The Baking Sheet - Issue #45

April 23, 2021

Gamers Unite. šŸŽ®

Welcome to this weekā€™s issue of The Baking Sheet!

As we charter further along into a new era of Tezosā€™ never ending evolution with quorum reached for Florence, letā€™s discuss further some of the more larger pieces of news weā€™ve witnessed this week with Ubisoft.

Ubisoft x Tezos

Without the intent of sounding like a broken record, itā€™s little to no secret that public blockchains accrue their value from network effects.

The best way to look at it is to imagine a moat around a fortress. The moat acts as a vestibule to a deep and empty valley allowing nothing to enter the fortress that could prove hostile to its inhabitants. The fortress on the other hand, represents the collective might and power of the nation and its inhabitants occupying it.

In relation to Tezos, we can view the moat as the underlying secure smart contracts and likewise the fortress can resemble the various entities that are using Tezos either directly or indirectly. For the sake of this post, Ubisoft will be using Tezos directly, and weā€™ll explain how they are doing just that.

Earlier this week, TQ Tezos put out a short post describing the Ubisoft news to a certain degree. What was once considered an improbability has been rapidly catching steam with more and more corporate bakers coming to the Tezos ecosystem.

This concept goes beyond the trivial and often conflated ā€œpartnershipā€ news we see within other projects using X blockchain for some reason or another. Corporate baking is much more direct in this sense. These are enterprises that take their own capital, market buy tez (if they donā€™t hold it already as indicative in a balance sheet) and set up a baking operation on the Tezos network (which isnā€™t exactly cheap, btw!).

In short, these select enterprises are doing a couple of things.

  • Assuming all upfront costs through acquiring tez on the market.

  • Taking a fiduciary risk by running the baking operation.

  • Expressing enough interest in Tezos to the point theyā€™re contributing to the network in the most direct way humanly possible (securing + producing and validating blocks on the network).

  • Gaining experience with the network (which can translate to other things).

The latter two points are the most exciting parts and contrary to some beliefs, go beyond simple speculation.

Awhile back, I had the chance to chat with Alain Broustail of Sword Blockchain/ Sword France. In some of his responses, he outlined from an enterprise standpoint the decision basis behind choosing to run a baker on Tezos.

As a senior consultant, I am often advising board members of our clients about the legal status of crypto assets and the best processes for managing corporate wallets. Terms like GDPR, IFRS, 4 eyes validation or ISO27001 popping out. Similar questions have been asked by Sword CFO when we proposed the project. Itā€™s good to give the answers to the questions. But itā€™s even better to show that you have been through it yourselves.

If you had to choose between two consulting agencies on the topic, would you rather believe the one who thought about it, or the one who thought about it and then implement the solution for itself?

There are still very few ā€œcorporateā€ organizations the size of Sword France (>50Mā‚¬ revenues) who did cross the line, but many will and we are here to help!

Also, I want to point out that this project attracted a lot of interests from our collaborators internally. Many had no, or poor, knowledge on what blockchain technology is.

Even recently graduated engineers coming from some of the best schools in Europe were still believing that ā€œminingā€ a blockchain was only about wasting massive amounts of CPU/GPU and electricity as fast as you could. These people now have a different vision, and are in a way better position to spread awareness on blockchain in general and Tezos specifically to our hundreds of clients.

Itā€™s all about first hand experience. Getting enterprises accustomed to the Tezos network through direct firsthand experience (baking) can open up further opportunities/applications at a later date. It is indeed, in my opinion, the most profound method of onboarding.

With that in mind, letā€™s look at Ubisoftā€™s press release in coordination with Nomadic Labs.

Weā€™re happy to be joining the Tezos ecosystem as a corporate baker. Ubisoft believes that blockchain has the potential to bring new possibilities to players and developers alike, and this new collaboration will allow us to pursue our innovation efforts with an ecosystem that aligns with our environmental-friendly approach thanks to its proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.ā€ - Nicolas Pouard, BID at Ubisoft

Beyond just strictly baking, the door is wide open for further collaboration/exploration if it wasnā€™t made explicit enough in Mr. Pouardā€™s comments. What will result from this announcement remains yet to manifest itself.

However, with all the gaming/creator applications currently underway through InterPop and others, it doesnā€™t take a ton of thought to consider what might eventually unfold.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Assassin's Creed publisher will act as a validation node while experimenting with how blockchain can be used in games

Ubisoft, leading creator, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and services, including the Assassinā€™s Creed series, has joined the Tezos ecosystem as a corporate baker. Ubisoft isā€¦

We have been sharing our progress from day one. Today, we are very excited to announce that Tezos Domains are finally here! Bidding on all domains with five characters and more.

Bangalore-based KoineArth is launching a non-fungible token service for enterprises to convert enterprise assets into tradeable NFTs.

Kolibri is an algorithmic stablecoin built on the Tezos blockchain by Hover Labs.

Learn how to get started minting NFTs on the Hicetnunc cryptoart platform. This is an easy-to-follow course which is free to all WOCA members

Wrap is a decentralized bridge between Ethereum and Tezos. Through Wrap, users can transfer their Ethereum ERC20 and ERC721 tokens to the Tezos blockchain in a decentralized way.

Reasons Why You Should Keep Track of Your TEZ and Create a Tax Report with this Step by Step Guide by accointing.com

This Week in Tezos Development

In just three months the project has grown from 1,000 to 10,000 users.

The MadFish team attributes this explosive growth to increasing interest in the Tezos ecosystem and their own products becoming more and more polished.

Swap feature is about to be added to the Temple wallet along with full mobile compatibility and other great features. The team plans to make the Temple wallet the most convenient tool for seasoned Tezos users and a perfect entry point for newcomers

The Umami Wallet is aimed at power users, in that it provides all advanced features supported by Tezos. One interesting differentiator for Umami is that it is built by and for OCaml developers.

A brief recap of Nomadic Labsā€™ plans for consensus: Weā€™re currently running Emmy+. We plan to propose to move to Emmy* soon. Then we plan to propose to move to Tenderbake.

Version 9.0 has just been released. This new major release contains the current protocol proposal, Florence, as well as the new protocol environment (V2) that is needed by Florence.

Before we begin our article on phase 3 of the TezEdge node, we have an announcement to make; our company is rebranding itself as Viable Systems. The name comes from the Viable systems model, aā€¦

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We have talked with Sergey Vasilchuk, the co-founder of Tezos Ukraine and Everstake founder. Sergey shared with us the history of Tezos Ukraineā€™s creation, talkedā€¦

As some of you already know, we are working to estimate the environmental footprint of the Tezos blockchain.

We are planning to publish a paper to emphase this differentiating factor for Tezos, which we believe could enā€¦

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