Everything you need to know about nominations, winners and rewards.

You’ve probably seen #TezosCRP pop up in a lot of posts on X, and maybe you asked yourself, “What the heck is TezosCRP?” Or maybe you are one of the many Tezonians who have already nominated someone for a reward, or even won one yourself. Whichever group you fall into, I’m sure there is something useful for you in this article.

The goal here is to explain the program to anyone hearing about it for the first time, but also to clear up a few misconceptions and answer some questions that people already familiar with it might have. So let’s get right into it.

What the heck is TezosCRP?

Let’s start with the basics. TezosCRP, short for the Tezos Community Rewards Program, is a Tezos Commons initiative that started back in 2020, with the goal of rewarding people for contributing to the Tezos ecosystem. Since then, it has gone through a few different iterations, but the concept has remained the same.

Every month, we recognize community members who stand out and add value to Tezos. These are people who are not on a payroll, but they still go out of their way to answer questions, make tutorials, build tools, run bakeries (validators), introduce more people to Tezos, and in general help to spread the word.

In its current iteration, the program has 9 different categories that you can nominate people for, which cover most of the cases we have met so far. Namely: Drill Sergeant, Helping Hand, Influencer, Tez Dev, Assimilation, Formal Verification, Pâtissier, Tezos Tutor, and TEO. You can find the full list and descriptions of each category on our website.

So how does it work? How and who can you nominate for these rewards?

Nominations

There are two ways to nominate someone.

Let’s start with the nomination form. It has 3 questions. First, who you want to nominate, where you add a link to their X profile. Second, the category you want to nominate them for. You can only pick one category per nomination, so if you want to nominate someone for two categories, you just submit two nominations. And third, what they have done for the Tezos community.

This last question is optional, but we highly recommend filling it in. The more evidence you give us, the better. A direct link to a post or message is best, and Telegram and Discord both let you link to a specific message. If you can’t get a link, try to explain with as much context as possible, including the when, where, and what they did.

But let’s say you don’t want to fill out any forms. For some reason, you don’t like them or whatever. What then? Do not worry, my friends, we’ve got you covered. Our second, and even easier way, is to tag a post, tweet or message with a #TezosCRP hashtag. This can be used on X, the Tezos Reddit, Tezos Agora, the Tezos Discord, and Tezos Telegram.

For example, let’s say someone has posted a useful guide on staking, and you think they deserve some recognition for it. You can reply to that post or quote it, tag the person, and include #TezosCRP. That’s it. We will find and collect that nomination at the end of each month.

Keep in mind that if you are using the hashtag in a standalone post that is not connected to someone’s action and you just tag them (we get plenty of those), it is very helpful to add a short explanation of why you are nominating them and what they did, otherwise, we might not be able to find the context.

Regardless of the way you choose, there are two more things to remember.

The nominations should be about contributions during the month we are going through. For example, if you are nominating someone in November, it should be for activities that happened in November, not back in May.

Lastly, it is absolutely ok to nominate yourself. If you have been contributing to Tezos and think your work deserves recognition, you can follow the same process and show us what you have been doing. Just keep self-nominations to once per qualifying category.

What happens after you nominate someone?

Once the month is over, we collect all the nominations, both from the form and from the hashtag, and we go through them. Here, I have to say that some are better than others, and we want to be honest about that. The best ones come with context: what the person did, a link to it, and why it deserves recognition. The ones we struggle with are lists of handles with no context at all. We do see those too, and we try to go through the feeds of everyone who got tagged, but we might miss the value they add and the reason you tagged them. So if you are nominating someone, even one sentence about what they did helps a lot.

Overall, there are many things we look at when we pick winners. Some of them are the quality of the contribution and of the submission, the number of nominations, verifiable evidence, and more. We are not going to list all of them, because that would make it easier for the program to get gamed. And yes, we do see the attempts to game it, and we filter the nominations a lot to make sure those attempts fail.

Keep in mind that we are all part of the Tezos community as well. We follow the conversations, use the tools, and see a lot of the things happening around the ecosystem. That context also goes into the review, we don’t just choose winners based on numbers on a sheet.

Sometimes, we might also change a nominee’s category. If we see that what someone did fits better in another category than the one they were nominated for, we move them. It doesn’t take anything away from the nomination.

Now, something that I’ve seen confuse some people. We usually announce the winners in the middle of the following month. So for example, the October winners will probably be announced in mid-November. This means that if you nominated someone early in November, or if you have been getting a lot of nominations at the start of the month, and you see the announcement for October and don’t find yourself in it, there is nothing to worry about. That announcement is for the previous month. The nominations you are seeing now are for November, and if they end up winning, they will be part of the next announcement.

Collecting the rewards

So let’s say you found your name in the announcement. First of all, congratulations, and thank you for your contributions! The next step is to collect your reward. We send the rewards through Kukai’s DirectAuth feature, using the winners’ X accounts. If this is the first time you hear about this feature and you have no idea what that is, fear not, as I will explain everything.

Kukai is a Tezos wallet, and DirectAuth is a feature that lets you access a wallet using an account you already have, such as your X account. Every X account has its own Tezos wallet linked to it, and you don’t have to create it. It is already there, even if you have never used Kukai.

This wallet is different from any other wallet you might be using. If you already have a Temple, a Kukai seed phrase wallet, or a Ledger, the rewards won’t go there. They go to the wallet linked to your X account, and the only way to access it is by logging in to Kukai with that same X account.

This is also what makes it so useful for us. With DirectAuth, anyone can send tez to someone using only their X handle, without asking for their address. That is how we can reward people who might not even have a Tezos wallet yet.

To access that wallet, go to Kukai and select the X/Twitter icon under the social sign-in options.

You will then be asked to sign in to your X account and authorize Kukai Wallet to connect to it. If you are already signed in on that browser, you can use that account. Make sure it is the same X account that received the reward!

Once you authorize the connection, you will be redirected back to Kukai to access your wallet.

Keep the nominations coming

Over 300k tez have been distributed since the program started, and behind every reward is someone who did something for the Tezos ecosystem. Someone who helped a newcomer, built a useful tool, created educational content, or kept people informed. These contributions matter, and TezosCRP gives us a way to recognize them.

But the program needs your participation too. We can’t see everything, and your nominations help us find contributions we might otherwise miss. If someone helped you or did something you think deserves recognition, take a minute to nominate them. Tell us what they did and give us a link so we can check it out. And if that person is you, don’t be shy about nominating yourself!

Now that you know how it works, who gets your next #TezosCRP nomination?

Do you even #TezosCRP? was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.