COMMUNITY

Month at a Glance — February 2023

A breakdown of the latest happenings and significant milestones taking place within the Tezos ecosystem for the month of February 2023.

Originally published at Tezos Commons News

By William McKenzie

TEZOS COMMONS

1,300 words, 7 minute read

Month at a Glance January 2023 image 1

Welcome to our latest issue of Month at a Glance where we give a quick breakdown of the latest happenings and significant milestones taking place within the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.

Like a repeating vinyl record, spinning over and over again, February 2023 was a big month in terms of continued network usage, integrations, and further adoption. It’s only a matter of time before these achievements unlock the next mass adoption by the masses.

Let’s break it all down.

Ecosystem Insights #

Month at a Glance — April 2023, image 2

Mumbai is now in promotion phase! #

Protocol Mumbai, the 13th Tezos upgrade has been announced and is currently in the promotion phase of voting. In case you haven’t been following along with the upgrade, it’s worth highlighting some of the key features and what to expect as activation gets closer.

Protocol Mumbai will introduce the following features:

The work on pipelining is worth highlighting in particular. With this upgrade, the efforts towards pipelining are moving fast. Essentially, this change will allow block times to get reduced in half from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. Get ready for some speedy block times!

Nomadic Labs detailed these features in length on their blog post.

To summarize, in Kathmandu we first focused on applying this new validation discipline to manager operations — e.g. transactions and smart contract calls, which are the ones which consume the most resources. In Lima, we extended our scope to all operations supported by the Tezos economic protocol, and to how blocks are handled when nodes receive them. And now in Mumbai, pipelining is brought to the baker, so the block payload (smart contracts, etc.) is not executed before the proposed block is propagated — the block must only go through a lightweight validity check (see our previous discussions on pipelining for more details).

This will be the second time Tezos reduces its block time via its on-chain governance. The first being witnessed in protocol Granada with the activation of Emmy*. For a detailed breakdown on other features such as smart rollups and zk rollups, be sure to check out our post on Mumbai.

Let’s get out there and vote for Mumbai!

TezQuakeAid #

On February 6th, we witnessed the unfortunate news of a large magnitude earthquake striking Turkey and Syria resulting in more than 40,000 deaths and countless injuries. In the aftermath of all this, the Tezos community did something truly wonderful and banded together to support the victims and families of this disaster through their art and donations.

As of today, more than 100k tez has been raised through the event. Artists can participate in TezQuakeAid by minting their artwork under the initiative and using the proceeds from sales to contribute to the donation wallet. Alternatively, artists can sell existing work and directly donate the tez raised to quakeaid.tez. There are several platforms available, including Teia, Objkt, Versum, and fx(hash). Guides for artists using each platform can be found on the TezQuakeAid website.

Collectors can also support TezQuakeAid by collecting artwork minted or sold under this initiative, promoting and sharing artwork by Turkish and Syrian artists, and by directly contributing tez to the quakeaid.tez wallet.

For those who want to contribute directly, they can send tez to the address KT1X1jyohFrZyDYWvCPXw9KvWxk2VDwxyg2g or quakeaid.tez. The funds raised can be monitored on the quakeaid.tez wallet for transparency, and evidence of the funds sent to NGOs will be provided through payment receipts for full transparency.

Google Cloud news #

As of late, we’ve seen lots of traction from companies coming in and starting bakeries with the most recent of the bunch being Google Cloud.

Google Cloud has recently announced that they are becoming a Tezos baker and now are enabling corporate customers to deploy their own Tezos nodes and have seamless access to the technology. In addition to this, in collaboration with the Tezos Foundation, a Tezos incubator is going to be created for startups and will be eligible to receive Google Cloud credits and mentorship via the Google for Startups Cloud Program.

Talk about a partnership with one of the world’s largest tech giants.

It’s pretty exciting to see an enterprise of this scale come over to Tezos and launch a corporate baker. Not only does it instill a strong level of confidence in the underlying technology, Tezos is one of three blockchains to have been selected by GCP and it shows that there is genuine interest in Tezos beyond the web3 scene as well.

Be on the lookout for a detailed breakdown on some of the larger companies coming in and launching bakeries on Tezos soon.

News from the Tezos World #

Month at a Glance — January 2023, image 3

Aleph.im announces collaboration with Ubisoft and Tezos ecosystem

PR: "So, we now enable the wider Tezos community to harness the power of our novel, fully decentralized, and dynamic NFT smart contracts. This will catalyze the global NFT market’s expected CAGR of 23.9%, helping it reach $19.57 billion by 2028".

TezQuakeAid Relief

The Tezos community took the initiative to support relief efforts following the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. To learn more about the the fundraiser, head over to the site.

ZirconTech becomes a corporate baker

PR: "With the emergence of Web3, the company has recently developed a blockchain application to enable universities to dematerialise diplomas and transcripts. The application is based on the ZirconTech Notarizer, which uses blockchain technology as a proof of authenticity for the existence of a file. ZirconTech, has added Tezos as a new blockchain platform for the Notarizer and will also integrate it into the “Tokenizer”', a general purpose tokenization platform to be launched this year".

Quipuswap v3 is here!

Tezos development team, Madfish Solutions has launched the long awaited Quipuswap v3. Check out the new version here and be sure to read the guide if you get stuck along the way.

Deku has been discontinued by Marigold

PR: “With sadness we must announce the Tezos Foundation has discontinued the Deku project. The betanets are being shut down, and the repository will be archived. With crypto winter upon us, the Foundation has decided to cut costs, and prioritize rollups instead”.

Rarible’s aggregation tool will now support NFTs from Tezos

PR: “Alexander Salnikov, co-founder of Rarible, told CoinDesk the company chose to integrate Tezos marketplaces into its aggregation tool in an effort to court crypto-native artists as well as collectors that favor sustainability. Through its aggregation tool, collectors on Rarible will be able to purchase Tezos-based NFTs from marketplaces such as Objkt, fxhash, Teia and Versum”.

Google Cloud becomes a corporate baker on Tezos

Google Cloud customers now have access to Tezos’ blockchain technology. Additionally, select Tezos incubator startups will be eligible to receive Google Cloud credits and mentorship via the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Learn more about these resources here.

The Tezos SDK for Unity is now live!

This complete Web3 SDK lets you bring any blockchain capability to your game. Connect to crypto wallets, generate NFTs, authenticate users, and more, all on the energy-efficient Tezos blockchain. Learn more about the SDK here. There’s also a dedicated landing page on Tezos.com as well!

Events #

Month at a Glance — January 2023, image 4