The Baking Sheet - Issue #79

December 24, 2021

Merry Xmas Tezos Community -- Have a safe and happy holiday!

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

With Christmas upon us and New Year’s Resolutions abound, it’s a great time to reflect on some of the notable events and developments we’ve seen garnered throughout the Tezos ecosystem in 2021. 

It’s been a short year, but there’s been lots of progress made. So, let’s digest it all.

Ecosystem Insights: 2021 Reflections

As we approach the end of another year, our psychology always shifts to being more reflectionary. Thoughts of what were, what could have been, and perhaps even what should have been - permeate our minds and beings. 

For this week’s issue, I think it would be good to take a mixture of these questions and also showcase important accomplishments that we witnessed this year in the ecosystem. 

Let’s start off with network metrics. Contract calls have made new highs all throughout the year, thanks to a novel mechanism to Tezos (on-chain protocol upgrades) and real organic adoption of NFTs. 

In other words, protocol upgrades amalgamated with organic NFT interest have encompassed for the vast majority of contract calls on Tezos to date… just since April. 

Tezos has showcased a new movement and pivot for artists and creators furiated from issues plaguing other platforms/networks, not just limited to feature sets. We’ve seen a whole new culture and community emerge from this movement that has begun to define it. 

That culture has led to the creation of original art, creative and intuitive applications of their art, and an experimental atmosphere that would not be available much elsewhere. One would be pressed to find a more vibrant community and group of collectors and artists than what we’ve seen come to Tezos. 

Let’s now pivot more towards protocol upgrades. Ithaca, the most recent and 9th protocol upgrade injected into the Tezos network is undergoing voting. Of all the features, the most noteworthy is the introduction of Tenderbake, a novel feature which will increase transaction throughput from +/- 200 txn’s/second to a much higher figure. 

This has been part of a growing theme within core dev teams to begin to utilize base layer capabilities but also shift towards welcoming layer-2 applications on Tezos to amend them even further. We had the chance to chat with the Marigold team a little while back to extrapolate on that. Gabriel Alfour of Marigold shared some input there. 

From my point of view, it has been my thesis since the beginning. Most of the activity on blockchains will move to layer 2. Because, the whole point of layer 2 is to have the same warranties with blockchain but with better scalability. We can already see blockchains that are basically a layer 2 system with it built in essentially from the beginning. The flow blockchain is an example, it is essentially one big rollup.

Most things will go towards this direction. I have a vision that is very centered around web3 and the goal is to make this work on Tezos. There are no other teams working on this kind of stuff right now, so we want to be the team that makes this a reality.

Pivoting towards general news, 2021 was not shy of that for Tezos. In no particular order, here were some of the highlights we saw. 

It’s been a big year. 

As we draw closer to 2022, it’s worth challenging old perspectives and replacing them with new. What better parallel than a network like Tezos to commensurate that very statement - which is designed to evolve and amend itself over time. 

Merry Christmas, Tezos community!

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

DOGAMI, the first mass-market play-to-earn nonfungible token (NFT) game powered by Tezos, secures $6 million in funding from Ubisoft, Animoca Brands and The Sandbox co-founders

In spite of the pandemic, 2021 proved to be very cool: Tezos had three updates, and the tez price nearly broke the historical record. Meanwhile, we held a hackathon, launched an incubator, wrote an online course, and planned more events.

LucidPay, a leading payment provider for the hospitality industry, plans to launch a stablecoin for frictionless, global payments. LucidPay is currently being used in top hotels located in the UAE and KSA such as Atlantis, Sofitel on the Palm, Turtle Bay Hotel and Caesar's Palace.

Smartlink has partnered with the French Atomic Energy Commission CEA to develop web 3.0 escrow solutions. CEA is a French public government-funded research organization in the areas of energy, defense and security, information technologies, and health technologies.

This Week in Tezos Development

We were proud to see Hangzhou go live on chain on December 4th, 2021.

In keeping with our policy of proposing upgrades on a regularly scheduled basis, we’re happy to announce our latest Tezos protocol proposal, Ithaca.

Tarides continues to develop fast, reliable storage components for Tezos, so this report contains our progress on the Tezos storage projects during September, October and November 2021.

DipDup received a major update! New features and significant performance improvements

Now Streaming

NFT Feature: Alchememist