The Baking Sheet - Issue #39

Welcome to this week’s edition of ‘The Baking Sheet.‘ As the publication continues to grow, we would like to start featuring more Tezos ecosystem contributors to showcase a wider variety of insights. This week we are excited to have our first guest writer, Charlie Wiser from TQ Tezos.

The Tezos ecosystem has experienced tremendous growth in the first 2.5 months of 2021. After a lot of hard work from a wide variety of Tezos teams developing tools and standards that facilitate end-user applications, a number of products have launched this year and gained strong traction.

The chart above shows the number of interactions with Tezos smart contracts each month over the past 12 months. This is an important metric to follow as it tracks real activity with Tezos-based products. On-chain activity is a significant contributor to a cryptocurrency’s network effect. And as I outline in this blog post, cryptocurrencies derive their value from network effects.

February was a stellar month for Tezos on-chain activity with the network experiencing just over 100,000 smart contract interactions. Even more impressive, 12 days into March and that number has already been surpassed. Tezos is currently on-track to crack over 300,000 smart contract interactions in March, which would smash February’s number by over 3x. If we continue on this trajectory, April could see over 1,000,000 smart contract interactions, which would be a terrific milestone for the Tezos community.

This adoption can largely be attributed to the recent wave of Tezos-based products that have launched. Most notably, hic et nunc (which is Latin for “Here and Now”), absolutely blew up over the past two weeks. As the first NFT marketplace on Tezos, hic et nunc facilitated over 20,000 sales in its first 10 days and has gained adoption by a number of high-profile artists and creators. Additionally, The Alchememist’s NFT auctions, which are powered by OpenMinter, and tzcolors saw significant engagement. These sorts of early experiments are made possible by maturing community standards and wallets such as Kukai, which allows users to easily store, transact, and view their NFTs.

In addition to the NFT explosion so far this month, on-chain activity has also significantly increased in other areas like DeFi. In particular, Kolibri, the first algorithmic stablecoin on Tezos which launched on 17 February 2021, was a community favorite in early March. By 7 March, Kolibri had passed 500 “ovens” (collateralized debt positions), securing over $6.2m worth of tez and minting over 1.1m kUSD.

It’s incredibly exciting to see new Tezos-based products and experiences emerging each week. With upcoming launches like QuipuSwap, Wrap Protocol, Tezos Domains, Kalamint, Synthetic Exchange Project (SEXP), Mewn Fish, Homebase, TEZEX Bridge, and more, the growth in on-chain activity and adoption of Tezos is just getting started. 🚀

This week we hosted a global Tezos AMA on /r/CryptoCurrency, the most popular crypto community in the world with 1.9 million subscribers. We received an overwhelming response with over 450 comments and a mass amount of high quality questions from people who are interested in learning about Tezos. A special thank you to all the community members that helped answer questions alongside with Arthur and Corey!