The Baking Sheet - Issue #76

December 03, 2021

From Miami to Hangzhou

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

The Hangzhou era is approaching! All the talk of the town has certainly been Tezos NFTs this week as well at Art Basel. There’s been a few popular PFP drops from the likes of Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park too. It’s been a crazy week.

This week’s issue, we’re going to focus more on Hangzhou and the significance of this upcoming upgrade for the Tezos network.

Enter Hangzhou

We plan to share a bit more of a detailed blog post on the significance of this upgrade next week. But, it’s important to focus on this mechanism amidst all the great developments as this is the thing that quite literally makes Tezos and derives its value proposition as comparative to other networks.

That said, in case you’re unaware of that “mechanism” allow me to explain.

Tezos has a unique feature, allowing it to incorporate the latest and greatest feature sets/technologies onto the core protocol in a formal and seamless means. This allows Tezos to “self-amend” and incorporate these feature sets without a hard fork, or splitting of network effects.

Think of networks like Ethereum which are still under a Proof of Work based consensus. In order to incorporate any protocol level changes, they must undergo a hard fork.

This has led to example upon example of splitting communities and network effects. Those network effects are crucial for public blockchains as that’s where they drive the majority of their value from. Tezos isn’t an outlier, it just recognized these flaws ahead of time and created a new method and means of incorporating protocol level changes without succumbing to the same fate.

For more information, be sure to check out the video here.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s look at Hangzhou and the significance of this upgrade.

Upon activation (December 3rd), Hangzhou will be the 8th autonomously activated Tezos on-chain upgrade. No other public blockchain can claim this feat, Tezos has truly battle tested its novel self-amendment process.

Hangzhou traces its nomenclature to East China’s Zhejiang province. Located on the East China Sea, Hangzhou was a natural location for trade and became one of the largest ports in China during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE). This in culmination with the arrival of new people and the growing importance of the Silk Road on the Chinese economy — led to a large artistic, cultural, and religious exchange as well.

We can draw parallels to Tezos today. While Tezos is not bordered or tied to a specific geographic region of the world, we’re seeing the blending of art, culture, and more globally in the form of NFTs and DAOs, to name a few. At the epicenter of this cultural and artistic movement is a global and decentralized network designed to adapt and evolve over time.

Hangzhou introduces several new features for the Tezos network. Of all the proposed features, it's clear the foundations are being laid for the highly anticipated Tenderbake feature.

The features present within Hangzhou are as follows:

  • Caching

  • Views

  • Timelock

  • Global Table of Constants

  • Context Flattening

  • Liquidity Baking

In case you’d like to learn about everything more in-depth, be sure to head over to Marigold’s blog.

While we’ve seen the constant changes/optimizations in gas/storage costs, we’re witnessing a feature truly unique to Tezos being battle tested in a public environment.

What remains to be seen is the roles in which Tenderbake and further Layer-2 developments will begin to bring about for the Tezos network for dApp’s, NFTs, DeFi, and more.

December is going to be another month for the books.

If you’re a public or private baker, be sure to upgrade to octez 11.0 as well!

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

Hello, Rarible fam! When we launched in 2019, NFT conferences were small huddles of crypto people.

As the NFT zeitgeist sweeps the world, the industry’s beating heart is in Asia, writes David Tng of TZ APAC. Here’s how Asian NFTs are changing business models.

After downloading the app from Google Play (iOS version is in review by the App Store), Naan users can view and trade digital assets, sign messages, send transactions, and store NFTs on the go. The…

Hangzhou protocol adoption, nodes and API updated, new listings, Tezos in top-10 most popular coins, 5k NFTs from Mike Shinoda, and other Tezos news in the monthly digest of the Tezos world.

ENVITED research cluster elects Technical Steering Committee and publishes new Certificate Course "Simulation of Automated Vehicles"

Today, Talao, a blockchain-based Digital Identity specialist, and the developer of the first French smartphone wallet for Self-Sovereign Identity, announced the availability of its wallet for all mobile users in Europe.

This Week in Tezos Development

Dear Bakers,

The activation of Hangzhou will take place between Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th December (Hangzhou’s 1st block will have level 1,916,929) – the current estimate is Dec 4, 2021 01:09 CET.

This means that the…

Version 11.0 of Octez has just been released.

There is no significant change compared to 11.0~rc2.

This version contains a user-activated protocol override for Mainnet that tells the node to use Hangzhou2 instead of Ha…

Art Basel Miami: Minting a Tezos NFT

Tezos NFTs: Ziggurats by Mike Shinoda

WHAT IS ZIGGURATS?

ZIGGURATS is the first generative NFT mixtape. It is a collection of 5000 unique audio + visual NFTs on the Tezos chain, generated from new art and music by Mike Shinoda. Visually and musically, no two items are the same, but some are more rare. The initial price of each NFT will be 15 Tezos (XTZ).

In ancient Mesopotamia, the Ziggurat was a tall, layered, structure. It was believed that the Gods lived in the temple at the top. Great care, effort, and creativity went into the creation of its complex structure. Likewise, this project is built upon layers of effort and devotion, some elements many years in the making