The Baking Sheet - Issue #56

Evolution, Growth, and Adoption -- Tezos is firing on all cylinders

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

As protocol upgrade Granada is beginning to draw near the end of token holder voting, we’ve continued to see further adoption across the board within the Tezos ecosystem. We’ve seen exciting ways for creators and collectors alike to begin to build cross-chain NFT profiles, continued DeFi growth, and much more.

This week’s issue will focus on mixing decentralized protocols like Tezos and e-voting together.

Tezos Ecosystem Insights: Electis

Recently, we received some interesting news around e-voting and the city of Neuilly-sur-Seine located in France, to allow its ~60,000 residents to participate in local government decision making through the usage of blockchain technology in the form of e-voting.

This post will cover the concept of e-voting, how it ties with blockchain technology, and engage some healthy speculation as to where things can eventually unfold within Tezos and abroad.

Why Blockchain?

Before we can fully glean how blockchain can benefit government decision making in the form of e-voting, we should understand just exactly what e-voting is in the first place.

Loosely put, electronic voting (e-voting) makes use of computer mediated processes in order to cast ballots and exercise one’s stance towards candidates and/or political issues that they are in favor for or against. It’s important to understand most of this process takes place with computers however, the form of ballot composition itself is generally non-electronic.

With the effects of COVID-19 affecting how we interact day to day, the idea of e-voting comes as a timely one and these effects will likely outlast their short-term composition. Thus, the concept of e-voting seems simple at the surface but how exactly does blockchain fit into the mix?

With Electis, which has developed this blockchain-based online voting platform — residents of the city of Neuilly-sur-Seine could use the Tezos blockchain for e-voting as early as September. This usage comes as a legitimate and attractive use case of blockchain. We can think of this as a pure corollary to the industry-wide customization to buzzwords, meaningless hype and deterrents thereof.

When we bend away from the noise, the idea of blockchain in the use of several applications should come quick to the curious observer. Things like decentralized identity (DID), certificate issuance (think diplomas, training program completions, etc), and voting are strong use cases of blockchain.

Blockchain purports more advantages in the following ways:

  • Highly secure

  • Decentralized

  • Auditability

For Tezos in particular, these traits come as those of cultural significance — thus its implications within e-voting should be easily conveyed. Within Tezos, there lies the facilitation of formal verification — a process in which proves the mathematical correctness of the underlying code allowing for institutional-grade smart contracts. There also lies several benefits such as secure custody, and upgradeability — allowing for any new features/tech to be ported onto the protocol in a timely, battle-tested, and well-defined manner.

Thus, when we amalgamate this with the predisposing realization that the world is rapidly changing around us in not only a government perspective, but economical, and societal at large — we can come to the conclusion that trustless-ness and transparent auditability come as significant pieces of importance for the common good. What better way to encapsulate that very philosophy through the usage of fully-decentralized and transparent blockchain-based protocols like Tezos?

When we look at most things today, we may not immediately realize it but, there is a large value placed on invisibility. In contemporary society, we take this particular concept for granted. Examples include you viewing this post as we speak — how did you get here?

As technology has continued to grow in speed, intelligence, and reliability — there’s been a large effort in simplifying this process and the way in which we interact day to day in terms of user-experience. When it comes to e-voting — it comes paramount to understand that UX (“user experience”) decreases as more effort begins to accrue from the user.

With Electis’ solution, they aim to bring this power directly to the citizens in the most simplistic way possible through the usage of blockchain and specifically — Tezos.

“We decided to be extremely simple so we will make them vote on simple things, which are in their daily lives, which interest them, which mobilize them in such a way as not to use this vector for requests that are very far from their concerns. As the habit is taken, as the connection is established between the City and the population “ with “ why not, one day, a vote via this blockchain technology “. — Jean-Christophe Fromantin

Looking Forward

As we begin to traverse the growing digital renaissance on Tezos, the renaissance taking place around is much more than an artistic movement. We’re slowly beginning to witness the shift from cultural, political, and economic aspects as well — all comparative to the fervent period of Europe that lasted between the 14th — 17th century.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

The MadFish team has released the QuipuSwap analytics section 

The first installment of QuipuSwap analytics includes the tools long awaited by the community; more features will be added with time.

Features in this release:

  • Pairs/tokens analytics

  • Aggregated stats (TVL, Volume, price changes) in XTZ and USD

  • Price/volume/liquidity charts for each token

  • List of all transactions across the exchange

  • Monitor favourite pairs and tokens

  • Search pairs and tokens by contract address

What’s next?

  • Public API

  • User account analytics

  • and more!

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