OKEx held a Tezos AMA with Jonas Lamis (Founder of Tezos Capital and StakerDAO), Vitali Parkhomenko (Project manager of Everstake), ZED (Founder of Bake’n Rolls)

Here a summary of the key takeaways from the AMA:

The Tezos governance system and decentralization: Tezos uses a governance system (Self-amendment, a way to decide what changes/additions are made to the blockchain. There is no need for hard forks.) that makes the development of Tezos decentralized, “automatic and pretty much seamless, the community decide what they want to change and then we just upgrade the network. There are a lot of issues related to hard-forks like splitting the chain and the community, trouble with SC, etc.” The past year has shown that self-amendment works in Tezos. “We've successfully implemented 2 on-chain amendments of the protocol. I'd also say that the community participation and engagement during both times has been incredible and unprecedented.”

“Since Tezos is a open-source decentralize network [with no owner or central power] there is no single roadmap since there is no single entity to decide the future of the protocol. Each Tezos ecosystem member or organization has its own roadmap, for instance there are several independent developer teams around the world working to integrate Zk-Snarks Saplings, Tendermint, Sharding to Tezos with the upcoming on-chain amendments.” Looking at the very diverse and growing companies focussed on developing on for Tezos, the system seems to work in a very successful manner.

Devs community and programming languages: The growth of the developers community is fueled by initiatives like the Tezos Blockstar Programme in collaboration with B9lab who are in the process of training 500 developers for Tezos. According to @AMangiero, there are over 800 Tezos developers who have been trained or are being trained. 

As to the programming languages on Tezos: “This question is a bit too general, it could be more specific. I mean if it's the protocol, then Ocaml, if clients, then Rust & Ocaml.”

“Tezos [itself] may not have the easiest dev languages, but Tezos does have the best economic incentives to attract highly skilled teams. Blockchain devs need to get paid like every other dev, yet many chains dont have a way to incentivize development on their platform.  Tezos has it built in.  Devs can submit proposals for things they want to do with Tezos either on-chain and get funded directly by a vote of the community, or off-chain and get funded by a grant from one of the Tezos foundations.  With over a $500M endowment, the Foundation can fund a lot of long term visionary projects, and on-chain funding can continue forever.”

“As for smart contracts, it's Michelson as a low-level l-ge and Liquidity, Ligo, Python, Reason ML, Haskell, etc. as high-level l-ges. As for dApps and the rest I don't think there any limitations there.”

The US non-profit Tezos Commons runs many meetups.  Check out what they have planned:  https://tezoscommons.org/events/

Decentralization of Liquid PoS in Tezos: Tezos has around 500 bakers (validators) at the moment. There is no other PoS network that has this many. The amount of bakers is unlimited and will grow organically over time.

User-friendliness of cryptocurrencies in general and Tezos in particular, “different groups who support Tezos are working on this.  For example, Coinbase just announced staking for Tezos holders through their app. Very easy to use.  I expect other exchanges to do so as well.  Companies like StakerDAO are working to make staking very easy for non-Crypto people as well.  You can join our TG:  https://t.me/stakercommunity to learn more.” OKEx just launched staking for Tezos as well. 

Long term: The Tezos governance system makes long term vision very fluid and adaptable. The total package makes Tezos very competitive to other smart contract plaftforms. “From the whitepaper written in 2014, you can see that Tezos is designed to be secure, upgradeable, and built to last.  The choice of OCaml as the development language means that Tezos has a level of security and formal verification available that most others don’t. The choice of a governance process that involves all token holders takes the power of arbitrary features out of the hands of a core group of devs and puts it in the hands of the entire community.  This is critical for the long term stability of a chain and for long term trust of businesses that want to build on it.”

You can read the full AMA here: https://t.me/okexofficial_en