The Baking Sheet - Issue #146

April 15, 2023

Let's go on a Safari!

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.

What a week! It's been a whirlwind in New York as the Tezos community came together and celebrated art on Tezos. We will have full coverage next week on our learnings at the Tezos NFT Summit that brought together artists, developers, and enthusiasts under one roof. However, that wasn't the only headline of the week, The development teams in the Tezos ecosystem came together and dropped a major surprise that took over all the chatter in the Tezos Ecosystem — Let's dive in!

Introducing the Next Tezos Upgrade: Nairobi

As we just experienced one of the most significant upgrades for Tezos, a joint announcement from Nomadic Labs, Marigold, TriliTech, Oxhead Alpha, Tarides, DaiLambda, and Functori revealed the Nairobi protocol proposal for Tezos. This new protocol proposal contains a variety of updates and improvements, including an up to 8x increase in transactions per second (TPS) for specific manager operations, a revamped gas model for signatures, and faster consensus.

Increased TPS Through Finer-Grained Gas Model

The Nairobi protocol proposal refines the gas cost model for signature verification of manager operations, making their cost dependent on the cryptographic curve used and the payload size. This finer-grained approach enables a significant increase in the maximum number of manager operations that can be included in a block. The result is an 8x performance boost for specific operations, such as basic Tezos transactions between tz1 or tz2 accounts.

Endorsements Rebranded as Attestations

The term "endorsement" is being replaced with "attestation" to more accurately reflect the role of bakers (validators) in the Tezos ecosystem. Attestation better communicates the fact that validators merely attest to the production of a valid block, rather than endorsing the block's content. This change begins with the deprecation of the endorsing_rights RPC endpoint and the introduction of attestation_rights as a replacement.

Faster Consensus Through Fine-Tuned Validation Pipelining

The Nairobi proposal fine-tunes the Mempool module to speed up consensus by validating and propagating consensus operations more efficiently. This update allows bakers to communicate their votes in the pre-attestation voting phase faster, resulting in quicker consensus on block proposals.

Continuous Improvement of Smart Rollups

Smart Rollups, Tezos' general-purpose Layer 2 solution, is evolving with additional host functions and new internal Layer 2 messages, which notify all rollups of new Tezos protocol upgrades on Layer 1.

Nairobinet Test Network Launching Soon

If the Nairobi proposal is voted in by the community, an upgrade to Octez v17.0 or later will be necessary to participate in consensus. To enable testing, a release candidate for Octez v17.0 will be published shortly, and a dedicated protocol test network, Nairobinet, is scheduled to launch soon.

For more information about the test network, visit https://teztnets.xyz/. To get started, join the Tezos Developer Slack or Tezos Discord communities.

Statement from Tezos Commons on the Nairobi Variant with inflation funding

One long-standing Tezos community member, Nicolas Ochem proposed a Nairobi variant that utilized the inflation mechanism for Tezos upgrade proposals. This proposal includes 100K tez to be minted by the protocol and fund a community wallet that is used for the Tezos Community Rewards program. Our executive director, Corey Soreff, released a statement regarding this

A note on the recent proposal to fund the #TezosCRP wallet via inflation funding:

- Tezos Commons was not involved in any way with the proposal, nor were we notified beforehand.

- #TezosCRP is funded by the Tezos Foundation, there is no immediate need for funding.

- Tezos Commons is fully in support of funding community efforts via inflation, as was always intended in Tezos. However, we think this would be better utilized to fund a community DAO, or projects that are more in need of funding. A community DAO is also in the works!

- Considering some of the recent conversations around this, we would like to note that 100% of the funds in the #TezosCRP wallet go back to the community. It is never and will never be used for any sort of Tezos Commons team funding.

We encourage healthy debate around inflation funding as a future means of ecosystem support.

In summary, we appreciate the efforts and support by the Tezos community and the only goal from our organization is help foster and grow the ecosystem. Thus, we would prefer inflation funding be more effective to fund a community DAO. We will continue to distribute rewards every month back to the community with the Tezos Community Rewards program so please keep nominating on who you think deserves tez for their contributions in the ecosystem.

A Message to the Community from Interpop

To the InterPop community,

We’ve made the difficult decision to end development of InterPop games, and will close the MinterPop marketplace on April 30, 2023. This decision wasn’t easy, and is one that no creator wants to make. Everyone at Interpop is proud of the products we’ve built together. We continue to believe that web3 is the future of fandom, and that it enables true ownership of digital assets such as comics, games and collectibles.

