The Baking Sheet - Issue #141

Attention passengers: prepare for landing in Mumbai

Welcome to this week's issue of the The Baking Sheet, your weekly newsletter for all the latest and greatest in the world of Tezos. This week, Tezos Foundation published their bi-annual report, a new gaming collaboration, and prepare for landing in Mumbai, the next Tezos protocol proposal! 

Nefta and Block Born join forces to supercharge Web3 development on Tezos

Nefta, a Web3 technology platform, has announced a new partnership with blockchain gaming launchpad Block Born. The partnership will see Nefta's whitelabel suite and NFT minting tools integrated into Block Born's platform, providing support for NFT minting and a white label marketplace. This will give developers easy access to tools for developing successful Web3 games on the Tezos Blockchain, an energy-efficient and self-upgradable proof-of-stake blockchain.

Founded by esports veterans, Block Born offers developers a comprehensive, accessible, and user-friendly toolbox to integrate game services like tournaments, battle passes, quests, and more. The Block Born Launchpad offers developers a place to crowdfund by selling NFTs, in-game assets, or native tokens, funding new project ideas, or content expansions for existing projects. With a team of esports veterans and a world-class Game Services offering, Block Born strives to onboard dozens of games to the Tezos ecosystem in 2023. Now, with the Nefta partnership, aspiring games studios have the opportunity to centralize all of their Web3 elements in one place.

The new partnership with Nefta further reinforces Block Born's commitment to empowering Web3 studios, with a shared goal of making an accessible and streamlined gaming experience on the blockchain. Nefta is a one-stop-shop for Web3 tools, providing comprehensive end-to-end solutions for businesses looking to enter and grow in the Web3 space. Nefta provides seamless integration for digital assets, multi-chain wallets, tokens, custom marketplaces, white label services, and more, using bespoke APIs and SDKs. With Nefta's support, businesses gain valuable insight into blockchain economies, monetization, and user analytics.

The partnership between Nefta and Block Born will be brought to life through Block Born x Nefta tournaments and Twitter spaces, alongside content focused around improving existing Web3 games, bringing the best of Web2 to Web3, and other technical discussions around the future of the space. The partnership will also help developers successfully scale their projects while making it easier than ever to integrate onto the Tezos blockchain.

Geeshan Willink, CEO, and Co-Founder of Nefta, said, "We are pleased to be part of Block Born's mission to make Web3 gaming fairer and more accessible, and we're proud to offer our services to help bring their ambitious projects to life. Block Born is backed by some of the biggest names in the Web3 space, and their expertise combined with Nefta's comprehensive end-to-end toolbox means we're able to bring fun and fair Web3 experiences to more gamers."

Will Pazos, SVP of Block Born, said, "With a shared vision of empowering Web3 gaming studios and making the blockchain more accessible, Nefta was the perfect partner to help us focus on building and growing great games. With Nefta's support, we're able to focus on what we do best and help our partners successfully scale their projects while making it easier than ever to integrate onto the Tezos blockchain."

The partnership between Nefta and Block Born is a significant development in the Web3 gaming space. It provides developers with the necessary tools and infrastructure to build successful Web3 games, ensuring a streamlined gaming experience for players. The Nefta and Block Born partnership marks another milestone in the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, paving the way for a more accessible and equitable future for gamers and developers alike.

Tezos Foundation Bi-annual Report

Tezos Foundation published it's bi-annual report this week which provides an update on the entire ecosystem. In the latest report, Tezos network experienced remarkable growth in usage and value in 2022, with a 115% increase in NFT sales compared to 2021. Two successful forkless upgrades were also completed, improving the scalability and functionality of the network. The biannual update highlights gaming as a significant vertical, alongside collectibles, creator tokens, and DeFi.

Dear Tezos Community,

We are pleased to report that the Tezos network experienced significant growth in usage and value in 2022. According to a recent report, network activity measured by smart contract calls and transactions, saw year-over-year growth throughout the year. Additionally, the Tezos ecosystem saw a 115% increase in non-fungible token sales in 2022 compared to 2021. Two forkless upgrades were successfully completed during the second half of 2022, with the most recent, Lima, launching on the mainnet in December. These upgrades have improved the scalability and functionality of the Tezos network. We are excited about the upcoming 13th Mumbai upgrade, which will introduce Smart Contract Optimistic Rollups (SCORU) and significantly increase transaction throughput while preserving decentralization and security.

The Tezos Foundation weathered the industry-wide storm and did not incur significant direct losses from any of the notable collapses reported in the media. However, the value of the Foundation's strategic Bitcoin and Tezos holdings decreased significantly in line with market movements. We anticipated the potential downturn and started a thorough review in March 2022, reducing future commitments, and validating our efforts by developments later in the year.

The Tezos Foundation will continue to support the creation of high-quality technical solutions, embrace and encourage third-party control, and enhance our own transparency to build trust for the industry and for Tezos. This biannual update is an example of our transparency and detailed reporting. We dedicate this update to all games and gamers on Tezos, as many developers have been building and launching games during the year, establishing gaming as a strong vertical alongside collectibles, creator tokens, and DeFi. The project pipeline for gaming in 2023 is exciting.

The Tezos Foundation's role is to support the long-term success of the Tezos protocol and ecosystem. We look forward to an inspiring 2023 and thank you all for your dedication and passion.

