The Baking Sheet - Issue #41

March 26, 2021

Tezos continues to upgrades in practice, not in theory.

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

Quorum has been successfully reached for the exploration period of Florence! Equally as important, we’re continuing to see more growth within network usage, DeFi, NFT’s, and much more.

In light of the growing CleanNFT movement, this week’s issue glosses over Proof-of-Stake as a more environmentally cleaner and security-focused consensus as opposed to novel consensus variants such as Proof of Work used within Bitcoin and Ethereum, namely.

Tezos Ecosystem Insights

Reality v. “The Vision”

“And you’ll sit beside me, and we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.” - Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

The aforementioned quote, while brutally blunt - paints an interesting metric pervading the cryptocurrency space. We hear it all the time, “Why isn’t X performing as well as Y which has more stronger fundamentals and actual usage”. It’s a particular argument and metric which is anything but new in this space but is worth some further dissection.

To understand this better, let’s dissect the reality today within Tezos and understand why vision is just that, a vision.

Let’s look at Tezos today, what is the reality?

The reality today is that Tezos is a fundamentally sound Proof-of-Stake (Liquid Proof-of-Stake) blockchain network that has a tested (5 successful upgrades ported onto the protocol seamlessly and autonomously) and well-defined governance process. It is one of the most decentralized Proof-of-Stake protocols in market existence with over 400 bakers securing the network. Network participation within baking is roughly 80%.

Apart from this, contract calls (an undeniable metric based on immutable data from the blockchain) have grown tremendously in the past few months, aligning with the introduction of many DeFi applications released and NFT platforms that have sprung up.

Like low-cost and environmentally sound NFT’s? You have a place now. Like cheap fees with a focus on sustainability and security? You have a place now. Want to conduct your STO and not succumb to a potentially massive financial loss based on a bad contract? You have a place now.

These items described are a reality, these are facts which do not care about your feelings. Items described here exist now, they’re not “coming soon”, “a few months away”, and vice versa.

Get the gist?

Great, now lets circle towards “the vision”.

Merriam Webster defines the word vision as; “a manifestation to the senses of something immaterial”.

When we look across the board, the Proof-of-Stake space is still quite nascent and does not account for a significant majority of the entire cryptocurrency space. The space is primarily dominated by Proof-of-Work, which Bitcoin and Ethereum count for the underlying majority of capitalization as PoW-based networks.

So, how exactly do these two differentiate from each other?

Proof-of-Work relies on electricity usage (power), that is a specific type of hardware in most instances that outputs processing power derived from electricity consumption to secure and validate new transactions on the network. Namely, this is present within Bitcoin and Ethereum today.

Proof-of-Stake however, relies on network participants' number of coins/tokens (stake) to secure and validate new transactions on the network. This model is present within Tezos, Cosmos, and Avalanche namely. For the comparison on energy consumption as opposed to PoW, be sure to read this post.

This model also poses greater security measures after the fact against malicious actors attempting to attack the network as opposed to PoW. Within a 51% attack on a PoW-based system, an entire hashing algorithm has to be rewritten and renders existing specific hardware worthless, financially hurting “good” participants at the cost of the bad ones. Within PoS, the codebase can be forked and essentially eradicate the attacker's coins.

Now, let’s revolve to consider a network wishing to transition towards the PoS model as opposed to PoW. We can loop this back to the previous definition provided earlier on, it represents a vision. It’s something that is not materially existent today, therefore it’s not our present day reality.

What the underlying reality is, PoS encompasses a much more environmentally friendly and secure solution to attackers with the sole interest of disrupting a network in the form of an attack.

If you’re wanting an environmentally sound, low-cost, and security-focused network today that offers these benefits and others towards DeFi, NFT’s, STO’s and more - it exists within Tezos today. It’s not expected “soon”, it’s merely reality and here now.

“An unspoken secret in the cryptocurrency space is that it's always best to be the project that is *about* to ship.” - Kathleen Breitman

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

For this week’s spotlight, we talked about creating NFTs on Tezos with Sandeep Sangli and Harsha Bakku — the core team behind Kalamint, a public marketplace for NFTs on Tezos.

We are thrilled to kick off our new series, Women in Crypto, featuring Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman.

Wakam, the leader of digital insurance in Europe, expanded its involvement in the Tezos ecosystem by becoming a corporate baker.

Back in February, we released a course on smart contract development with Tezos, held four workshops, and organized #TezosDeFiHackathon. In March, the winners of #TezosDeFiHackathon launched a generative art project called Tezos Mandala.

Join us for the first edition of our monthly 'Last Wrap' Series, where we'll update you on what we've been up to, plus answer some popular questions from the Bender Labs community

Crypto trading game & market simulator "Botwars" to deploy NFTs and payment token on Tezos.

Mandala Exchange - Powered by Binance Cloud announces listing of Tezos

This Week in Tezos Development

Less than a month after the approval of Edo, the Tezos network started voting on the new update called Florence. The quorum has been already reached.

As the Tezos ecosystem converges around metadata standards for NFTs

(a.k.a. Clean NFTs),

TZComet now provides a “token-viewer” (already 2 iterations, first blog

post …). It also got upgraded to its own fancy domain name:

tzcomet.io.

This article is aimed at those already familiar with Tezos protocol. If you are new to the ecosystem, I strongly encourage you to go over the Tezos documentation and familiarize yourself with what is going on.

Now Streaming

Trending on Tezos Agora

Liquidity mining was developed for a lot of defi token but it could be used for xtz itself. This would work as follow: Create a Dexter contract for XTZ / TZBTC, or some other pair (a stablecoin for example)

Hey community, I was thinking about inflation by the Tezos protocol which is fixed at 5.5%

The Buttonists team, the winners of Tezos Ukraine’s Tezos DeFi Hackathon, have just launched their pilot NFT project Tezos Mandala.

Tezos NFT Gallery - #CleanNFTs