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Tezos is a self-upgradable and energy-efficient Proof of Stake blockchain. Designed to evolve. Built to empower.
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The Baking Sheet - Issue #299
TezDev week is starting to come into focus.
With the full agenda now out, you can begin to see how everything is lining up in Cannes. The conversations, the people, the ideas that have been building over the past few months are all about to come together in one place. At the same time, the broader landscape around Tezos is shifting in its own way, with new clarity beginning to emerge in how the network is being viewed and discussed at a regulatory level.
And alongside that, the policy layer is stepping further into the spotlight, with Tezos contributors helping shape conversations around how decentralized assets and staking fit into evolving frameworks like MiCA.
This week’s edition moves across those layers. From a moment that touches on one of the longest-running questions in the space, to the agenda that will shape TezDev itself, and the discussions happening just next door at EthCC.
Tezos Referenced in U.S. SEC Digital Commodities Framework
For years, one question has quietly followed Tezos and much of the broader crypto space: how exactly should these networks be classified?
That question has shaped conversations across regulators, builders, and institutions. It has influenced how products are designed, how participation is structured, and how entire ecosystems are understood from the outside looking in.
This week, there’s a meaningful signal in that ongoing discussion.
In a recent release from the U.S. SEC, Tezos (XTZ) was explicitly referenced among examples of what are being described as “digital commodities.” The definition leans heavily on functionality. Networks that are already operating, where value comes from usage, participation, and supply and demand within the system itself. Not from promises. Not from future earnings tied to a company. But from the system as it exists today.
Tezos appearing in that list places it clearly within that conversation.
It reflects a view of Tezos as a network that stands on its own mechanics. A chain where validation, governance, and evolution are driven by participants rather than centralized control. A system that has continued to upgrade itself, cycle after cycle, without relying on a single coordinating entity to push it forward.
For a long time, the line between what is considered a security and what is considered a commodity has been one of the biggest open questions in the space. This doesn’t close that conversation entirely, but it does show where thinking is starting to land, at least in part, and it’s happening alongside similar discussions elsewhere.
At EthCC in Cannes, that same question takes a different form through a policy roundtable focused on how liquid staking and decentralized assets should be classified under MiCA. Contributors from across the Tezos ecosystem are helping bring those conversations into the room, alongside policymakers and industry participants working through Europe’s evolving framework.
Two different regions. Two different regulatory approaches. But both are circling the same core idea.
How do you define networks that don’t behave like traditional financial instruments?
This week, Tezos finds itself directly inside that answer. With that being said, if you would like to attend the policy discussion at EthCC, register here.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
TezDev 2026 Agenda Goes Live
After weeks of hints and early announcements, the full picture for TezDev 2026 is finally here.
The agenda is now live, and it gives a clear sense of how the day in Cannes will unfold. From the first session to the final panel, it’s turning out to be one of the most packed and wide-ranging TezDev programs to date.
The day opens with a quick welcome before moving straight into what’s being built right now. Early sessions focus on core infrastructure, from native atomic composability to staking design and how canonical LSTs are being approached within the ecosystem. These aren’t abstract ideas, they’re the building blocks that developers and teams are actively working with today.
From there, the conversation shifts into real-time performance. A fireside chat on Etherlink’s instant confirmations digs into what low-latency execution actually looks like in practice, and what it unlocks for DeFi and beyond.
Midway through the day, the focus broadens.
Panels on intents, RFQs, and bridging explore how liquidity and user experience are evolving, followed by a deeper look at agentic development and how applications may be designed moving forward. Then comes a moment many will be waiting for, Arthur Breitman’s keynote, stepping back to look at where Tezos is heading next and what the current wave of infrastructure enables from here.
The second half of the agenda leans into use cases.
Tokenized metals, commodities trading, and new financial primitives take center stage, connecting onchain systems with real-world markets. It’s a continuation of a theme that’s been building over time, bringing more tangible assets and activity into the ecosystem.
Later panels expand that lens even further. Discussions around yield, new earning models, and the next phase of crypto-native applications sit alongside a dedicated focus on art and digital creativity, a space where Tezos has continued to carve out its own identity.
And once the sessions wrap, the day doesn’t end there. Art After Dark closes things out with a 360° immersive experience, bringing together the creative side of the ecosystem in a different format.
You'll also be able to participate in TezQuest, a series of challenges that will have you meet projects, experience apps, and more. Participants will compete for prizes from a pool worth up to $7,000!