Sincerely,

The Tezos Foundation Council

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Tezos is set to undergo its next protocol upgrade, Mumbai, which introduces several exciting new features. One of the most significant is the activation of Smart Rollups on the Mainnet, providing a powerful scaling solution that allows anyone to deploy decentralized WebAssembly applications with dedicated computational and networking resources. Additionally, Mumbai introduces Epoxy, which allows for instant finality due to SNARK's proof-of-validity.

The protocol upgrade also reduces the block time to 15 seconds by significantly reducing block propagation times through improved pipelining. Ticket transfers between user accounts are now possible in Mumbai, and two new RPC endpoints have been added to improve the visibility of ticket ownership. Furthermore, new Michelson operations have been added to support logical operations on bytes and convert between bytes and nat.

However, Mumbai also disables Transaction Optimistic Rollups (TORUs) on the Mainnet, as this functionality can easily be implemented through Smart Rollups. If Mumbai is voted in by the community, the transaction rollup subsystem will be completely disabled, meaning tickets deposited on transaction rollups will be lost forever. Upgrading to Octez v16.0 or later will be necessary for participating in consensus, and a dedicated protocol test network, Mumbainet, is also scheduled to begin soon.

This Week in Tezos Development

Nomadic Labs have discovered a vulnerability which could affect the Tezos network’s liveness but not its safety. In other words, the vulnerability could slow or halt the network, but not put funds at risk.

Nomadic Labs have investigated various ways of mitigating the problem via an Octez shell update (everything but the protocol), but none were found to be satisfactory, and a patch for the protocol itself is required.

Moreover, Nomadic Labs have taken the step of producing a patched version of the Mumbai protocol upgrade proposal that addresses this vulnerability. The hash of Mumbai 2, the patched version of Mumbai, is: PtMumbai2TmsJHNGRkD8v8YDbtao7BLUC3wjASn1inAKLFCjaH1.

As the Mumbai proposal is currently in the Promotion period of the governance cycle, there are two scenarios going forward:

  • User activated protocol override: The community votes Yay to Mumbai in the current voting period. All nodes running v16.0 of Octez will activate the patched version, PtMumbai2, instead of PtMumbaii. This is what happened with the patched Babylon, Edo, and Hangzhou proposals.

  • Restarting the governance cycle: The community votes Nay to Mumbai in the current voting period, and the governance process “reverts” to a new proposal period. A patched Mumbai protocol will then be proposed and must undergo a full governance cycle. This should last about 2.5 months assuming approval in every voting period.

A new release candidate, Octez v16.0~rc3, has just been published, and v16.0 is expected shortly after. In addition to the Mumbai 2 protocol, this release candidate also includes performance improvements in the baker that we consider necessary for the block time reduction coming with Mumbai.

Important: Octez v16.0 will be required for Mumbai

As stated in a previous blogpost, upgrading to v16.0 (or later) is necessary to participate in consensus once Mumbai is activated, independent from the discussion above.

We remind the community that bakers representing at least 2/3 of the total stake must be running the same protocol version for the chain to stay live, due to the requirements of the Tenderbake consensus algorithm.

The Mumbainet test network will be restarted shortly to instead use the Mumbai 2 protocol. Joining the new rebooted test network will require Octez v16.0~rc3, or the upcoming stable release. Please check this page for further details.

We acknowledge that this is coming at a late stage in the current voting process, and we ask for the community’s understanding and cooperation in addressing the situation. A full write-up on the vulnerability will be published when it is safe to do so.

We are confident that the measures outlined in this post will sufficiently address the present issue and look forward to unleashing the potential of the ground-breaking features contained in Mumbai!

Nomadic Labs

This short article will show you how get started with a rollup on the Mumbai test network. Assuming that the Mumbai protocol is accepted, the process here should work on mainnet in April 2023, but please be careful — any Tezos wallet you manage on mainnet should be well-protected. Besides, the smart rollup node released as part of Octez v16 is provided for testing purposes. The first production-ready smart rollup node, suitable for a mainnet deployment, is expected to be released as part of Octez v17.

LigoLANG updates | Marigold

LigoLANG has released a new LIGO LSP (Language Server Protocol) that has been rewritten to OCaml. To test the new LSP, users need to install ligo v0.61.0 or newer, the vscode extension (v0.5.0 or newer), and make sure ligo is on the path. Users can open a .mligo or .jsligo file to start the extension. The LSP should support hovers with types, errors/warnings that appear when typing, go to definition (ctrl-click), find references (F12, only in open files), rename (F2, only in open files), go to type definition, and document links. Users are encouraged to test real contracts with many/big files to provide feedback to LigoLANG on any social platform.

Now Streaming

Tune into our next TezTalks Radio episode featuring Gretchen Andrew! 

In this podcast, we hear the story of Gretchen Andrew, who left her job in Big Tech to pursue her passion for art. Gretchen believes that the art world celebrates individuality and authenticity, something that she felt was lacking in the tech industry. As an artist, she is committed to using her work to explore the impact of changing technology and the demographics of those who benefit from it.

The podcast also introduces us to Crypto Mermaids, a female-led NFT collectible project on Tezos that empowers women by funding tech education.