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State of TON + Grants with TON Foundation
Recorded: Sept. 1, 2023 Duration: 0:13:49Space Recording
Full Transcription
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Hey, Marco.
Apologies about the technical difficulties.
How are you doing?
Apologies.
You're on mute.
Oh, okay.
No, no, that probably couldn't hurt.
Hey, Jeff.
Sound perfect.
Hey, it's great to talk again.
Sorry again.
I don't know why, but I had to log out, log in, log back in.
It just didn't let me start.
Twitter space always has issues.
Hopefully next time we'll just do Telegram.
I would do that on Telegram are also great.
Okay.
I think this should definitely be some...
They should have more exposure.
Yeah.
So, yeah, with that said, for the Tawn ecosystem, obviously, more exposure on Telegram, but it's kind of late right now in New York.
It's already 11 at night.
So, a lot of our builders and community will probably listen tomorrow.
So, with that said, I'm really excited to introduce Marco, who is...
You can introduce yourself, Marco, actually.
Yeah.
Good.
Great.
So, my name is Mark, and I'm happy to work in Tawn Foundation in the DevRel department.
So, I'm basically DevRel manager.
So, I'm helping our head of DevRel managing a few directions where we try to make Tawn ecosystem a better place for builders, developers, investors, mostly focusing on developers because it's DevRel.
And I do manage grants.
I manage smart challenges that we run, the builders.
And also, we start to grab the surface on YouTube video tutorials.
This is...
I outline the scope of my focus.
So, the scope of DevRel department focus is much broader.
Awesome.
With that said, we're very excited to have Marco.
We spoke about six months ago, and we're very excited about what Marco does for the Tawn ecosystem at large with education, creating accessibility, as well as engineering, you know, engineering training courses for, you know, Fund C.
And I think, Marco, you're going to be very great for the North American community, U.S. community, because our builders do want to build on Tawn, have a lot of questions, and are interested.
I'm trying my best in the U.S. to encourage and inspire people about Tawn.
It's great that recently, you know, training bots and other Telegram bots has taken interest and are widely used now.
And that's a great, you know, entryway for Tawn ecosystem.
So, with that said, hopefully when our builders listen to this tomorrow morning and tomorrow, they'll learn more about Tawn and be encouraged to try Tawn now.
And the best way to try Tawn, feel free to use Sonnet and our governance tools, our NFT marketing tools.
You'll be able to see a lot of Tawn NFT projects, gaming projects that we've partnered with, and you can go try the projects out and their games through our bot.
And also, we also have a text-to-AI imaging product.
So, with that said, Marco, would you mind giving a little bit more update about the ecosystem and how NFT and gaming projects are growing?
Yeah, sure.
You just got me so curious about some North American, like, U.S. community of developers for Tawn.
Before, I have some things to tell, for sure.
I would really love to say some things that are popping, because I'm right now in Korea, in the middle of the Tawn Bootcamp.
It's a side event on the Korean Blockchain Week, and we have a demo day today.
So, I'm excited to talk about so many things, but I really, really, really, really want to learn more about the American community, as much as you know.
So, can I please maybe do a bit of an off-talk regarding that, if you don't mind?
Yeah, that's fine. Go for it.
So, basically, you said something about trading bots, and so you said, like, those start to be more interesting for the builders and developers, if I got you right.
But I'm very curious, like, about Telegram exposure.
So, from your experience, from what you've seen, is it, like, the Telegram itself, is it a place for builders to actually meet their users?
Like, is it taken this way in the builders' community?
Yeah.
So, that's a great question.
I think I mentioned this to you in our last chat.
Telegram is the most widely used communication platform for Web3 in the U.S.
Oh, really?
Yep.
It's the number one.
Especially Discord.
So, Discord is for the power users.
But if you wanted to just, you know, if you go to any of the conferences and events, people will ask you, what's your Telegram?
If they like you, they actually want to talk to you, what's your Telegram?
