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.

Friendly Reminder to all Bakers that the next Tezos protocol call proposal, Nairobi, is in the exploration phase with 6 days remaining — Now is the time to vote!

This week we are focusing on an amazing product launch by an uber talented team that loves to build on Tezos — Let's Dive In!

Welcome to Season Zero

DNS.xyz has been hard at work over the past year working on creating new and exciting ways to connect web3 profiles (a form of decentralized identification) for the Tezos network.

The fruits of those labors have been fully acclimated with their latest announcement of a waitlist for their upcoming social platform on Tezos. Taking NFT ownership and music to the next level, the new platform aims to redefine how music should be experienced and how musicians and fans can connect.

Let’s dive into it and highlight what we can expect to see following a release with some insight from Shokunin of DNS.xyz.

A New Social Platform on Tezos

The new platform from DNS will be launching as a Lens competitor on Tezos. This means that the platform will include a timeline where you can come in and follow people, like posts, and comment. All of this activity is done on-chain via Tezos.

Basically, each post will be an NFT. Likes and comments will end up on a rollup that the DNS team has developed. They have developed what they dubbed ‘a new Layer 3 rollup’. Every 10 minutes, the ‘layer 3 rollup’ records everything that has happened on the platform and allows that data to be written to the blockchain on IPFS. All of the activity that happens within the system ends up being recorded on the Tezos blockchain.

If that’s not cool enough, they have some exciting features and sneak peeks of the platform.

• Smart wallet

• DNS Tezos domains

• Media player for NFTs

• Shopping cart feature for NFTs

• Collecting posts as NFTs

• Buy/Sell NFTs natively and from OBJKT/others

• Tipping feature for profiles

Speaking on the smart wallet functionality, Shokunin of DNS.xyz gave some more color to how that will work alongside DNS Tezos domains.

If we can think of one way to get NFTs to be used by more people, what’s the most compelling case one can possibly think of?

Probably through music and video streaming.

The DNS team has developed a media player that is able to play high-quality music from NFTs, videos, create playlists, add queues, and much more. Imagine Youtube Music for NFTs. That’s essentially what you’re getting here.

That’s not all.

The DNS team has also developed a new minter and has made it as simplistic to use as making a post on Facebook. When you want to create a post on the platform, you will use the following tool.

All these features make for one of the most decentralized social platforms on Tezos and probably the entire blockchain landscape. This introduces new solutions to the various tradeoffs that exist between different NFT marketplaces. By making everything all-inclusive for the community to things like buying and selling of NFTs, DNS.xyz’s new platform will introduce a whole new way for anyone to become involved within the Tezos NFT space.

How Can I Join the Waitlist

To kick off the waitlist for DNS.xyz’s new social platform, the team has teamed up with artist Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot. To get into the beta, users can collect a free piece(NFT) from Alec Empire showing a video teaser of the site with music produced by him.

In conjunction with this, the DNS team plans to give away a number of free unlocks and items for their introductory Season Zero pass. This includes the initial Alec Empire piece, a new PFP from a PFP project that is being created called “Soundmoji’s”, a free banner, and your own DNS Tezos domain.

Make sure to head over to their site, hop in the discord, RT their thread, and reserve your waitlist spot today to take part in a whole new way to connect and create collectibles on the Tezos blockchain!

When it comes to using a DAO and the benefits for an institution like the Berlin Institute for Sound and Music, it makes sense to begin ‘testing the waters’. As technology continues to evolve and grow, much like the Tezos blockchain, so does the need to cater towards one of the more prolific areas of growth in the Tezos ecosystem; NFTs.

I can’t think of any better entities to begin experimenting with DAOs on Tezos than institutions like HEK and the Berlin Institute for Sound and Music.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Mavryk Finance Testnet Release

The Mavryk Finance team is excited to announce the public beta release of their platform on Ghostnet. With the launch of the public testnet, the team is eager for users to explore, test, and provide valuable feedback on the platform. Your support and engagement on social media platforms such as Twitter will be highly appreciated.

Key Features of Mavryk Finance:

The public testnet plays a vital role in identifying and addressing any issues or bugs before a full-scale release, ensuring that the platform is robust and secure. Mavryk Finance has already undergone internal testing with ~100,000 lines of tests. However, security is an ongoing effort, and the platform's smart contracts will eventually undergo a rigorous security audit. The team is also working on clear documentation and user support via a Gitbook release in the near future.

Read the full announcement on how you can participate

Tezotopia Mobile App Testing

Tezotopia Mobile App's beta testing begins today at 6pm UTC, with opportunities still available for interested participants. To join, contact the team via Discord.

This Week in Tezos Development

The Future of Validity Rollups on Tezos | Nomadic Labs

Validity rollups, also known as zk-rollups, are a popular topic in the blockchain community. Nomadic Labs has been working on implementing its own version of validity rollups, called Epoxy, and has released an early version on its testnet, Mondaynet. There is also a developed epoxy-tx, a transactional rollup capable of handling Tezos’ tickets, to test the system.

After two years of research and development, Nomadic Labs' cryptography team has concluded that validity technology will not achieve general compatibility and high throughput at a reasonable cost for at least a few years. This conclusion is based on the challenges and limitations involved with validity rollups, which include expensive proofs, limited compatibility, and fragmentation in tooling.

In contrast, optimistic rollups, like Tezos' Smart Rollups, provide a high-compatibility and high-throughput solution at a low cost, but with longer finality. To address the challenges of validity rollups, Nomadic Labs has decided to take a different approach and upgrade Smart Rollups with validity technology. This "hybrid" approach allows for instant finality for a higher fee, standard transactions with short finality, and longer finality for more complex operations or new confidentiality features.

This approach has several advantages, including cementing the longevity of Smart Rollups, complimentary features, and gradual implementation. The Tezos ecosystem and community can expect to see more details on this exciting journey as the hybrid design for Smart Rollups is ongoing R&D. In the long term, there is a bright future for validity rollups, but believes a gradual implementation, resting on the solid foundation of Smart Rollups, is the right solution for the years to come.

Now Streaming

Join us for our next TezTalks featuring CodeCrafting

A discussion with Josh Dechant (CodeCrafting) on his recent grant from Tezos Commons to build focused.art. Josh has also joined DNS.xyz as VP of Engineering and will discuss some of his duties and the recent platform launch of DNS.

Now Streaming on YouTube