We’re thankful to our fans who built a vibrant community and joined us in exploring how blockchain technology could enable new gaming experiences. Thank you for helping to redefine fandom; we couldn’t have created InterPop Comics, MinterPop and Emergents TCG without your support. And we’re tremendously grateful to the hard work and creativity of everyone involved in developing and running InterPop over the years. They are an amazing and talented group of people.

In light of this decision, the last chance to access all InterPop games and the MinterPop marketplace will be on April 30, 2023. After that time, you will be unable to use the MinterPop marketplace and play Emergents TCG.

Exchange for Initial Purchase Price

We are offering to exchange purchased cards, super boosters, and the pre-launch promotional NFTs for the initial purchase price. The exchange window opens today and will remain open for 30 days until May 14, 2023. Users who currently hold cards, super boosters, and the pre-launch promotional NFTs must email [email protected] with the following information:

  1. Wallet address

  2. Name of each asset

  3. Price of each asset

Exchanges will be issued within 30 days of email receipt.

Contact customer support

We understand that users may have questions about the refund process, so please feel free to contact us at [email protected]. Our team will be monitoring this inbox and responding to queries until May 31, 2023.

What’s next?

  • At this time all current MinterPop Marketplace card sales will end.

  • At this time no new listings to MinterPop Marketplace will be accepted.

  • Emergents TCG will be disabled and the game will be delisted on April 30, 2023.

Thank you all for a wonderful journey! We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

The InterPop Team

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

XTZ News reports, Winterthur, the sixth largest city in Switzerland, has announced the EulachGold project, a Tezos-based token with a 1:1 value ratio to the Swiss Franc. The project, launched on the successful Ecoo App, enables users to purchase goods from participating shops in the pilot project.

The Ecoo App is a versatile platform that facilitates digital vouchers or tokens across various sectors like tourism, events, corporate meal plans, and health insurance. Managed by Digital Winterthur and City-Vereinigung Junge Altstadt, the EulachGold project aims to modernize payment options and strengthen the old town as a shopping and meeting place. Following the pilot phase, the experiences of participants will be assessed to determine the potential for a digital means of payment in Winterthur's old town.

MVL X Tezos, Web3 Mobility Project Successfully Completed

On April 11th, MVL successfully completed its Web3 mobility project with the Tezos Foundation.

The two companies had a joint goal of innovating the mobility sector with blockchain technology and have been working together on mobility blockchain-related technology development and field pilot projects since September 2021.The joint projects conducted by the two companies include launching a hybrid blockchain, issuing driver passport NFTs, and developing wallets that support Tezos (XTZ) and Tezos sub-tokens.

The MVL Foundation has generated about 64,000 driver passports, and the numbers are still increasing along with the growth of TADA users. In particular, MVL has jointly developed Tezos network support features in its Clutch wallet with Tezos, enabling TADA service users to easily receive, store, and use tokenized incentives on the Tezos network, and successfully integrated it with the TADA platform.

This Week in Tezos Development

A new Tezos-compatible L2 chain has been developed using smart rollups, allowing users to interact with the Tezos public network. The introduction of optimistic rollups in the Tezos ecosystem follows the Mumbai upgrade, which significantly improved Tezos as one of the most technolgically-advanced chains.

Tezos stands out from the competition due to two groundbreaking aspects: implementing settlement and fraud proof mechanics at the protocol level and offering the Kernel SDK in Rust, allowing for the creation of custom execution logic. As a result, Tezos now boasts a cost-efficient and well-tuned settlement layer on a decentralized network, providing an excellent developer experience, particularly for Rust enthusiasts.

Rollups are considered essential for the future of web3, as they offer customizable infrastructure and the ability to deploy application-specific chains, providing the best user experience. Unlike other L2 scaling solutions, rollups offer a secure, cost-effective scaling solution with various trade-offs, allowing for optimal flexibility.

The goal of the project is to create an application-specific chain with Michelson contracts that provide a customizable solution for both existing Tezos app developers and newcomers. Potential features include lower operational costs for running oracles, custom MEV-resistant techniques for TradeFi, chain-native tokenomics, feeless experiences, account abstraction, and permissioned chains. Head on over to Baking Bad's blog to learn more in-depth on this Tezos-compatiable L2 chain and interact with it as with any other Tezos public network.

Visit https://teztnets.better-call.dev/rollupnet to give it a try!

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Join us for TezTalks Radio featuring Matt Medved!

This week, we're super excited to welcome Matt Medved, founder of nft now, to the show! As a pioneering force in the rapidly evolving world of digital art, Matt is ready to share his invaluable insights on the future of NFTs and why the Tezos blockchain is a premier home for artists.