Teia Today: August 2026

Actual Examples of Web3 Built On Tezos

When I wrote about Teia in February, much of that article described work still in development. That is a normal position for a volunteer-run platform, and it is also the position most crypto writing never escapes. Most of what was forthcoming then is now sitting in the interface, and I have been using these tools rather than reading about them. Features only matter once people know they exist, so what follows is what shipped, what it makes possible, and why it all makes me so excited!

Two Entities, One Source

Before we get into the update, we need to make a distinction. Two things appear together in most of these announcements and are worth separating. Teia is the DAO, the open source code, the shared contract, and the on-chain data, governed through community processes and funded through grants and treasury donations. “teia.cafe” is a separate effort focused on building commercial applications for Teia users, including the recent distribution work behind the curation fees, which lets it pursue revenue and outside investment without the DAO taking on those obligations.

Ryan Tanaka of teia.cafe has described minting on Teia as closer to registration than to listing, where a work uploaded to the shared contract can surface anywhere, OBJKT included, without the artist doing anything further. He compares it to registration organizations that keep the art and entertainment industries running, and that hold in function only, since none of this is administered by an office. Anyone can build on the contract, governance runs through the DAO, and nothing here puts Teia volunteers in a position to restrict what gets made. I plan to write a full article on the teia.cafe side of things soon, but let’s get into the exciting parts that matter to the community!

What Shipped

Curations went live this month at teia.art/curations, and that feature gets its own section below. The calendar surfaces what is happening across the platform and connects to TheTezosCommunity events roster. You can even subscribe and click to add to calendars of your own. Tezos based events have historically been discoverable only if you caught a post on X or sat in the right Discord/Telegram channel at the right time. A single place to look changes how this community stays connected. You can now propose your own event to the DAO through that interface.

Propose your event directly on Teia.art

Filters and activity feeds have both been reworked, and browsing Teia feels more controllable as a result. Moderation tooling arrived alongside them, built to support decisions made through community process rather than from the top down.

Make polls that live beyond the algo.

Other Key Features

A few other features from the first article deserve a second mention. On-chain polling puts decentralized governance behind a working interface, and now anyone can donate to the treasury through a leaderboard that keeps donor history transparent.

Preview of Copyright Customization

The copyright registration and marketplace is the foundational development that makes the rest feel intentional, since artists can create on-chain copyrights that protect both the person and the work. That system is what makes the next section possible and sustainable.

First curations created and/or migrated from preview version.

Curation And Playlists

I am personally invested in these next new features, and was able to test them before launch. As a musician who has wanted this specific thing for years, please read the enthusiasm in this section with that in mind.

Curation lets anyone assemble work into a set with intention behind the order. The obvious application is a gallery or a themed collection based on what is already mined on Teia. The use case that made me most excited reveals itself in an added step, making playlists of your curations.

A real music player style playlist that works on desktop and mobile.

Musicians minting on Teia have released singles by structural necessity until now, because a minted artwork is a single object on a shared contract, while an album is a sequence. Curations and playlists close that gap. Audio curations can run as a radio rather than fixed audio attached with an image file. A functional player generates with a shareable link, so people can listen to music on Tezos while doing something else on their screen even.

Showcasing how music doesn’t stop playing when you navigate elsewhere.

When you consider the ability to mint music files free from imagery as well on Teia, it means a record can finally exist as a record, in the order the artist intended and in a way that is easier to share and experience.

Sequencing an album is a compositional act, and losing it has quietly flattened years of music released into this ecosystem. Getting it back means a musician here can make the same statement as a musician anywhere else, with added provenance and licensing control among the many other benefits of NFTs on Tezos. The tool does not require you to be an artist either, which gives this community’s curators somewhere to apply that talent.

Curation With Provenance

What separates this from a playlist feature on traditional music platforms, is that the curation is registered on-chain rather than held inside a single platform’s database, which turns it into a resource anyone can read and build against. Ryan Tanaka put it plainly at launch, describing it as a resource for anyone rather than for one platform, and developers are already treating that data as a foundation.

Showcasing how I linked a curation to a channel.

Curations connect directly to the forums, calendar, and messaging features too, which turns a list of separate tools into a single system. A curation can be announced in a public channel, scheduled, and discussed in the comments on each piece inside it, without that traffic leaving the chain. The consequence of that openness is that every action taken through these features is public data. So, remember that when posting and put your best self forward.

A Unique Royalty Case

One of the most interesting pieces of design in this whole update is coming to teia.cafe rather than to Teia itself. That split is the two-entity structure doing exactly what it was built to do. You will register the work on Teia, and then utilize the commercial application, teia.cafe, built on top of that registration for this specific use case.

Curations will carry an extra monetary benefit. A curator will be able to list a work above what the artist asked for and keep the difference, while the artist still receives their stated minimum. Royalties are built into the curation itself, so the creator continues to earn as the work moves. The purpose is to let distributors sell artists’ work on their behalf while respecting the IP registered through the copyright marketplace.

Markup-based curation introduces an incentive this ecosystem has mostly avoided so far, where the person selecting the work has a financial reason to select it for resale margins rather than for the art. The community process and the artist floor both push against that, and because the data is open, anyone can watch how it plays out. This is a way to balance the free market while continuing to protect creator rights.

Receipts From The Grants

The first Tezos Foundation grant funded community events rather than development, and the record is public on the Teia wiki. Funding supported nine events across five countries! Many of which were mentioned in Teia Today article in February.

The Foundation has since approved the second stage on the strength of that record. The features described earlier were built by volunteers working without compensation from this grant, while the grant money went to the honorariums offered in the open calls.

Applications for the second round are open, and the submission for can be found here. If you have an open call, a showcase, or an event idea, this is the moment to ask for support. The list above is what a successful application turns into.

External Funding Efforts

Teia DAO LLC has also opened a fundraising push aimed at grants from outside the crypto economy. Nearly everything in this ecosystem is funded by the ecosystem, which means art infrastructure tends to stall whenever the market does. The exception is a platform carried by volunteers who keep building and keep applying for aid through the quiet stretches, which is what the last six months on Teia have looked like.

That record makes the outside approach credible, because a platform built on artist rights is making its case to investors who evaluate factors other than token velocity. The pitch arrives with delivered work rather than just promises on a roadmap. More on this in a future article leaning into the teia.cafe side of things.

Dawn of Accessibility

Coming later this year, is a body of accessibility work led by Malicious Sheep, orangezoot, and Tantan. Screen reader compatibility is being extended to cover the newer features. User guides are being built as a popup tour of the site so that orientation becomes part of the experience, and the Accessibility Guide itself is being reworked.

A feature that a portion of the community cannot use is a feature that only partially exists. Scheduling this alongside the new tooling rather than after it says something about how the people building Teia think about who the platform is for: everyone.

Why I Keep Using Teia

I have been minting on this contract since the front end was called hicetnunc. Through the period when nobody was certain it would survive, and through the prolonged bear markets that followed. The thing that has stayed constant is that the people building what’s under the hood are doing so because they believe it is needed, not because they think it is profitable.

I depend on the internet not just as an artist but as a person trying to function in modern society, and I am tired of relying on billionaires and corporations living in between me and every interaction I have. Teia means web, so let’s make it world wide and permissionless, by using and supporting the projects that build tools to empower us.

Teia Today: August 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.