A Common Wealth Of Quality Humans

The term “Tezos Community” gets used loosely, as shorthand for anyone who holds tez or collects a piece of art on the network. TTC, TheTezosCommunity, is something more specific. It is a volunteer-run organization with a Discord server, a website, a calendar full of recurring events, and a group of people who have spent years building tools and traditions that make Tezos feel like a real life community to those who are frequently active.

I have spent enough time with TTC to feel like I have a family on Tezos. The organizers are friends, and the events are never obligations, just standing invitations I take up when I can. I am writing about them now for a specific reason. Entering its fourth year, TTC asked the community for help covering basic operating costs through crowdfunding, and even built a tool to run that raise transparently. The interface was clean, the ask was clear, and they hit the target faster than anyone expected. Years of doing real work for people came back around, which is what happens when a group asks plainly and makes it easy to say yes.

The doors at TTC are staying open, and the tool they built to keep them open has since become something the whole ecosystem can use. That makes this the right moment to look at everything TTC does, and at where the crowdfunding platform goes from here.

TheTezosCommunity

“Stronger Together” is a phrase that shows up everywhere at TTC, in the Discord welcome message, in event graphics, in the sign-off on nearly every post the team publishes. Over time it has functioned as a core mantra and motivator. There is no corporate backing steering the direction or intentions of the core team. The people hosting calls, moderating the server, and building the tools are doing it because they care about Tezos.

Ask anyone who has spent real time across Tezos Discord servers and they will tell you TTC’s is one of the most detailed and well managed in the entire ecosystem. Channels are organized with intention, archives are properly preserved, and a very abstract idea gets compiled into one place where all are welcome.

The team keeps a wide range of activities running. Rumble Royale brings chaos and prizes on a rotating schedule, Tezos Gartic turns hand drawn prompts into a running game, customized Tezos Quizzes get published after they run so anyone can revisit them, and newer formats keep arriving, like Tezos Art Quest. An open Artists Space runs monthly, co-hosted with Rick (DarkWheel.tez) for the past two years, giving artists a standing platform whether or not a themed week is happening. None of it requires a person to be a developer or a major collector to participate.

The team has built a lot of useful tools over the years. The Tezos Rich Previews bot renders proper previews for Tezos NFT and collection links dropped into any Discord server, maintained openly on GitHub so anyone with the skill can contribute. The Events Bot pulls listings straight from the calendar, Name That Artist turns art recognition into a standing game, and the team maintains an Awesome Tezos List indexing tools across the ecosystem. The team consists of RubisCo, Webidente, Macz, Rick and Skllzrmy. All community members are passionate about the future of Tezos.

Supporting The Arts

Spend enough time watching TTC operate and a quiet mechanism reveals itself. The art given away as prizes during community games is either collected from community artists during Support Artists Day spotlights or donated by artists and partner projects who want to be part of the fun. Follow one piece through the loop and the design becomes clear. TTC collects art from an artist during a Support Artists Day event, that work becomes a prize in a community game, and a member ends up holding art they might never have discovered on their own. The games generate attention for the artists, the artists supply the reason to play, and the prize wallet doubles as a patronage system.

The causes that pass through Support Artists Day tend to be inclusive, supportive, or educational, and often all three at once. Recent events have focused on rallying around the Echoes from Venezuela curation, Art4Life, and Tezos Pride, among others. Where community is needed, TTC shows up to lead by example. The team keeps a running ledger of all of this stretching back to 2022, tracking games, prizes, and events in detail, and by that count, at the time of writing, Support Artists Day is heading into its eighty-second edition while weekly poker has run roughly two hundred rounds. Plenty of projects launch a flurry of events around a token drop and quiet down once the attention moves elsewhere. TTC’s calendar has simply kept running.

My Part In TTC Story

A few years back I wrote and recorded a custom theme song for TTC, wanting to give the community a piece of music composed specifically for them. I have also hosted meme banner creation parties, sessions where members provide a PFP and I create a meme-like scene depicting all our characters partying together in silly settings. These are strong core memories where TheTezosCommunity supported me as an artist and in turn I was able to thrive in a role entertaining people I admire. This was long before my work with Tezos Commons, during genuinely difficult times, and it meant the world to me.

