The Baking Sheet - Issue #36

February 19, 2021

"In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise."

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

As we’ve recently witnessed the autonomous activation of Edo, we’ve been met by a flurry of ecosystem news and updates.

Macro Insights

For this week’s issue, we’re going to scale back the curtain and look through a macro lenses at everything we’re witnessing being built today across the blockchain space as a whole - and the role in which Tezos can play within those lenses.

Where we’re going

As many of us are aware and have been a part of the Tezos community for some time, the early years were anything but uneventful. On our latest TezTalks Live episode with Danny Masters, he brought this particular point up and I think it’s important to understand.

For, how can we truly glean where it is exactly we are going, without knowing where we have been?

The following publications from WIRED and Breakermag do a great job of extrapolating just exactly where we have been, I encourage everyone to read through them and share them if you find it in your interest to do so.

Now that we’ve established where we have been, let’s take a look at where we are going.

Amidst the vast array of developments and innovations we’re witnessing today within the Tezos ecosystem, the blockchain space as a whole has rapidly grown from 2017 - a time in which many newcomers first learned about blockchain and likely entered the market.

Since that point in time, we’ve witnessed several years of building and the fruits of these years are beginning to manifest today.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has grown beyond leaps and bounds throughout this period. What started as a humble beginning and a grant with Uniswap in 2018, has now led to the exchange processing more volume than established crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and others.

This growth has not been met without its downsides, however.

Institutional interest in Bitcoin has never been higher. Nearly every other day for the past few weeks, we’ve heard of a new company/institution buying large amounts of Bitcoin. Just recently, to add onto the list above, it was discovered that companies/institutions to the likes of Tesla and BlackRock have begun to buy large amounts of crypto.

This is adoption on a scale never witnessed before within the blockchain space. What was once merely a 2017 meme, is becoming true by each passing day.

During this time we’ve witnessed the emergence of a pandemic that has completely shifted the way in which we collaborate, communicate, and handle our day-day activities. This emergence has created a growing trend in remote work and coinciding with that trend, we’ve seen large amounts of growth within technology companies and unsurprisingly, blockchain.

Circling back - Danny also mentioned in our recent TezTalk, blockchain companies such as Coinbase have pivoted towards a direct listing. This listing has Coinbase placed at a $77B valuation. The impacts of this listing are a clear indication for the future of the digital economy.

What will become clear from this listing is not only is there value within the underlying and innovative technology that blockchain brings. Rather, we will begin to see further the realization that there is a vast array of components that complement underlying blockchain technology that enable numerous applications.

These applications can stem from DeFi, NFT’s, DAO’s, tokenized assets, decentralized identity (DID), and more. What we’ll see and arguably have already begun to see is there is value not only within these components around the underlying technology but also, between the types of assets that move and flow between these networks.

This realization is a far cry from 2017, where these ideas merely existed but were never actuated or realized. What we’re seeing today across the blockchain space as a whole is the beginning of these once ideas finally realizing themselves and cementing their weight in market share.

Further cementing this point - as I touched on in last week’s issue, certain events have led to this transformation that will only perpetuate further exploration and adoption of blockchain.

For a blockchain-based network such as Tezos, this remains two-fold. Since Tezos is built to truly last through porting new and existing features and even upgrading the manner in which it does so as witnessed within Edo - Tezos is well positioned to capitalize in this burgeoning digital economy.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Tezos “Edo” upgrade is the blockchain’s latest forkless upgrade, adopting new exciting features and showcasing why its upgrade mechanism is a game-changer. Through this mechanism, Tezos has upgraded…

In October 2020, in collaboration with TQ Tezos, we introduced a new rewards program for the Tezos Community in which up to 5000 tez will given to contributors across various categories.

Former Marvel Illustrator To Bring Sky Godz Animated Anime NFT Series To Tezos. This is a transmedia project including an anime streaming series, graphic novel, card games and NFTs.

Cryptocurrencies derive their value from network effects, and Tezos is uniquely positioned to be able to quickly evolve and adapt (without sacrificing decentralization) according to the network effects of technologies in the blockchain ecosystem.

BRD customers can now begin earring staking rewards starting with XTZ! Staking with BRD is done near-instantly all in a non-custodial…

We’re proud to announce that the ‘buy crypto in-app’ feature has officially been deployed to the Sylo Smart Wallet.

Botwars announces it is building on Tezos to bring players real-money battles through in-game currency and ownership of characters and items via NFTs

TEZEX Bridge is a non-custodial cross-chain token bridge for Tezos, that runs on the basis of atomic swaps through a double-sided marketplace.

Kolibri, the algorithmic stablecoin pegged to the US dollar we’ve been working on for the past few months, is now live on Tezos mainnet!

The Blockchain Venture Studio and Fund Backs the First-Ever NFT Marketplace on the Tezos Network.

This Week in Tezos Development

Understanding the source code of Tezos may take much time for fresh contributors. This gentle note gives a global presentation of the control flow of a simple transaction example, going from the high-level command line call to the low-level account operations.

One of Beacon’s main shortcomings was the clunky user interface that end users were confronted with in the dApp when they paired their wallet or triggered an operation.

OpenMinter is dApp framework for enabling the creation and collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Tezos

At TQ, we’re working to advance the Tezos ecosystem by building open-source software and public goods. …

Here's what the Bender Labs team has been up to this week of February 17th

Tokens are the hot subject of the moment in the Tezos ecosystem: everyone is talking about non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) with the release of different platforms to create them (like OpenMinter)

Trending on Tezos Agora

This is a joint announcement from Nomadic Labs, Marigold, and DaiLambda. On 13 February 2021, the Tezos blockchain successfully upgraded by adopting Edo at block #1,343,489.

Edo Update Is Now Approved, and Here’s What It Brings to the Table February 14th, 2021, the Tezos network saw yet another historical event.

We are launching the free online course Smart Contract Development on the Tezos Blockchain Platform consisting of four video lessons.

Tezos on Demand: Now Playing

Upcoming Tezos Events

Tezos DeFi Hackathon hosted by Tezos Ukraine - Register here - February 26-28th