Taken together, the agenda reads less like a list of talks and more like a snapshot of where things stand right now. Infrastructure, applications, markets, and culture all moving at once, each with its own track, but all part of the same story unfolding in Cannes.
Tezos Events
Tez/Dev 2026: Less than 2 Weeks Away!
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
🔴 Now Streaming: The 5.5 Million Tez Decision Explained
This week on TezTalks Radio, we’re joined by Mat Cybula, CEO of TenX Protocols, following the announcement of a strategic staking partnership with the Tezos Foundation.
In January, TenX acquired approximately 5.5 million tez. But beyond the headline, this conversation focuses on something more important: how that decision was made, and what it actually means in practice.
🔍 In this episode, we explore:
How the internal decision to acquire tez came together
The biggest concerns raised before committing capital
What made Tezos a “yes” for TenX
What a “strategic staking partnership” actually involves
What TenX is running today and how to verify it
What delegators should expect in terms of fees, payouts, and reporting
How validator performance and transparency will be communicated
What due diligence from the Tezos Foundation looks like behind the scenes
How TenX approaches security, key management, and failure scenarios
The balance between yield optimization and operational safety
How TenX thinks about decentralization and stake concentration
Why Tezos governance and upgrade reliability stood out
How TenX plans to approach on-chain voting
Whether TenX plans to contribute beyond validation
Throughout the conversation, Mat keeps coming back to a simple idea: running infrastructure is about responsibility, not just returns.
Now streaming on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
With the full agenda now out, you can begin to see how everything is lining up in Cannes. The conversations, the people, the ideas that have been building over the past few months are all about to come together in one place. At the same time, the broader landscape around Tezos is shifting in its own way, with new clarity beginning to emerge in how the network is being viewed and discussed at a regulatory level.
And alongside that, the policy layer is stepping further into the spotlight, with Tezos contributors helping shape conversations around how decentralized assets and staking fit into evolving frameworks like MiCA.
This week’s edition moves across those layers. From a moment that touches on one of the longest-running questions in the space, to the agenda that will shape TezDev itself, and the discussions happening just next door at EthCC.
Tezos Referenced in U.S. SEC Digital Commodities Framework
For years, one question has quietly followed Tezos and much of the broader crypto space: how exactly should these networks be classified?
That question has shaped conversations across regulators, builders, and institutions. It has influenced how products are designed, how participation is structured, and how entire ecosystems are understood from the outside looking in.
This week, there’s a meaningful signal in that ongoing discussion.
In a recent release from the U.S. SEC, Tezos (XTZ) was explicitly referenced among examples of what are being described as “digital commodities.” The definition leans heavily on functionality. Networks that are already operating, where value comes from usage, participation, and supply and demand within the system itself. Not from promises. Not from future earnings tied to a company. But from the system as it exists today.
Tezos appearing in that list places it clearly within that conversation.
It reflects a view of Tezos as a network that stands on its own mechanics. A chain where validation, governance, and evolution are driven by participants rather than centralized control. A system that has continued to upgrade itself, cycle after cycle, without relying on a single coordinating entity to push it forward.
For a long time, the line between what is considered a security and what is considered a commodity has been one of the biggest open questions in the space. This doesn’t close that conversation entirely, but it does show where thinking is starting to land, at least in part, and it’s happening alongside similar discussions elsewhere.
At EthCC in Cannes, that same question takes a different form through a policy roundtable focused on how liquid staking and decentralized assets should be classified under MiCA. Contributors from across the Tezos ecosystem are helping bring those conversations into the room, alongside policymakers and industry participants working through Europe’s evolving framework.
Two different regions. Two different regulatory approaches. But both are circling the same core idea.
How do you define networks that don’t behave like traditional financial instruments?
This week, Tezos finds itself directly inside that answer. With that being said, if you would like to attend the policy discussion at EthCC, register here.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
TezDev 2026 Agenda Goes Live
After weeks of hints and early announcements, the full picture for TezDev 2026 is finally here.
The agenda is now live, and it gives a clear sense of how the day in Cannes will unfold. From the first session to the final panel, it’s turning out to be one of the most packed and wide-ranging TezDev programs to date.
The day opens with a quick welcome before moving straight into what’s being built right now. Early sessions focus on core infrastructure, from native atomic composability to staking design and how canonical LSTs are being approached within the ecosystem. These aren’t abstract ideas, they’re the building blocks that developers and teams are actively working with today.
From there, the conversation shifts into real-time performance. A fireside chat on Etherlink’s instant confirmations digs into what low-latency execution actually looks like in practice, and what it unlocks for DeFi and beyond.