None of that changes how I approach writing about TTC today. Even with no history here I would see the same things: friends to anyone on Tezos, a team building consistently, moderating fairly, and keeping the tools running. I am always willing to offer TTC a helping hand to match their energy, and right now that hand takes the form of explaining what the team built and why it matters.

The Crowdfunding

A lot of what is described above only costs time, but time is still valuable. There are also some things that need money to operate. Hosting a HubPage and the Events Calendar, the software licenses and subscriptions that keep the site running and the social accounts reaching people. Roughly ninety-nine percent of those costs need to be paid in euros and dollars, and goodwill does not settle a bill that is due.

TTC has asked the community to help with that gap exactly once before. In October 2023 the team covered the largest first-year expenses themselves. That December, Cryptonio and an anonymous community donor closed the remaining budget for tooling like Elementor and the calendar system. On February 2, 2024, a Tezos Ecosystem DAO grant arrived and covered two years of operations. Careful budgeting and later in-kind support, including donated licenses, stretched what was left far enough to reach most of a third year. Year four is where that runway ended, and the team needed a different way to cover the gap.

The response was a dashboard rather than a donation address. Webidente, one of TTC’s devs and guardians, built TTCrowd for the specific problem of raising tez against bills denominated in fiat. Since the expenses are in EUR and USD while the funds are held in XTZ, the amount of tez required moves with the price, and the tracker recalculates the campaign and each goal accordingly rather than quoting a fixed number that drifts out of date the moment the market moves. Funding follows a waterfall, with goals filled in priority order and any excess rolling into the next. Everything held is staked and delegated while it waits, so proof-of-stake rewards compound back into the same goals, and every movement stays verifiable on chain. TTC seeded this with their own funds before asking anyone else for anything, and the community closed the target quickly from there, helped considerably by TransparentArt, who issued a matching challenge and brought a wave of contributors in with it, including 1k+ tez donations from Zancan and United Saints.

Scaling For Public Use

While the campaign was still running, other projects and community members started asking whether they could use the same interface. That question turned a dashboard into a platform. TTCrowd now lives at crowd.thetezos.com, rebuilt so anyone in the ecosystem can run a campaign on it.

The design is simple but purposeful. A campaign can be one goal, one target, and one receiving wallet, with contributions going straight to the campaign treasury. TTCrowd never holds the funds at any point, which removes the trust from the equation, “trustless” is good. Campaigns can add whatever they need. Multiple phases and goals, a donation matching feature, and even options to fund through Open Edition mints on Objkt.

Other key optional features are: donor comments, campaign updates, Discord notifications for donations and milestones, custom branding, and treasury tracking. The treasury even comes with optional staking yield. Contributions can arrive in tez or USDt on Tezos L1, and XTZ or USDC on Etherlink. Each campaign also gets an admin area where up to two managers can configure everything themselves.

Webidente has said the platform will keep developing around the campaigns that arrive. Any features built for one campaign will be made available to everyone when they have broader use. That is the same method that produced the Rich Previews bot and the Events Bot, now being applied at a scale well past TTC’s own needs. Any Tezos project that has ever tried to run a fundraiser out of a wallet address and a spreadsheet now has somewhere to organize the effort, with community support.

Stronger Together

Volunteer organizations are fragile by nature. Burnout is real, momentum is hard to sustain, and nothing obligates anyone to keep showing up. What makes TTC different is that the people running it seem to genuinely love each other, love the community, and love their work. That is not something an organization can fake for years at a time. It shows up in the consistency of the events, in the care put into the server’s structure, and in the meticulous records the team keeps. When things got tight, TheTezosCommunity got stronger, together.

I think about how many of my own favorite moments on Tezos trace back to something TTC contributed to. For some people the phrase Stronger Together is a cliche. For me it is a lived experience, thanks largely to TheTezosCommunity. Not the abstract phrase used to describe everyone who happens to use the Tezos blockchain, the TTC is a Crowdfunding platform, a theme song, a website, a discord server, and endless offerings of ways for you to play on Tezos and make new friends.

TTC: TheTezosCommunity was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.