The Baking Sheet - Issue #35

Happy Lunar New Year! One cool initative that the Tezos community has put together is sending people a red envelope of tez using Kukai’s DirectAuth in which anyone with a twitter handle can receive tez. Check out the initiative here.

This week, we’re going to dive into an interesting piece of news that surfaced last week.

Last week, we were treated to some interesting developments within the state of Nevada around a proposed piece of legislation which will allow for technology companies to essentially create their own governments within the state. 

As reported last week in Associated Press - Nevada is planning through a new proposed piece of legislation to launch “Innovation Zones” within the state. Among these zones, there will be certain prerequisites ranging from land ownership to capital investment in the zones over a duration of time. 

This maneuver is clearly directed towards garnering interest amongst more tech companies to come to the state. 

The effects of bringing a large scale company like Facebook or Tesla to set up shop in a given state are clearly beneficial from an economic perspective for both parties. In fact, this movement as a whole is a clear trend we’ve been witnessing for months but may have not necessarily given a lot of thought to. 

For some time now, we’ve heard consistent criticism towards Silicon Valley and people seeking a new tech-centric frontier or “Tech Hub”. 

Fair amounts of public praise has been garnered towards Florida as a possible option - so it should come as no surprise that we’re beginning to see more interest taken by savvy states wishing to capitalize on the growing momentum shift from Silicon Valley.

Beyond this momentum, what’s beginning to become more apparent is the opportunity for blockchain companies to start to establish a foothold in these “Innovation Zones”. 

If this concept sounds foreign to you, it shouldn’t. In fact, we covered Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO’s) on a high-level in a previous issue with TQ Tezos launching a DAO platform, called HomeBase. It should be clear that blockchains are more than just an underlying technology as there are a vast array of components that interplay between the technology itself. 

This array can best be looked at as the digital equivalency of a modern day country. When we combine the innovative technologies that blockchain offers and the interplay associated thereof with the underlying technology - the idea of a city reminiscent of Silicon Valley but around blockchain becomes something further from a dream; but a new reality. 

Opining that thought, the mayor of Reno, Nevada even publicly opened the doors wide open for Tezos as well as other blockchain networks to shape this new frontier. 

As technology companies begin to mitigate and push their foothold outside of San Francisco, it’s going to become clearer that a new paradigm shift has begun to emerge. What remains worth seeing is the role in which Tezos can play in that paradigm shift.