Midway through the day, the focus broadens.
Panels on intents, RFQs, and bridging explore how liquidity and user experience are evolving, followed by a deeper look at agentic development and how applications may be designed moving forward. Then comes a moment many will be waiting for, Arthur Breitman’s keynote, stepping back to look at where Tezos is heading next and what the current wave of infrastructure enables from here.
The second half of the agenda leans into use cases.
Tokenized metals, commodities trading, and new financial primitives take center stage, connecting onchain systems with real-world markets. It’s a continuation of a theme that’s been building over time, bringing more tangible assets and activity into the ecosystem.
Later panels expand that lens even further. Discussions around yield, new earning models, and the next phase of crypto-native applications sit alongside a dedicated focus on art and digital creativity, a space where Tezos has continued to carve out its own identity.
And once the sessions wrap, the day doesn’t end there. Art After Dark closes things out with a 360° immersive experience, bringing together the creative side of the ecosystem in a different format.
You'll also be able to participate in TezQuest, a series of challenges that will have you meet projects, experience apps, and more. Participants will compete for prizes from a pool worth up to $7,000!
Taken together, the agenda reads less like a list of talks and more like a snapshot of where things stand right now. Infrastructure, applications, markets, and culture all moving at once, each with its own track, but all part of the same story unfolding in Cannes.
Tezos Events
Tez/Dev 2026: Less than 2 Weeks Away!
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
🔴 Now Streaming: The 5.5 Million Tez Decision Explained
This week on TezTalks Radio, we’re joined by Mat Cybula, CEO of TenX Protocols, following the announcement of a strategic staking partnership with the Tezos Foundation.
In January, TenX acquired approximately 5.5 million tez. But beyond the headline, this conversation focuses on something more important: how that decision was made, and what it actually means in practice.
🔍 In this episode, we explore:
How the internal decision to acquire tez came together
The biggest concerns raised before committing capital
What made Tezos a “yes” for TenX
What a “strategic staking partnership” actually involves
What TenX is running today and how to verify it
What delegators should expect in terms of fees, payouts, and reporting
How validator performance and transparency will be communicated
What due diligence from the Tezos Foundation looks like behind the scenes
How TenX approaches security, key management, and failure scenarios
The balance between yield optimization and operational safety
How TenX thinks about decentralization and stake concentration
Why Tezos governance and upgrade reliability stood out
How TenX plans to approach on-chain voting
Whether TenX plans to contribute beyond validation
Throughout the conversation, Mat keeps coming back to a simple idea: running infrastructure is about responsibility, not just returns.
Now streaming on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
Tezos Community Rewards — February 2026
Announcing the CRP Winners for February 2026!
Greetings Tezos Community,
We are pleased to announce the winners of the “Community Rewards Program” CRP for the month of February 2026!
For more details about the various categories, please refer to the rewards page on the Tezos Commons website.
The Community Rewards Program is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month, tez rewards are distributed to individuals and teams who stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole. For this round, a total of 9,500 tez has been awarded.
In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it takes less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.
Don’t have 30 seconds? You can tag any Discord message, Reddit post or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well!
This is the fifth iteration of the program, and we will continue to make changes based on community feedback. Just like the Tezos blockchain, we will be continually evolving this program.
Numerous factors are used when evaluating submissions, such as quality of submissions, quality of activity, number of submissions, and verifiable proof of activity done by the nominee (no single factor is determinative of a winner, as all factors were weighed to select winners). The judges would like to note that for each category, they are looking for the respective monthly related activity, meaning submissions should reflect activities done for that current month, i.e.; month of January activities.
Without further delay, here are the results of the winners, below.
Helping Hand Award
@HashSosaHash
@ZerorezeroA
@TheTezos
@AuRo404
@_DiVieM_
@NurArt_
@_Gellefin
Influencer Award
@NftyTrap
@ariasixthousand
@fabriziobrarez
@KOLLECTOR_OG
@sheasmith1
@ErnestCisneros1
Tez Dev Award
@FromFriends__
@_joesimon
@webidente
@JackTezos
@BakingBenjamins
Assimilation Award
@Tez2ndMarket
@xSAMGADx
@Chazwesley99
@ZeroUnboundArt
@SkullDegenClub_
@younghover1996
@LaChicaBabyBoo
Patissier Award
@Zir0h
@blockbakery
@fafo_lab
Tezos Tutor Award
@TozartWeb3
@cletusEllijah
@proto_designer
@malsheep56
Formal Verification Award
@skllzarmy
@ryangtanaka
TEO Award
@StrokeDriven
@uzzy_arts
@FendelMarc
@the1hashbrown
Nominations Are Open For March
With March underway, we have begun accepting nominations for this month. If you know someone who deserves a reward for their contributions to the community or have ideas about other categories that should be recognized, then please fill out a nomination form located here, or you can tag a post (or discord message) with #TezosCRP.
