The Baking Sheet - Issue #116

September 09, 2022

If I ever get outa here, I'm going to Katmandu šŸŽµ

Welcome to this weekā€™s issue of The Baking Sheet!

Quorum has been met for the promotion phase of Protocol Kathmandu. The 11th Tezos upgrade is locked in. For this weekā€™s issue, weā€™re going to highlight the upgrade and what we can possibly expect to follow its activation.

Onwards to Protocol L

If youā€™ve been in the crypto space long enough, youā€™ve likely encountered discussions about scalability. Those discussions lead to different viewpoints on how one can achieve optimal scalability but they all revolve around one core premise.

That premise being blockchains are far behind in terms of scale compared to more established web2 centralized technologies. Think of VISA for instance. The VISA network is able to support upwards of tens of thousands transactions per second.

When youā€™re running internet applications and supporting merchants worldwide, this number is important to consider. If blockchains are to truly become mass adopted and support internet scale applications, they canā€™t be bottlenecked by a low threshold.

But rest assured, Tezos has been making strides to improve scalability. With the latest protocol upgrade locked in, weā€™ve been introduced to another rollup centric optimization and several other features including..

  • Smart Contract Optimistic Rollups (SCORUs)

  • Improved randomness for distribution of baking rights

  • Event-logging, enabling off-chain systems to react to smart contract execution

  • Validation pipelining: (ongoing block validation tweaks to improve Tezos Layer 1 throughput)

  • Support for ā€˜Ghostnetā€™, a permanent testnet that upgrades with Mainnet

Where Jakarta introduced us to Transaction Optimistic Rollups (TORUs), Kathmandu takes it a step further with SCORUs. Gabriel Alfour of Marigold shared a few words on what SCORUs are and how they will benefit the Tezos network in a past article, which you can read in full.

In blockchains typically we batch together sending operations and processing operations. With SCORUs, we split those responsibilities. So, there are two kinds of nodes in SCORUs. On one hand, there are consensus nodes that just send operations and build consensus on which operations are part of the chain. On the other hand, there are rollup nodes which actually process the operations.

Thatā€™s not all.

Taking it a step further, weā€™ve already seen the first Tezos sidechain go live - Deku. Moving forward, there will be other scaling optimizations beyond rollups following Protocol Kathmandu such as sharding.

Gabriel Alfour painted some color on what we could potentially see down the line.

There is TORUs which have already been done, showing that it can work even if itā€™s not used in practice. We also have SCORUs and web assembly for SCORUs. That will basically bring WASM support to Tezos. Thereā€™s a lot of work thatā€™s been done on zk rollups as well.

So, thatā€™s quite cool. An even crazier thing is sharding, thereā€™s a whole lot of work being done there. Essentially, when sharding and rollups will be completed, weā€™ll see crazy high TPS (transactions per second). Itā€™s the kind of stuff that could possibly 10x or 100x our current TPS even before optimizations. So, Iā€™d say sharding and rollups are the two things Iā€™m most hyped about.

This is how we get most of the scaling on Layer 1. Even SCORUs and TORUs, they are called Layer 2 but they are not really Layer 2 at this point because they are enshrined into the protocol. With sharding and rollups, weā€™re making very few compromises. Weā€™re still very close to peak blockchain security.

As we move towards the next Tezos upgrade, the focus is very much on scalability. The seeds are being planted today to support the next wave of internet scale applications.

The Naan Collection

The naan collection will celebrate artists creating on Tezos. The mission of the collection is to increase awareness and adoption of Tezos across the art world, as naan continues to support artists, collectors, and builders on Tezos.

The naan gallery will showcase NFTs collected by our curator Varun Desai, also known as Varundo on Twitter. The naan collection is a way to celebrate the amazing artists creating work on Tezos, and helps shine a spotlight on the rapidly growing Tezos ecosystem.

Learn more about the Naan Collection here and read about Varundo's journey through the art world of Tezos

Celebrate Mid Autumn Festival with Mooncakes

The Mid Autumn Festival starts tomorrow -- celebrate with Mooncakes by claiming a free NFT giftbox!

Mooncakes is a fun way to interact with the Tezos blockchain using Kukai Wallet. Claim your free Moon Festival NFT gifts, earn rewards and enter daily giveaways.

Reward the community | Nominations are open

The Community Rewards Program (CRP) is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month up to 5000 tez are rewarded to those that stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole.

In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, starting in September the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it take less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.

Don't have 30 seconds? You can tag any discord message or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well. :)

The categories and nomination standards have remained the same. For more information head over to Tezos Commons Rewards page

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

SignaVerse aims to become the entertainment capital of the metaverse, the virtual Vegas of Web3. In this project, Gif.Games are collaborating with Las Vegas entrepreneur Gavin Maloof.

Tezos Israel has announced that Sayfer will begin to provide Tezos smart contract auditing services to expand the ecosystem partners available to provide Tezos technical services.

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

On Saturday, the Plenty DeFi team held a Twitter call. There were blockchain developers, NFT artists, active members of Tezos ecosystem and Tezos Ukraine's community manager Olya Rymar. We discussed a lot of interesting topics: NFTs, Tezos security, rookie problems, and the TVL bloat. In this post, we recap the most interesting points.

You just read or heard about an interesting Tezos dApp that you want to try out, whether itā€™s a game, an NFT marketplace, or a cool DeFi project, to interact with it you will need some tez in your wallet.

PyratzLabs, the French start-up studio specializing in the acceleration of Web3 projects, implements its operating arm in Art Tech: Lezar House. This physical art gallery acts as a creative studio and incubator for resident artists and uses NFT productions as a means of financing innovative art, design and architecture projects through its own marketplace.

This Week in Tezos Development

Join LigoLang by Marigold and Tezos Israel in the Ligo Developer Training: Using Tickets. It is the perfect workshop for beginner or intermediate smart contract developers to level up their Web3 development skills.

The best way to learn any programming language is through implementing it and building projects. We will be learning Ligo from scratch with the core LigoLang team and building hands-on projects specifically around Tickets on Tezos.

Date and time

Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 10:00 AM ā€“

Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 12:30 PM CEST

Motivation

The on-chain view provides a synchronous way for a contract to fetch the data from another contract. This, however, doesnā€™t benefit legacy contracts that is originated before Protocol Hangzhou.

Ideally one cā€¦

Umami is a Tezos desktop wallet that combines best-in-class features to deliver a smooth user experience for both beginner and advanced users.

Head over to github to see the audit by inference

Now Streaming

Tune into a special TezTalks Radio episode featuring conversations from Art Basel 2022.

Missed Art Basel? Join us for an exploration of the history and transformation of the arts. Moderated by Johnny Dean Mann, this panel takes us through a journey of art and technology with innovators like Baptiste Crespy, founder of (fx)hash.

Now Streaming Everywhere