The Baking Sheet - Issue #36

Welcome to this week’s issue of The Baking Sheet! 

As we’ve recently witnessed the autonomous activation of Edo, we’ve been met by a flurry of ecosystem news and updates.

For this week’s issue, we’re going to scale back the curtain and look through a macro lenses at everything we’re witnessing being built today across the blockchain space as a whole - and the role in which Tezos can play within those lenses. 

As many of us are aware and have been a part of the Tezos community for some time, the early years were anything but uneventful. On our latest TezTalks Live episode with Danny Masters, he brought this particular point up and I think it’s important to understand. 

For, how can we truly glean where it is exactly we are going, without knowing where we have been? 

The following publications from WIRED and Breakermag do a great job of extrapolating just exactly where we have been, I encourage everyone to read through them and share them if you find it in your interest to do so. 

Now that we’ve established where we have been, let’s take a look at where we are going. 

Amidst the vast array of developments and innovations we’re witnessing today within the Tezos ecosystem, the blockchain space as a whole has rapidly grown from 2017 - a time in which many newcomers first learned about blockchain and likely entered the market. 

Since that point in time, we’ve witnessed several years of building and the fruits of these years are beginning to manifest today.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has grown beyond leaps and bounds throughout this period. What started as a humble beginning and a grant with Uniswap in 2018, has now led to the exchange processing more volume than established crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and others. 

This growth has not been met without its downsides, however. 

Institutional interest in Bitcoin has never been higher. Nearly every other day for the past few weeks, we’ve heard of a new company/institution buying large amounts of Bitcoin. Just recently, to add onto the list above, it was discovered that companies/institutions to the likes of Tesla and BlackRock have begun to buy large amounts of crypto. 

This is adoption on a scale never witnessed before within the blockchain space. What was once merely a 2017 meme, is becoming true by each passing day.

During this time we’ve witnessed the emergence of a pandemic that has completely shifted the way in which we collaborate, communicate, and handle our day-day activities. This emergence has created a growing trend in remote work and coinciding with that trend, we’ve seen large amounts of growth within technology companies and unsurprisingly, blockchain. 

Circling back - Danny also mentioned in our recent TezTalk, blockchain companies such as Coinbase have pivoted towards a direct listing. This listing has Coinbase placed at a $77B valuation. The impacts of this listing are a clear indication for the future of the digital economy. 

What will become clear from this listing is not only is there value within the underlying and innovative technology that blockchain brings. Rather, we will begin to see further the realization that there is a vast array of components that complement underlying blockchain technology that enable numerous applications. 

These applications can stem from DeFi, NFT’s, DAO’s, tokenized assets, decentralized identity (DID), and more. What we’ll see and arguably have already begun to see is there is value not only within these components around the underlying technology but also, between the types of assets that move and flow between these networks. 

This realization is a far cry from 2017, where these ideas merely existed but were never actuated or realized. What we’re seeing today across the blockchain space as a whole is the beginning of these once ideas finally realizing themselves and cementing their weight in market share. 

Further cementing this point - as I touched on in last week’s issue, certain events have led to this transformation that will only perpetuate further exploration and adoption of blockchain. 

For a blockchain-based network such as Tezos, this remains two-fold. Since Tezos is built to truly last through porting new and existing features and even upgrading the manner in which it does so as witnessed within Edo - Tezos is well positioned to capitalize in this burgeoning digital economy.