As mentioned previously, we are still working on long-term improvements to this program. We know this program is far from perfect, so please bear with us while we strive to improve this program based on community feedback. Stay tuned, stay creative, and keep nominating!
As a reminder to the reward winners, the awards are all distributed through Kukai and DirectAuth. If you have issues claiming your awards, please message us here.
Tezos Community Rewards — February 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Greetings Tezos Community,
We are pleased to announce the winners of the “Community Rewards Program” CRP for the month of February 2026!
For more details about the various categories, please refer to the rewards page on the Tezos Commons website.
The Community Rewards Program is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month, tez rewards are distributed to individuals and teams who stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole. For this round, a total of 9,500 tez has been awarded.
In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it takes less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.
Don’t have 30 seconds? You can tag any Discord message, Reddit post or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well!
This is the fifth iteration of the program, and we will continue to make changes based on community feedback. Just like the Tezos blockchain, we will be continually evolving this program.
Numerous factors are used when evaluating submissions, such as quality of submissions, quality of activity, number of submissions, and verifiable proof of activity done by the nominee (no single factor is determinative of a winner, as all factors were weighed to select winners). The judges would like to note that for each category, they are looking for the respective monthly related activity, meaning submissions should reflect activities done for that current month, i.e.; month of January activities.
Without further delay, here are the results of the winners, below.
Helping Hand Award
@HashSosaHash
@ZerorezeroA
@TheTezos
@AuRo404
@_DiVieM_
@NurArt_
@_Gellefin
Influencer Award
@NftyTrap
@ariasixthousand
@fabriziobrarez
@KOLLECTOR_OG
@sheasmith1
@ErnestCisneros1
Tez Dev Award
@FromFriends__
@_joesimon
@webidente
@JackTezos
@BakingBenjamins
Assimilation Award
@Tez2ndMarket
@xSAMGADx
@Chazwesley99
@ZeroUnboundArt
@SkullDegenClub_
@younghover1996
@LaChicaBabyBoo
Patissier Award
@Zir0h
@blockbakery
@fafo_lab
Tezos Tutor Award
@TozartWeb3
@cletusEllijah
@proto_designer
@malsheep56
Formal Verification Award
@skllzarmy
@ryangtanaka
TEO Award
@StrokeDriven
@uzzy_arts
@FendelMarc
@the1hashbrown
Nominations Are Open For March
With March underway, we have begun accepting nominations for this month. If you know someone who deserves a reward for their contributions to the community or have ideas about other categories that should be recognized, then please fill out a nomination form located here, or you can tag a post (or discord message) with #TezosCRP.
As mentioned previously, we are still working on long-term improvements to this program. We know this program is far from perfect, so please bear with us while we strive to improve this program based on community feedback. Stay tuned, stay creative, and keep nominating!
As a reminder to the reward winners, the awards are all distributed through Kukai and DirectAuth. If you have issues claiming your awards, please message us here.
Tezos Community Rewards — February 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Inside Tezos Agora: Where Ideas, Upgrades, and Debates Meet
The forum where Tezos upgrades are discussed, ideas are debated, and the community helps shape the network.
One thing the Tezos ecosystem definitely doesn’t lack is conversation.
Ideas, questions, updates, and debates appear daily across Telegram groups, Discord servers, X threads, and developer chats. It’s a sign of a living ecosystem with people actively thinking about the future of the network.
But when discussions are spread across so many places, something important can happen, good ideas and points get buried and remain unseen.
That’s exactly the problem Tezos Agora was built to solve.
What Tezos Agora Is (and Why It Exists)
Tezos Agora is the main forum for governance and ecosystem discussions around Tezos.
It’s where developers, bakers, researchers, and community members gather to talk about the protocol, upcoming upgrades, technical improvements, and sometimes even broader ideas about how the ecosystem should evolve.
And yes, before anyone says it, I also enjoy the fast-paced chats and meme-filled groups. I don’t live in the 2000s. But forums serve a different purpose.