If they don't really want to talk to you as much, then people will just share, this is my Twitter.
You can follow me, and you can see what I like.
And then Discord is usually project-focused.
You're right.
It's like, hey, these are participants of this project, and you can ultimately, you know, you can ultimately learn more about a project.
So, Telegram is more personable, and projects are now starting to use Telegram as well.
A DAO that I helped co-found for gaming tournaments.
We started off on Telegram, grew the community to about 2,000, and then when it was too much people, right, we then moved to Discord.
Because Discord has more scalability for communities.
So, I would say Telegram is good for personal and for new projects trying to scale from zero to, let's say, 100 to 500, and then people move on to Discord.
So, yeah, Telegram is number one now.
And your point about trading, definitely trading is getting popular because, think about it, in the U.S., there's a lot of regulation.
And honestly, you know, I think a lot of people are getting around the regulation through trading on Telegram bots as well.
Really?
Wow.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Thanks for this insight.
I really learned something new right now.
But I also see this as a...
So, let's say, if we're talking about the rest of the world, we envision Telegram as an amazing, let's say, delivery channel for the product to the users, right?
So, when we're talking about, like, Telegram is the power user, right?
So, it's really nice that early adopters of Telegram are the Web3 enthusiasts.
So, I see a lot of potential in that.
Because then, whatever I'm going to talk about, it's about cool things of Telegram.
And it's like, but if we're talking, if we know that the power user bases are in the Discord, but I think that's a good trend.
That's a good trend, what you're saying.
If you go from 100 to 500 with your community and you feel the power of Telegram, Telegram is making a lot of steps towards improving the user experience for the communities as well.
So, they do have this topic feature recently.
So, if you're like, we, as a ton, we use Telegram a lot.
Like, we try to utilize features of Telegram to the very extent, you know.
And, yeah, I'm going to be talking about some cool features of Telegram that we're using now.
But, in general, I think Telegram has the intention to become a great place for bigger size of community management.
So, just, I really, I'm encouraged now by this insight that, for the small communities, it is the choice.
It's really great.
So, what's popping in Tom?
I'm going to start with a boot camp.
I'm right now taking part in.
So, in Korea, in Seoul, we had, like, it's the third day today.
We're going to have a demo day.
We were having a boot camp.
We called it Tact Boot Camp.
And Tact is a new programming language that is kind of like a new level of abstraction above the FUNC.
Because FUNC was, let's be honest, FUNC is quite a complicated language to enter, especially if you're outside of crypt or trying to enter the Web3.
FUNC wouldn't be the first choice.
So, we have implemented Tact.
So, Tact is actually compiling to FUNC, and then FUNC is doing, like, compiling to FIFT, and, like, then there's all underground.
So, and we have a boot camp where we encourage Korean students.
We have some more than just Korean students here.
Not just students.
Those are some agencies there.
We encourage them to learn Tact.
I was hosting a workshop as well.
And there's some guys who know Tact much better than me even already.
So, it's a great place to meet builders.
And it was actually super great to meet projects that I've heard of before, like, guys from Megaton Finance.
They're also here.
So, basically, Tact boot camp is something that took place these days, and it went really well.
So, I encourage anybody who wants to try programming smart contracts to actually try Tact first.
So, we don't enforce it, because it's known fact that you can optimize your smart contracts much better with FUNC.
Yep.
But for the onboarding purposes, Tact is just making the deal, you know?
Because you can still write FUNC code inside of the Tact contract.
You can still perform some optimizations, potentially, but the main reason is for we try to adopt it for the newcomers.
And once they're feeling confident, once they're feeling confident with Tone architectures, etc., they are kind of keen to learn FUNC.
So, that way we kind of grow.
We already have X main language.
So, Tact is more for more newcomers.
FUNC is more for those who try to fight for the optimization, guess price, etc.
So, I really, really think it's a good idea for those who want to start building to use Tact.
Yeah.
So, this is the Korean...
