The Baking Sheet - Issue #111

August 05, 2022

Enter, Emergents

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

As we head into the last months of Summer, we are going to focus on the highly-anticipated launch of the Emergents Trading Card game, the public beta is set to drop August 18th -- let's dive in

Emergents on the horizon

“If you build it, they will come.”

The road to digitizing a beloved real-world hobby (and its passionate adherents) is a long and winding one. If executed effectively, however, the results can be astonishingly positive for everyone involved.

Since bursting onto the scene way back in 1993 with the emergence of Magic: The Gathering as a lucrative global pop-culture phenomenon, the trading card game industry has managed to grow itself a massive (and passionate) global community. Games like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragonball have since joined Magic: The Gathering atop the TCG charts. Massive tournaments have dolled out millions of dollars in prizes to the world’s top TCG players over the past decade or so, and secondary markets for rare/useful cards are absolutely booming.

Today, the global trading card game (TCG) market is estimated to be worth almost $3.5 billion. Spurred on by a global pandemic that saw many increasingly isolated folks looking for new ways to stay entertained, a TCG renaissance of sorts is now in full swing, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

The rise to prominence of blockchain technology and the NFT as important new players in the larger global collectibles landscape, however, has added an exciting new wrinkle to the TCG mix. Some of the biggest names in the sports collectibles world have already made massive strides into the NFT arena — nowhere more so than right here in the Tezos ecosystem. It appears, the trading card game industry is ready to follow suit.

Enter: the Emergents trading card game. This highly-anticipated Tezos-powered offering developed by some of the most respected names in the TCG industry has managed to generate an enormous amount of buzz over the past few months. While some may not be overly familiar with this exciting Tezos NFT-enabled game and the InterPop-backed comic book universe its characters inhabit just yet, there’s plenty of reason to believe that they will be soon.

As one of the first TCG offering exclusively built on Tezos technology — which officially launched last year with its first promo card dropping in September 2021 — the reasons to get excited about what the Emergents TCG could mean for the ongoing evolution of the Tezos ecosystem are many. Here are just a few worth thinking about ahead of Emergents TCG’s impending public Beta launch and promo-card-packed Super Booster drop on August 18th, 2022…

Kathmandu voting is underway

Only 6 days remaining to vote for the 11th Tezos protocol upgrade proposal -- 'Kathmandu'

The main features of Kathmandu are:

For more details, see our Kathmandu preview post. A deeper technical description can be found in the protocol proposal’s technical documentation, and a complete list of changes is provided in the changelog.

The DeFi Roundtable

Please join Tezos Commons this Friday at 1 pm EST for The Tezos DeFi Roundtable. We will be discussing the launch of the Tether USDT stablecoin on Tezos and the new Sirius liquidity baking token.

Participating teams: Plenty, Baking Bad, Youves, Mad Fish, and Mavryk Finance

Binance Live with Tezos

Binance Live conducted an AMA with Executive Director of Tezos Commons Foundation, Corey Soreff!

Ths Week in Tezos Ecosystem

Unless you’ve had your eyes closed and your fingers jammed firmly in your ears for the past year, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’ve heard the term “metaverse” at least once.

Amex will give exclusive OneOf tokens to cardholders attending a pop-up event in Turkey.

The Tezos NFT market had a record-breaking month in July, with leading generative art platform fx(hash) recording over $3.8million in sales.

DeFi projects with DAO and self-governance were originally conceived as decentralized. The story of hic et nunc is different: the centralized marketplace was left without a creator, disappeared, and recovered under community management.

This Week in Tezos Development

Layer 2 solutions are near the corner and you wonder how to interact with it TzPortal is the Tezos bridge allowing you to deposit and withdraw assets between Tezos and several L2. We start our first article with TzPortal V1 + DEKU-C sidechain.

LigoLANG is thrilled to introduce mutation testing feature in Ligo

Added wallet, connect, improved fork, diffs and views

Optimistic Rollups appeared in the Jakarta update. They are not on the mainnet yet, but on the testnet, the developers are already actively working with them. Meanwhile, we want to talk about the technology without which we wouldn't have rollups: Merkle’s tree and proofs.

Version 14.0 of Octez has just been released. Version 14.0 adds support for Kathmandu.

Now Streaming

In this conversation, we speak to three artists who have long explored the intersection between physical and digital realms through augmented reality, crypto poetry or human computer interaction (HCI). The discussion covers how blockchain and NFTs have influenced their art, what challenges still stand in their way, and how this new technology will make a lasting impact on the art world, beyond this first wave.

Featuring

Nancy Baker Cahill, Founder, 4thWallApp

Sasha Stiles Author, Technelegy | Co-founder, The VerseVerse

Dejha Ti Artist & Co-Founder, Operator

Now Streaming Everywhere