Unlike the fun chat platforms, discussions on Agora are structured, searchable, and persistent. Ideas don’t disappear after ten minutes. A thoughtful post can spark a conversation that lasts for weeks, and anyone can jump in, read the arguments, and contribute their perspective.
In a growing ecosystem like Tezos, having a place where these conversations can live and evolve in a more organized way is incredibly valuable.
Where Tezos Developments and Ideas Meet
That’s also what makes Agora so interesting to browse. Spend a bit of time scrolling through the forum and you’ll quickly notice that many of the conversations about future Tezos improvements actually start there.
It’s often where important announcements appear first as well. New Octez releases, technical updates, or ecosystem developments like Octez Connect (which serves as the replacement for Beacon as the wallet connection layer used by many Tezos dApps ) are typically shared on the forum so developers and community members can see what’s happening and ask questions.
Beyond announcements, core developers also post previews of features that might eventually become part of future protocol upgrades. The goal is usually to present the feature early, explain how it is expected to work, and gather feedback from the community before it is finalized or included in a future upgrade proposal.
And it’s not just developers posting updates. Community members also raise their own ideas and concerns. Threads discussing topics like liquidity baking, network economics, governance improvements, or ecosystem participation regularly appear as people share their thoughts on how Tezos could evolve over time.
But the best way to understand what makes Agora interesting is simply to look at the kinds of discussions that are happening there right now.
Some Conversations Happening Right Now
For example, one of the topics currently being discussed is enshrined liquid staking on Tezos. The proposal introduces the idea of integrating liquid staking functionality directly at the protocol level, allowing users to stake their tez while receiving a liquid representation of their staked position that could potentially be used elsewhere in the ecosystem. As you read through the replies, you’ll see people examining the proposal from different angles. Some highlight the potential benefits for accessibility and capital efficiency, while others raise questions about how it could affect staking incentives or the broader dynamics of the network.
Another discussion focuses on simplifying parts of Tezos’ on-chain governance process. Today, protocol upgrades go through several voting phases designed to carefully evaluate proposals before they are adopted. The proposal looks at ways parts of that process could potentially be streamlined, making governance easier to follow and participate in while still preserving the safeguards that make Tezos upgrades reliable. Some commenters see this as a natural step toward making governance more approachable, while others are more cautious and want to ensure that any simplification doesn’t weaken the review process that has helped keep upgrades safe and predictable.
And it’s not only developers starting conversations. Community members regularly bring their own ideas to the table as well. One example is a thread calling on bakers to disable liquidity baking, a mechanism that was originally introduced to support liquidity in the Tezos ecosystem. Some participants believe the feature has already served its purpose and should now be turned off, while others argue that it still provides useful liquidity and should remain active.
These are exactly the kinds of discussions that make Agora interesting to follow. You’re not just seeing announcements, you’re seeing ideas, questions, disagreements, and perspectives from people across the diverse ecosystem that is Tezos.
And that’s really the point of the forum, not just to follow discussions, but to become part of them.
Why You Should Participate
Reading through discussions on Agora is already valuable on its own. It gives you a clearer sense of what’s happening in the ecosystem and what ideas are currently being explored.
But the forum isn’t just meant for observing conversations. It’s also a place where anyone in the community can raise ideas, ask questions, or start discussions about the future of Tezos.
And maybe it’s time we start bringing back a phrase that used to be pretty common in the ecosystem: “Post it on Agora.”
You can share a thought in a chat group with hundreds of people and feel like it’s being seen, but in reality, it can get buried within minutes and missed by most of the people who might actually have something useful to add.
On Agora, discussions stay visible, organized, and easy to find later. That gives ideas the time and space to be explored properly instead of disappearing in the scroll.
Sometimes all it takes to start a good discussion is one post.
Tezos was designed around open participation. Upgrades are proposed, discussed, and refined in the open, and the community plays a role in shaping the direction of the network.
Tezos Agora is one of the places where that process becomes visible.
If you haven’t visited it yet, take a few minutes to explore Tezos Agora and browse through the discussions currently happening there. Chances are you’ll find something interesting, a topic you hadn’t considered before, a discussion you might want to follow, or even something you have your own perspective to add to.
And if you have something worth discussing, you already know what to do.
Post it on Agora!
Inside Tezos Agora: Where Ideas, Upgrades, and Debates Meet was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
One thing the Tezos ecosystem definitely doesn’t lack is conversation.
Ideas, questions, updates, and debates appear daily across Telegram groups, Discord servers, X threads, and developer chats. It’s a sign of a living ecosystem with people actively thinking about the future of the network.
