The Baking Sheet - Issue #50

Perez goes viral, Verstappen wins Monaco GP, and Quincy Jones is building a green NFT platform on Tezos

Welcome to the 50th issue of the baking sheet!

With protocol upgrade Granada looming in the horizon, we’ve been met with continuous upticks in on-chain activity, more artists coming to Tezos-based NFT platforms, and mainstream adoption. This week’s issue will focus on the theme of making Tezos cool.

Tezos Ecosystem Insights

We’re slowly witnessing a strong momentum shift towards capturing mindshare of non-crypto audiences. This momentum has been aided by the recent Red Bull Racing Honda news we wrote about last week and also a few other factors.

I think so often we overlook one of the main application that Tezos offers. That application is Tezos’ ability to self-amend, or evolve over time. Various technological advancements/improvements have the ability to be ported onto the protocol seamlessly through a battle-tested, formal, and well-defined on-chain amendment process.

This application is especially important when it comes to DeFi protocols and allows for necessary changes to be made in a predictable and timely manner.

On that same front with Granada I think its it’s a useful step forward with showing what Tezos’ governance mechanism can do (e.g. Liquidity baking). This will allow for smaller slippage and use already existing protocol induced inflation in the form of baking rewards and introducing it on chain through the tezos governance mechanism.

That’s pretty damn cool to me that we can add this on-chain and implement it in a predictable manner. That predictability is clearly becoming a long term performance goal as well if we’ve been paying attention too. So, we’re clearly becoming more in tune with consistent upgrades.

Circling back to DeFi on Tezos — the Delphi and Edo upgrades have played pretty pivotal roles in opening up the development of various primitives and applications to date. Delphi brought us improvements in gas costs by adjusting the gas model and reducing storage costs by 4x. Likewise, Edo brought about Sapling, BLS12–381 to enable privacy — preserving smart contracts, tickets, and changes in the underlying amendment process itself.

It shouldn’t really come as a coincidence all this stuff we’re seeing started popping off shortly after Delphi when gas costs became much more economically attractive as compared to other protocols. Likewise, this also dips into NFT minting and distribution.

The continued evolution of Tezos we’re seeing despite all the distractions here lately shows where this ecosystem and the people behind it to be more precise focuses lie. While others are focusing on shipping something that’s expected soon, we’re just steadily implementing the latest features and growing on-chain activity while amalgamating all this with achieving actual adoption.

That adoption ranges from all the work we’ve seen done within the STO space, gaming and creator applications and more recently the Red Bull Racing Honda news. Red Bull Racing is essentially going to build their own version of TRUESY - a popular new NFT platform featuring exclusive and renowned artists.

Likewise, we’ve also learned of a new NFT platform that raised $63M and will make use of Tezos. OneOf will include the likes of stars such as Quincy Jones, Doja Cat, Charlie Puth, G-Eazy, and more.

Can you say it with me, Adoption?

Also over the weekend Max Verstappen actually won the Monaco Grand Prix and Perez had a turn that was shown all over the internet. I think big picture is this is something we need to start seeing more of and cultivating the idea towards newcomers - wow, this is pretty cool.

Further, when we look at all the traction we’re seeing from NFT platforms like Hic et Nunc, Kalamint, TRUESY - I think people are really starting to resonate with that philosophy as not only is our atmosphere more welcoming from a economic standpoint than say Ethereum but it’s actually kinda cool what you can do with the Tezos blockchain now.

That’s really the message we need to send on a wide and broad scale.

Onwards and upwards!

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Jones, Whitney Houston, TLC, Doja Cat, John Legend, and more will release collections on the environmentally friendlier OneOf platform, which is scheduled to launch in June

This month, Gravity joined some of the largest international NGOs in the world to launch the Dignified Identities in Cash Programming (DIGID) project in Kenya.

Say hello to Blokhaus, a Marketing & Communications organization dedicated to help streamline and amplify marketing related activities for the Tezos brand and ecosystem.

2020 will go down in crypto history as the year that DeFi hit its stride, gaining over $15 billion in total value locked in the year, according to DeFi Pulse.

Decentralized finance is a compelling industry capable of unlocking many new use cases, services, and products.

We believe that these synthetic assets are cost-efficient and transparent. We build open-source software that allows you to create, store and manage your synthetic assets and data. To bring our vision to life, we kick-started youves, a decentralised, non-custodial and self-governing platform for the creation of synthetic assets.

There are a few NFT marketplaces on Tezos that utilize their own tokens. Here’s what we know about those tokens and the way they work.

To commemorate the lives lost on the KRI Nanggala 402 submarine,which tragically sank in Indonesia last April, 5300 NFT editions of “53 Never Forgotten” will be sold on the Tezos NFT platform, hic et nunc, and supported by TZ APAC.

This Week in Tezos Development

Introducing DipDup built by the talented team of Baking Bad. DipDup is a tool that abstracts developer from the indexing and data serving workflow and let him focus on the business logic only. It also applies selective indexing techniques to ensure fast initial sync phase and the most efficient use of public API endpoints.

DipDup is heavily inspired by The Graph Protocol but there are several important differences:

  • DipDup works with operation groups (explicit operation and all internal ones) and Big_map updates (lazy hash map structures) — until fully-fledged events are implemented in Tezos.

  • DipDup utilizes microservice approach and relies heavily on existing solutions which makes the SDK itself very lightweight and does not limit developer with a single programming language or a particular API engine.

We’re excited to announce the alpha launch of Tezos Profiles (TZP), which can be found at tzprofiles.com. TZP is a web application that helps users regain control of their digital identity.

The recent update in Temple Wallet: In-wallet swaps, Dapp directory, token prices, and other features now available

TzStats now offers public Tezos RPC node access, contributing to decentralization, resilience, and synchronization times of the global Tezos network.

Now Streaming

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Trending on Tezos Agora

All Applications for Tezos Ukraine’s Startup Incubator for Beginner Devs Submitted

We have accepted over 230 applications from those willing to participate in our startup incubator for blockchain devs.

Following the in…

Sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere, but like Liquidity Baking/Mining and HomeBase DAO, is one of the teams working towards an IDO launchpad on Tezos? Something like Polkastarter to raise capital and support ideas…

Hic et Nuc mints 100K NFTs