The Baking Sheet - Issue #37

February 26, 2021

Recapturing that magic this week that makes Tezos great

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

As we’re heading towards a new protocol upgrade, it’s been another great week for the Tezos ecosystem. For this week’s issue, I’d like to talk more about Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s) and discern just what exactly the recent momentum we’ve witnessed around them fits into a larger picture unfolding before us within Tezos.

Macro Ecosystem Insights

The term NFT shouldn’t come exactly as one that is new or an advent we’ve only witnessed popularity thereof in this year. In fact, if we trace back to 2017, it was one of the few catalysts leading up to the crypto bull market that abruptly ended in January 2018.

Let’s look at some historical data to actuate that claim.

Above is the Ethereum chart from early January 2018. Coinciding with this chart, according to the team behind crypto kitties, total registered users reached 250k accounts or roughly - an over 4x increase since December 5th, 2017.

To add, it's important to note that roughly 25% of ALL Ethereum traffic came from crypto kitties during (as of December 5, 2017). This traffic literally grew to the point where it actually slowed the Ethereum network down considerably.

The first conclusion that can be drawn is not only were initial coin offerings (ICO’s) a key catalyst, but often overlooked, NFT’s played a slightly less but nearly equal role in driving traffic and attention to one of the most widely used blockchain networks at the time.

So, what does this mean?

Pivoting from that, we’re witnessing the same patterns beginning to emerge and these patterns are on a much greater scale than initially witnessed in 2017/2018 in terms of a macro sense.

What we’re slowly witnessing is the growing acceleration of the core ideals behind decentralization - but they’re beginning to hit home in a truly meaningful way.

Not only are we starting to see a growing case for bitcoin in terms of a world’s treasury asset - it performs better in terms of functionality, and is a greater store of value amidst the vast money printing by the federal reserve and european union.

But, we’re seeing a truly widespread environment take form around this technology. This environment is being catered by the growing momentum within Decentralized Finance and unsurprisingly, NFT’s.

On the surface level, it makes sense to see a lot of traction towards something within an ecosystem where there exists a lot of well to do people. For, what things do wealthy people like?

(You should have thought about art, if not I’m sorry.)

Celebrity endorsement of NFT’s has hit an all time high. Everyday we’re met with more people talking about them, building them, building marketplaces around them, and more.

What we don’t really consider is just exactly why the main platform in which these NFT’s are predominantly minted has reached an inflection point. In case your wondering what that platform might be, it’s Ethereum.

The world’s economy and new digital financial sector will not be built on a platform where you have to pay $100 just to move a token, nor pay even more/slightly less just to mint an NFT. Value will begin to seep into more user friendly and cheaper alternatives. If you think otherwise, you’re only fooling yourself.

For Tezos, this inflection point comes as an advantage and large opportunity. That opportunity is being taken advantage of most notably with the collaboration with OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, even superseding popular alternatives like Rarible.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Following a council meeting today, the Tezos Foundation is proud to announce that Arthur Breitman, an early architect of Tezos, has been appointed to a one year term as a Council Member of the Tezos Foundation.

Seven years ago, I embarked on a mission to bring about a new form of money: bound by algorithmic rules, and yet capable of evolution; decentralized, and yet capable of self-governance. Tezos has always been an ambitious idea.

the world’s largest digital currency asset manager, is announcing its consideration of several new digital assets for potential new product offerings

Bordier & Cie, a private Swiss bank founded back in 1844, has started offering Tezos to clients.

Simplex, the leading fiat infrastructure provider, has integrated XTZ ), enabling users to purchase the coin with a credit or debit card, or via bank transfer, from anywhere in the world.

Our previous entries mentioned Kolibri (kUSD), a stablecoin on the Tezos blockchain. Today, we will cover it in greater detail: on February 18, the development team at Hover Labs has officially launched Kolibri on mainnet.

For this week’s spotlight, we chatted with Vertalo CEO & Co-Founder Dave Hendricks about the digital asset ecosystem on Tezos and trends in tokenization and digital securities more broadly.

Japanese exchange GMO Coin, subsidiary of GMO Internet Group, will offer Tezos staking services beginning on March 1.

You can now swap the first Tezos algorithmic Stablecoin, Kolibri and exchange with XTZ, BTC, ETH, USDT, LTC, AND tzBTC on Atomex wallet.

This Week in Tezos Development

009 Florence Protocol Change Log. Florence will be the next Tezos protocol proposal to be injected into the protocol in the coming weeks. This will be the 6th protocol proposal since mainnet in 2018.

In this article, we explain the main reasons for the change in name and what it means for the community.

OpenMinter release featuring Edonet support, video NFT support, and a number of fixes and improvements (v0.2.0) is now available

Learn Ligo and write Tezos smart contracts with our interactive tool. Convert your Solidity contracts to Ligo easily.

Trending on Tezos Agora

We at Madfish want to allow users to send their FA1.2 - FA2 tokens without holding XTZ on the user’s account. As a solution, we are developing a prototype of a Tezos Gas Station Relayer.

Cheers everybody, we released the first version of Maelstrom (https://maelstrom.fi) last week, which empowers users to: a) send Tezos to the contract and withdraw any amount of their liking from as many addresses.

TL;DR: A flaw was found in the camlCase’s Dexter contract. The funds have been removed from the contract and returned to their original holders.

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