But when discussions are spread across so many places, something important can happen, good ideas and points get buried and remain unseen.
That’s exactly the problem Tezos Agora was built to solve.
What Tezos Agora Is (and Why It Exists)
Tezos Agora is the main forum for governance and ecosystem discussions around Tezos.
It’s where developers, bakers, researchers, and community members gather to talk about the protocol, upcoming upgrades, technical improvements, and sometimes even broader ideas about how the ecosystem should evolve.
And yes, before anyone says it, I also enjoy the fast-paced chats and meme-filled groups. I don’t live in the 2000s. But forums serve a different purpose.
Unlike the fun chat platforms, discussions on Agora are structured, searchable, and persistent. Ideas don’t disappear after ten minutes. A thoughtful post can spark a conversation that lasts for weeks, and anyone can jump in, read the arguments, and contribute their perspective.
In a growing ecosystem like Tezos, having a place where these conversations can live and evolve in a more organized way is incredibly valuable.
Where Tezos Developments and Ideas Meet
That’s also what makes Agora so interesting to browse. Spend a bit of time scrolling through the forum and you’ll quickly notice that many of the conversations about future Tezos improvements actually start there.
It’s often where important announcements appear first as well. New Octez releases, technical updates, or ecosystem developments like Octez Connect (which serves as the replacement for Beacon as the wallet connection layer used by many Tezos dApps ) are typically shared on the forum so developers and community members can see what’s happening and ask questions.
Beyond announcements, core developers also post previews of features that might eventually become part of future protocol upgrades. The goal is usually to present the feature early, explain how it is expected to work, and gather feedback from the community before it is finalized or included in a future upgrade proposal.
And it’s not just developers posting updates. Community members also raise their own ideas and concerns. Threads discussing topics like liquidity baking, network economics, governance improvements, or ecosystem participation regularly appear as people share their thoughts on how Tezos could evolve over time.
But the best way to understand what makes Agora interesting is simply to look at the kinds of discussions that are happening there right now.
Some Conversations Happening Right Now
For example, one of the topics currently being discussed is enshrined liquid staking on Tezos. The proposal introduces the idea of integrating liquid staking functionality directly at the protocol level, allowing users to stake their tez while receiving a liquid representation of their staked position that could potentially be used elsewhere in the ecosystem. As you read through the replies, you’ll see people examining the proposal from different angles. Some highlight the potential benefits for accessibility and capital efficiency, while others raise questions about how it could affect staking incentives or the broader dynamics of the network.
Another discussion focuses on simplifying parts of Tezos’ on-chain governance process. Today, protocol upgrades go through several voting phases designed to carefully evaluate proposals before they are adopted. The proposal looks at ways parts of that process could potentially be streamlined, making governance easier to follow and participate in while still preserving the safeguards that make Tezos upgrades reliable. Some commenters see this as a natural step toward making governance more approachable, while others are more cautious and want to ensure that any simplification doesn’t weaken the review process that has helped keep upgrades safe and predictable.
And it’s not only developers starting conversations. Community members regularly bring their own ideas to the table as well. One example is a thread calling on bakers to disable liquidity baking, a mechanism that was originally introduced to support liquidity in the Tezos ecosystem. Some participants believe the feature has already served its purpose and should now be turned off, while others argue that it still provides useful liquidity and should remain active.
These are exactly the kinds of discussions that make Agora interesting to follow. You’re not just seeing announcements, you’re seeing ideas, questions, disagreements, and perspectives from people across the diverse ecosystem that is Tezos.
And that’s really the point of the forum, not just to follow discussions, but to become part of them.
Why You Should Participate
Reading through discussions on Agora is already valuable on its own. It gives you a clearer sense of what’s happening in the ecosystem and what ideas are currently being explored.
But the forum isn’t just meant for observing conversations. It’s also a place where anyone in the community can raise ideas, ask questions, or start discussions about the future of Tezos.
And maybe it’s time we start bringing back a phrase that used to be pretty common in the ecosystem: “Post it on Agora.”
You can share a thought in a chat group with hundreds of people and feel like it’s being seen, but in reality, it can get buried within minutes and missed by most of the people who might actually have something useful to add.
On Agora, discussions stay visible, organized, and easy to find later. That gives ideas the time and space to be explored properly instead of disappearing in the scroll.
Sometimes all it takes to start a good discussion is one post.
Tezos was designed around open participation. Upgrades are proposed, discussed, and refined in the open, and the community plays a role in shaping the direction of the network.
