Blockchain Weekly by Marigold - Issue #56
News Summary / TL;DR of Tezos ecosystem and blockchain world
R&D
On May 11th, Quorum was reached for the exploration phase of Nairobi, Tezos’ latest protocol upgrade proposal. It had 50% participation, including 132 out of 407 bakers voting.🥳
Nomadic Labs published two blog posts:
The first one “On the future of validity rollups on Tezos” explained how it can combine optimistic and validity rollups in a single product. The author laid out the team’s perspective on the current state of validity rollups and “present an exciting strategic shift in how we aim to integrate this technology into Tezos in a way that counterbalances its intrinsic limitations”.🧵
The second one, “What’s Cooking for Smart Rollups in Nairobi?”, showed how the Nairobi protocol upgrade will bring new features and improvements to Smart Rollups that will make life easier for developers.🧵
In a new blog post on Marigold’s blog, Lin Oshitani (OCaml developer at Marigold) explained how Tezos self-amendment works under the hood.🔃
LigoLANG announced its new releases 0.64.3 and 0.65.0: the former featured Windows installer and ligo npm wrapping; the latter mainly brought internal improvements and preparations for the next, more significant, release.⏫
Baking Bad shared that the latest Tezos explorer TzKT includes support for the new Nairobi network, an extended sharing mechanism, and even a new tab for games on smart rollup account pages.💡
In the article “Optimising Archive Node Storage for Tezos”, Tarides disclosed its work for the storage components of Tezos, from L1 and L2 shells up to the Tezos protocol, for the past few years. It explained how and why the new archive node storage was divided into multiple volumes.📃
Events
The 2023 edition of TezDev is on sight, back in Paris, on July 21st. Registration is now open to attend workshops, panels and keynotes about blockchain and Tezos projects.🇫🇷
On May 9th, Arthur Breitman (Tezos co-founder) highlighted the Freetez initiative that offers 5 tez (XTZ) for free for people who have spent over $100 in Ethereum gas fees in the past six months.🚰
On May 11th and 12th, Nomadic Labs is hosting a new training session to teach how to write smart contracts on Tezos with different languages, including LigoLANG.🧑💻
The HAKS Kryptosphere x Tezos hackathon will take place on May 12-14 at Telecom Paris with a grand prize of €20,000. The hackathon targets students from technical schools and will enjoy mentorship from Marigold and Nomadic Labs devs.🤓
On May 20th, Tezos Collective will showcase Tezos NFT, Live painting and “engaging talks” at the SSS Gallery in Bali (Indonesia).🇮🇩
On Tatcher.art, Denis Belkevich (Fuelarts founder) evaluated the Fuelarts x Tezos Accelerator for Art+Tech Startups program after the end of the batch of 2023. He also gave his analysis of the development of the Art+Tech industry.🔍
Adoption
On its website, TZ APAC listed actionable advice from Jennifer Cheng-Lo (Founder and Chair of NewChic Capital Family Office and advisor to startups in the TZ APAC Tezos Incubator) on making valuable connections, building an influential online presence, and capturing the attention of VCs.👥
Tezos Commons featured TurtleVision, a Tezos-based interactive, dynamic generative art project designed to mimic the experience of a sea turtle that’s navigating Earth’s oceans in 2023. The project’s goal is to alert on the environment of the animal. The founder chose Tezos as an “energy-saving chain ».🐢
On May 9th, on its Twitter account, Stack (a crypto dev tracker) noted that $XTZ was “currently one of the top-ranked projects” on its platform “by dev rank”.🏅
Ecosystem
On Tezos Commons, Cryptonio.tez offered a guide to “easily create a token on Tezos without the need for any coding skills”, with a comprehensive overview of the process. In a follow-up article, Cryptonio.tez walked readers through the process of creating a liquidity pool on one of Tezos decentralized exchanges.🧐
On its Youtube series “TezTalks”, Tezos Commons welcomed Josh Dechant (CodeCrafting) to talk about his recent grant from Tezos Commons to build focused.art, a creator-centric platform with a focus on creator sovereignty and interoperability on Tezos.🎙️
AirGap (developed by Papers, a team behind DeFi platform Youves and Oracle service Acurast) introduced AirGap Knox, a wallet service that supports several blockchains and offers the AirGap Vault and the AirGap Wallet. It automatically disables all types of network on an OS level, thereby achieving true offline security, according to Xtz.news.🔒
On Medium.com, Tezos DeFi platform Youves revealed that it would propose the community to transition from a multisig governance to a smart contract based DAO.⏩
The next episode of the “Conversations with Claude” series by TriliTech is out and deals with DeFi on Tezos and the hype around $PEPE.📹
Blockchain
According to CoinDesk.com, the crypto exchange Bittrex filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. state of Delaware on May 8th, notably after being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It believes it has 100,000 creditors “with estimated liabilities and assets both within the $500 million to $1 billion range”.📉
CoinTelegraph.com is one of the sources announcing the upcoming launch of the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network aimed at financial institutions. Participants include BNP Paribas, Cboe Global Markets, Digital Asset, Paxos, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, and others.🎇
In a recent statement, accounting firm Deloitte announced it has integrated KILT Protocol technology (a Polkadot parachain) to “enable the issuance of reusable digital credentials to its customers”. The integration aims to improve the efficiency of Deloitte’s Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) verification processes.🛠️
A report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) said that French bank BNP Paribas is promoting China's digital yuan by linking wallets to bank accounts.🏦
In an interview with CNBC’s Crypto World, Elliot Han (Head of crypto, blockchain and digital assets investment banking at Cantor Fitzgerald, an American financial services firm) affirmed that institutional interest in crypto is “maturing”. Speaking at Digital Assets Week, he underlined that they are trying to understand “these other use cases that aren’t necessarily obvious.”🤔