The Baking Sheet - Issue #33

January 29, 2021

Tezos has a killer app and its called DAOs

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

This week we have witnessed an unprecedented movement towards dispelling the broken nature of the traditional financial system. This singular notion is fermented within many of us within the crypto space, but the events we’ve witnessed this week have exacerbated the very angst that not only we have towards the traditional financial system - but others on a large scale.

With that said, it’s worth discussing the recent development we’ve been witnessing around DAO’s (Digital Autonomous Organization) on Tezos.

DAOs on Tezos

Decentralization hangs on the premise of transferring away decision making authority from a single or central entity, to a distributed group. In light of the news we’ve witnessed over the past week, the case towards decentralization continues to strengthen day by day.

Tezos is a decentralized and permissionless Proof of Stake blockchain network capable of amending itself through a formal and well defined governance process. Tez represents the digital currency fueling those seeking a security focused and state of the art smart contract platform.

To learn more about this process within Tezos be sure to check out the video discussing how this process differentiates from Bitcoin mining.

We’ve begun to see more development around DAO’s on Tezos. It’s important to understand just what exactly a DAO is, however. One can think of a DAO similar to a venture capital fund. In the same way the fund provides capital for a new company or startup - A DAO can provide funding in an automated and decentralized method. That is, there are no board of directors or management structures compatible to that of a VC fund.

This structure goes beyond just funding, however. Since blockchains comprise of more than just an underlying technology, there’s a vast interplay between the technology itself, how to govern it, economics, rules and regulations, and more. All these subsets, if we wish to call them that, create an image of a modern day country - and within that country there needs to be states, cities, and towns.

We can look at a DAO as an example of the above.

With the announcement of Homebase from TQ Tezos, there will now be an efficient means enabling developers or interested community members to launch DAO’s on Tezos using a friendly user interface.

To learn a bit more why this is a necessary component within the Tezos ecosystem, Gregory Rocco explained a bit more within the latest Tezos Spotlight.

“It seeks to ease any barriers associated with participating in a DAO in the Tezos ecosystem. Normally, blockchain-based applications and primitives are marred with usability issues due to a divide with both technical and non-technical crowds. A project team may be technical, but its followers who keep a particular platform or protocol running may not be — but it shouldn’t disenfranchise them from any decentralized decision-making. It promotes efficiencies by offering teams the means to easily launch DAOs, and participants the means to easily submit and vote on proposals for any active DAO with a few clicks after connecting a Tezos wallet.”

Of equal importance, Tezos Commons has announced that we will be evolving the Community Rewards Program (CRP) into a DAO by the second quarter of 2021.

As the events unfolding before us continue to take shape, it places greater importance on amending a truly broken system by working towards a better one. The work we’re witnessing within Tezos today around DAO’s, DeFi, NFT’s are paving the way for driving social and economic change on a global scale.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Last Friday, imToken had Arthur Breitman join on Wechat for an Ask-Me-Anything session.

Crypto asset manager Grayscale has incorporated six more trusts, including those tied to Chainlink (LINK) and Tezos (XTZ) tokens.

Tezos Finance (aka ‘Tezfin’)—launching early-2021—is the first decentralized on-chain lending platform (conceptually akin to Compound or Aave) that will operate on Tezos blockchain.

If you have a question for the Tezos Foundation, please include below and we will do our best to answer during the week.

For this week’s spotlight, we chatted with Homebase Product Manager Gregory Rocco to explore Homebase, a framework for DAOs on Tezos.

This Week in Tezos Development

DIDKit is a lightweight set of Rust libraries containing a command-line interface and an HTTP interface.

Tezos is one of the major proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. Our company, MIDL.dev, offers infrastructure services for Tezos bakers and builders.

the rough design of our zk-rollup implementation on Tezos and completed corresponding tasks to lay a foundation. In fact, it’s more possible now to develop zk-rollups on Tezos since BLS12–381 related opcodes were added in the Edo protocol.

Tezos Content of the Week

Tezos Events this Week

Hear from co-founder of Tezos, Arthur Breitman on Saturday, Jan 30th at the world’s largest Blockchain education event. Register here.