Tezos Agora is one of the places where that process becomes visible.
If you haven’t visited it yet, take a few minutes to explore Tezos Agora and browse through the discussions currently happening there. Chances are you’ll find something interesting, a topic you hadn’t considered before, a discussion you might want to follow, or even something you have your own perspective to add to.
And if you have something worth discussing, you already know what to do.
Post it on Agora!
Inside Tezos Agora: Where Ideas, Upgrades, and Debates Meet was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The Baking Sheet - Issue #298
This week’s edition of The Baking Sheet brings together three very different corners of the Tezos ecosystem.
A major name from the gaming world has joined the Tezos by running a validator node and securing the network. Across the community, preparations for TezDev are picking up momentum, with new interactive experiences planned for attendees on the event floor in Cannes.
The conference circuit will also host a deeper technical conversation. Arthur Breitman is set to speak at EthCC about a question that is slowly moving from theory to planning: how blockchains prepare for a future shaped by quantum computing.
Infrastructure, community gatherings, and long-term research all appear in this week’s edition, each offering a glimpse of how the Tezos ecosystem continues to evolve in different directions at once.
Let’s talk about it all in your weekly dose of Tezos news.
Square Enix Is Now Running a Tezos Validator
There are certain names in gaming that instantly stand out. This week, one of them joined the validator set on Tezos.
Japanese entertainment giant, Square Enix, is now operating a baker node on the Tezos network, helping validate transactions and support the protocol’s operation.
For a company whose catalog includes legendary global franchises like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Space Invaders, the move represents another step in its growing involvement with blockchain-related infrastructure and digital ownership.
Square Enix has already explored the space through investments in projects like Soccerverse, HyperPlay, and The Sandbox. Running a validator on Tezos adds a new dimension to that participation, placing the company directly inside the network’s infrastructure.
Hideaki Uehara, General Manager of Investment and Business Development at Square Enix Holdings, described the decision as part of a broader effort to better understand the underlying systems powering blockchain ecosystems while contributing to their operation.
For the Tezos gaming ecosystem, the timing is notable. Activity across games and gaming platforms built on Tezos reached roughly 440,000 unique users and over 31 million transactions in 2025, reflecting steady growth across both casual and larger-scale titles.
Efe Kucuk, Head of Gaming at Trilitech, highlighted the significance of the moment, noting that having a major publisher like Square Enix validating the network adds credibility while strengthening ties between the gaming industry and the infrastructure supporting it.
As the ecosystem continues expanding across Etherlink and the broader Tezos stack, participation from established game publishers signals something important: the relationship between gaming studios and blockchain networks is moving beyond experimentation and into real infrastructure.
Welcome to the Tezos community, Square Enix.
TezQuest Brings Challenges and Prizes to TezDev
While some of this week’s news highlights major gaming companies joining the network, the next story turns toward a gaming event at TezDev that enables the community to win some awesome prizes on the event floor.
If you’re planning to attend TezDev this March in Cannes, there’s a new way to explore the event floor.
Introducing TezQuest: a series of interactive challenges taking place inside the XP Zone, where attendees can meet projects, try apps, and compete across the ecosystem.
Participants will be able to move between booths and experiences across the floor, completing tasks and challenges along the way.
Up to $7,000 in prizes will be available, including:
• iPad Pro• DJI Osmo• Ledger hardware wallets
The XP Zone is designed to bring TezDev to life in a hands-on way, giving attendees the chance to interact directly with projects building across the ecosystem rather than just hearing about them on stage.
TezDev takes place on March 30 in Cannes, and if you want to take part in TezQuest, securing your ticket is the first step.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Arthur Breitman: Preparing Blockchains for the Post-Quantum Era
As this year’s conference season begins to take shape in Cannes, another major conversation is coming to the stage alongside the community gatherings and ecosystem events.At EthCC, Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman will be speaking in the Core Protocol track with a talk titled “Preparing Blockchains for the Post-Quantum Era.”
The topic tackles a question that often gets pushed into the future: what happens to blockchains when quantum computers become powerful enough to break today’s cryptography?
Unlike many traditional systems, blockchains carry a unique challenge. Their data is public, permanent, and expected to remain valid for decades, which means the security decisions made today need to hold up far into the future. Waiting until quantum computers arrive would likely be too late.
Arthur’s talk will explore why post-quantum preparation needs to begin now, and what it means for protocols that aim to remain secure and usable over the long term.
