by this.

https://teia.rocks/ is an alternative mirror which has been set up independently by community members and uses another indexer that is currently available everywhere.

Teia marketplace contract and DAO registration

The legal team has continued researching our legal situation and looked for ways to go forward in terms of incorporating Teia. you can read a summary of the current discussion on our discourse forum

The main consensus is that we should incorporate Teia as soon as possible in order to have legal clarity and protection. We are currently in touch with DAO specialists and trying to sort out the best way to register as a DAO, currently a good option would be to register Teia in the Republic of Marshall Islands as they allow registration as DAO with a smartcontract defining the members of the entity.

This week, jagracar will start working on a DAO token prototype and is currently looking for tezos smart contract developers to help setting that up.

Researching different jurisdiction for DAO's. Marshal Islands comes up as the best place on a number of fronts by Incorporating in a jurisdiction that explicitly recognizes the unique structure of DAOs & ensures limited liability to its members - pioneered by @MarkLurie @midaods pic.twitter.com/WhWXYeXKpS
— theschoolofbitcoin (@theschoolofbtc) February 22, 2022

The current plan for the next step is to launch the marketplace contract with 0% fees (temporarily) to avoid tax liabilities until we have registered Teia officially. We will be able to put fees in place via multisig vote at a later date. This is probably happening this week. We are eager to start promoting the new marketplace contract and for people to swap onto it. The deployment of the Teia marketplace contract will be another important step for us to become a truly community-owned project.

For the time being, if you want to help support the infra and indexer, you can donate to Manitcors/Teztools donation wallet to help fund the upkeeping costs while we aren't collecting platform fees yet. You can of course also mint collab contracts with this address as benificiary. The address is tz1VsAWHavM8PvJZpedLr5BWuveypGxSVJUf.

Guild/Working Group Updates

We are currently formalizing our internal working group structure through “guilds”: The guilds are semi-autonomous sub-groups dedicated to specific areas of the Teia project. The long term plan is for each guild to have its own multisig contract and manage its own budget. Our current guilds are:

Culture/Equity
Development
Design
Security/Copymint fighting
PR/Communications
Operations
DAO Development

Each guild is in the process of appointing coordinators. These coordinators will track the guild’s progress, organise team members, assign tasks, and help onboard new volunteers. We hope to have coordinators appointed for all guilds within the next few weeks.

To improve the flow of information we have created “bulletin boards” for every guild. These bulletin boards will contain the most important and up to date info: progress reports, discussion writeups, team lists, and guild specific discord votes. All discord users will have access to view the bulletin boards, but only the guild’s coordinators will be able to post there. You can find a first sketch for bulletin board message templates on discord

Ideally, this guild structure will allow more people to stay up to date with the progress of each working group, and will allow for more streamlined activity on tasks. Of course this whole structure is in an early stage and will adapt over time.

We are still in the process of onboarding volunteers that filled out the volunteers form. If you are interested in contributing, please fill out this form and say hello on the discord to find the correct channel for your field of interest.

wiki.teia.art

Our Archive Team started setting up our own Teia Wiki which will for now be hosted on our Docs repository on github and aims at collecting Guidelines, Documents, FAQ sections, Onboarding Material.

Currently the wiki is incomplete and is being worked on but it is already accessible at wiki.teia.art

New pages added during the last few days include

Application for Prix Ars Electronica

111v1ab and the “Grants and Awards” team have submitted an application for the “Prix Ars Electronica” in the category “digital communities”, a grant awarded to “artistic and social projects and activities that aim to deliver social benefits, create and support communities, and foster an open and inclusive civil society”.

You can find the full application booklet on our Github Archive

We are in the process of setting up a team that will aim to apply for more awards and grants. As always: if you are interested in helping with that, you can say hello in discord (channel: #🏆grants-and-awards) and fill out the volunteer form.