There is a lot of talk on Ethereum about the

North Star...

What is the north star of Telos?

@LilicJohn @Infinityblocio

I think there are many… we also call it our Mars mission.

I talked a bit about this in the Symmetric spaces yesterday and also in a bunch of interviews at Binance Blockchain week, which I guess should be published soon. I believe our North Star is that Telos becomes a Community-Owned Web3 Venture Production Studio. That means we build a multitude of products and services for our community - products which give us sovereignty and reduce reliance on others. At our base layer, we have DPoS, which has proven to be a robust system. We are approaching 400M blocks produced and zero downtime since 2018. As a governance layer, the system has advantages because self-custody and low economic entry barriers are inherent to Telos Zero; e.g., you don't need 32 ETH to participate. Anyone can submit a proposal and vote, and more importantly, anyone can become a block producer. We have already seen community members step up, add value to the community, and ultimately get voted in to become block producers. Telos Kiwi is an example of that. I have publicly encouraged the community to get more active in governance and to submit more proposals and vote! Within the base layer, we have a performant VM which allows us to emulate the EVM with RUST and WASM native. 2.0 is ready to launch, which means stability will improve significantly, and I believe we will have one of the most performant EVMs in the market. On the innovation side, we have our zk strategy with SNARKtor at the core. Recursive proofs are fundamental in large part because they enable trustless bridging. SNARKtor has the opportunity to become the aggregation and data protection hub for not only Ethereum but other chains as well. Our zkEVM will give us a strong presence as an Ethereum L2 and allows us to compete in that space with our hardware-software co-design approach. However, given we have DPoS at the native layer, and unlike other L2s, we retain our sovereignty, which I think is a critical distinction that will gain more significance over time - especially because many others are essentially running massive subsidy programs because they have a huge chunk of their token supply as they created that token and distributed it to themselves at genesis. Telos airdropped the entire supply at its genesis in 2018, so we have no such ability given the supply is distributed and not in control. The zk effort is also accelerating our research into hardware acceleration and ultimately ZK proving ASICs. That research could lead to some significant breakthroughs, including a potentially new hybrid consensus with useful PoW (uPOW) + PoS. In parallel, we are also now researching quantum resistance, which means hashing + bigger signatures. Telos X unifies our ecosystem similar to how Binance + BNB or Coinbase + Base have done a great job interoperating their exchanges with their respective networks. We also see others joining like Kraken with Ink. We are unique in that exchanges launching their networks is common, but an L1 bootstrapping its own exchange with its existing community has not been done before. We will be able to offer better UI/UX, wallet experiences, and of course token utility, including many token pairs with TLOS as the base pair. Telos X also allows us to extend the reach of our ecosystem to new markets. Critically, we have partnered with the Binance Link program because we will inherit their security and liquidity - the two most difficult challenges when attempting to bootstrap an exchange.

We can now start to see a multitude of products and services acting in unison in support of the Telos ecosystem. Telos becomes a venture production studio because we build products to support our ecosystem. It is community-owned because everything ties back to our community through the TLOS token. At the DPoS layer, the token is critical for participating in governance. At the EVM layer, like Ethereum, gas is paid with TLOS, and tokens are burned as EVM consumption increases. SNARKtor aggregation fees are paid in TLOS. Telos X has already committed to using its profits to buy TLOS. It will then transfer those tokens to an on-chain DAO on Telos where token holders can vote. The vote is simple; there is a dispersal list which points to a burn address. The community can vote on whether the DAO will send tokens to the dispersal address and burn the tokens, or not. That is the north star vision: a community-owned venture production studio building a suite of products and services in support of its community where ultimately the token holders vote and decide. Telos will decide its own destiny. That is our north star.

I talked a bit about this in the Symmetric spaces yesterday and also in a bunch of interviews at Binance Blockchain week, which I guess should be published soon. I believe our North Star is that Telos becomes a Community-Owned Web3 Venture Production Studio. That means we build a multitude of products and services for our community - products which give us sovereignty and reduce reliance on others. At our base layer, we have DPoS, which has proven to be a robust system. We are approaching 400M blocks produced and zero downtime since 2018. As a governance layer, the system has advantages because self-custody and low economic entry barriers are inherent to Telos Zero; e.g., you don't need 32 ETH to participate. Anyone can submit a proposal and vote, and more importantly, anyone can become a block producer. We have already seen community members step up, add value to the community, and ultimately get voted in to become block producers. Telos Kiwi is an example of that. I have publicly encouraged the community to get more active in governance and to submit more proposals and vote! Within the base layer, we have a performant VM which allows us to emulate the EVM with RUST and WASM native. 2.0 is ready to launch, which means stability will improve significantly, and I believe we will have one of the most performant EVMs in the market. On the innovation side, we have our zk strategy with SNARKtor at the core. Recursive proofs are fundamental in large part because they enable trustless bridging. SNARKtor has the opportunity to become the aggregation and data protection hub for not only Ethereum but other chains as well. Our zkEVM will give us a strong presence as an Ethereum L2 and allows us to compete in that space with our hardware-software co-design approach. However, given we have DPoS at the native layer, and unlike other L2s, we retain our sovereignty, which I think is a critical distinction that will gain more significance over time - especially because many others are essentially running massive subsidy programs because they have a huge chunk of their token supply as they created that token and distributed it to themselves at genesis. Telos airdropped the entire supply at its genesis in 2018, so we have no such ability given the supply is distributed and not in control. The zk effort is also accelerating our research into hardware acceleration and ultimately ZK proving ASICs. That research could lead to some significant breakthroughs, including a potentially new hybrid consensus with useful PoW (uPOW) + PoS. In parallel, we are also now researching quantum resistance, which means hashing + bigger signatures. Telos X unifies our ecosystem similar to how Binance + BNB or Coinbase + Base have done a great job interoperating their exchanges with their respective networks. We also see others joining like Kraken with Ink. We are unique in that exchanges launching their networks is common, but an L1 bootstrapping its own exchange with its existing community has not been done before. We will be able to offer better UI/UX, wallet experiences, and of course token utility, including many token pairs with TLOS as the base pair. Telos X also allows us to extend the reach of our ecosystem to new markets. Critically, we have partnered with the Binance Link program because we will inherit their security and liquidity - the two most difficult challenges when attempting to bootstrap an exchange.

We can now start to see a multitude of products and services acting in unison in support of the Telos ecosystem. Telos becomes a venture production studio because we build products to support our ecosystem. It is community-owned because everything ties back to our community through the TLOS token. At the DPoS layer, the token is critical for participating in governance. At the EVM layer, like Ethereum, gas is paid with TLOS, and tokens are burned as EVM consumption increases. SNARKtor aggregation fees are paid in TLOS. Telos X has already committed to using its profits to buy TLOS. It will then transfer those tokens to an on-chain DAO on Telos where token holders can vote. The vote is simple; there is a dispersal list which points to a burn address. The community can vote on whether the DAO will send tokens to the dispersal address and burn the tokens, or not. That is the north star vision: a community-owned venture production studio building a suite of products and services in support of its community where ultimately the token holders vote and decide. Telos will decide its own destiny. That is our north star.

^