The Baking Sheet - Issue #84

January 28, 2022

The Institutions are here

Welcome to this week’s issue of the baking sheet!

There’s been a lot of great news throughout the Tezos ecosystem over the past week including Transak integrating tez, custom NFT collections on Rarible, and the CoinShares ETP news to name a few.

This week’s issue will focus on institutions now providing simple exposure for Proof-of-Stake protocols like Tezos.

Tezos Ecosystem Insights

A phrase about as old as crypto itself.

Earlier in the week, we were treated to some exciting news (albeit it has been expected for some time now). CoinShares announced the rollout of their physically-backed crypto exchange traded products (ETPs). Among the rollout, were Tezos and Polkadot ETPs.

If you’ve been keeping up with this development, plans were announced a while back on our TezTalks stream with Danny Masters. Danny also serves on the Tezos Foundation board.

Nevertheless, this development is significant for a few reasons not just in the light of Tezos - but the broader Proof-of-Stake space as a whole.

Firstly, these ETPs are the first institutional products of their kind. Using their own physical staked tez and DOT, investors can participate in the rewards accrued from securing these networks in the form of baking/validator operation without having to maintain hardware or infrastructure.

Since ETPs are listed on a national stock exchange and can be traded via traditional equity markets, these products are perfect for dissuading against the long on-ramp process within crypto networks for institutions.

Furthermore, since the tez/DOT is physically backed in these ETPs, CoinShares will have to hold the underlying assets instead of using derivatives as a benchmark.

By providing these ETPs along with the staking rewards they accrue to institutions and investors, it’s a great way for them to dip their toes into the water that is Proof-of-Stake without fully jumping in.

This can potentially lead to more exploration of protocols like Tezos. Overall, it should be seen as nothing short of a positive development for the Tezos ecosystem and that of Proof-of-Stake.

Townsend Lansing, Head of Product at CoinShares commented in a PR on the news.

“Proof-of-stake protocols require investors to use their holdings to validate the network and its transactions. The validator also earns the protocol’s digital currency, which means investors can contribute their assets to create large pools that share in those rewards. We are proud to launch the first physically-backed crypto ETPs with a unique mechanism that enables us to share staking rewards with investors in a transparent way”.

This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem

The CFMM and this blog post are based on Arthur Breitman’s Flat Curve CFMM concept and its reference implementation.

Transak, A developer integration to onboard global users from fiat to crypto and back using local payment methods, has made Tezos available to the US.

Coinshares announces Tezos has officially been listed as one of their ETP products.

SkillZ, the European leader in Staking-as-a-Service, has formally announced that it has expanded its involvement within the Tezos ecosystem as a corporate baker. By officially becoming a baker, SkillZ will now validate transactions and add them to the Tezos blockchain.

Kathleen Breitman, co-founder of the Tezos blockchain, explains how their protocol utilizes proof-of-stake to maintain energy efficiency. Plus, her opinion on the ongoing debate in the crypto space about how proof-of-stake compares to proof-of-work.

This Week in Tezos Development

A Turing-complete programming language is a language on which one can realise any calculable function, i.e. write literally any program. Most languages are Turing-complete, and it’s bad.

Recently, we released a new version of the tzNFT command line tool and a corresponding tutorial describing how to use it. The NFT tutorial gives detailed step-by-step instructions on how to prepare…

Now Streaming

Trending on Tezos Agora

The one caveat to this is parallelization of execution, for example with multiple cores. While it’s possible to do that within rollups, it requires more work

Dear Tezos Community,

We’re happy to relaunch the Monthly questions for the Tezos Foundation!

Feel free to share your question here, and we’ll do our best to answer it shortly.

The most frequently asked questions will…

Tezos Creators - Ottez

The story so far...

The world's nuclear power plants were convinced to allow their operations to be coordinated on Cordona Blockchain Smart Contracts after furious marketing from their leader Bob Hoskins (not the actor). The world's nuclear energy supply became a ticking time bomb and went into meltdown.

Radiation began to cover the planet wiping out all trace of human life. One canny species had a little-known advantage. Otters retreated to their dens and hunkered down, but the radiation seeped in as they slept and began to transform them.

When the first seven Ottez began emerging from their dens, they were the most advanced... The Magnificent 7. They quickly began adopting the traits and styles of their fallen human counterparts. Wearing their clothes, enjoying their leisure activities. As more otters awoke, new styles emerged.

Check out the unique 4007 Ottez collection on objkt