If you’re planning to attend TezDev, it’s worth noting that EthCC[9] is happening the same week in Cannes, making it an ideal opportunity to catch both events.
Between ecosystem meetups, developer talks, and protocol discussions, it’s shaping up to be a busy week on the French Riviera, hope to catch you there!
Tezos Events
Tez/Dev 2026: Registration is Now Open!
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
🔴 Now Streaming: Why Major Art Institutions Are Choosing Tezos
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Vinciane Jones, Art Vertical Partnership Manager at Trilitech, and Aleksandra Art, Head of Arts at Trilitech, to explore how Tezos art is stepping further into the institutional world.
With newly announced partnerships involving HEK Basel and the renewed collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image, the conversation centers on what it means for blockchain-based art to be exhibited, studied, and supported by established cultural institutions.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
A major name from the gaming world has joined the Tezos by running a validator node and securing the network. Across the community, preparations for TezDev are picking up momentum, with new interactive experiences planned for attendees on the event floor in Cannes.
The conference circuit will also host a deeper technical conversation. Arthur Breitman is set to speak at EthCC about a question that is slowly moving from theory to planning: how blockchains prepare for a future shaped by quantum computing.
Infrastructure, community gatherings, and long-term research all appear in this week’s edition, each offering a glimpse of how the Tezos ecosystem continues to evolve in different directions at once.
Let’s talk about it all in your weekly dose of Tezos news.
Square Enix Is Now Running a Tezos Validator
There are certain names in gaming that instantly stand out. This week, one of them joined the validator set on Tezos.
Japanese entertainment giant, Square Enix, is now operating a baker node on the Tezos network, helping validate transactions and support the protocol’s operation.
For a company whose catalog includes legendary global franchises like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Space Invaders, the move represents another step in its growing involvement with blockchain-related infrastructure and digital ownership.
Square Enix has already explored the space through investments in projects like Soccerverse, HyperPlay, and The Sandbox. Running a validator on Tezos adds a new dimension to that participation, placing the company directly inside the network’s infrastructure.
Hideaki Uehara, General Manager of Investment and Business Development at Square Enix Holdings, described the decision as part of a broader effort to better understand the underlying systems powering blockchain ecosystems while contributing to their operation.
For the Tezos gaming ecosystem, the timing is notable. Activity across games and gaming platforms built on Tezos reached roughly 440,000 unique users and over 31 million transactions in 2025, reflecting steady growth across both casual and larger-scale titles.
Efe Kucuk, Head of Gaming at Trilitech, highlighted the significance of the moment, noting that having a major publisher like Square Enix validating the network adds credibility while strengthening ties between the gaming industry and the infrastructure supporting it.
As the ecosystem continues expanding across Etherlink and the broader Tezos stack, participation from established game publishers signals something important: the relationship between gaming studios and blockchain networks is moving beyond experimentation and into real infrastructure.
Welcome to the Tezos community, Square Enix.
TezQuest Brings Challenges and Prizes to TezDev
While some of this week’s news highlights major gaming companies joining the network, the next story turns toward a gaming event at TezDev that enables the community to win some awesome prizes on the event floor.
If you’re planning to attend TezDev this March in Cannes, there’s a new way to explore the event floor.
Introducing TezQuest: a series of interactive challenges taking place inside the XP Zone, where attendees can meet projects, try apps, and compete across the ecosystem.
Participants will be able to move between booths and experiences across the floor, completing tasks and challenges along the way.
Up to $7,000 in prizes will be available, including:
• iPad Pro• DJI Osmo• Ledger hardware wallets
The XP Zone is designed to bring TezDev to life in a hands-on way, giving attendees the chance to interact directly with projects building across the ecosystem rather than just hearing about them on stage.
TezDev takes place on March 30 in Cannes, and if you want to take part in TezQuest, securing your ticket is the first step.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Arthur Breitman: Preparing Blockchains for the Post-Quantum Era
As this year’s conference season begins to take shape in Cannes, another major conversation is coming to the stage alongside the community gatherings and ecosystem events.At EthCC, Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman will be speaking in the Core Protocol track with a talk titled “Preparing Blockchains for the Post-Quantum Era.”
The topic tackles a question that often gets pushed into the future: what happens to blockchains when quantum computers become powerful enough to break today’s cryptography?
Unlike many traditional systems, blockchains carry a unique challenge. Their data is public, permanent, and expected to remain valid for decades, which means the security decisions made today need to hold up far into the future. Waiting until quantum computers arrive would likely be too late.
Arthur’s talk will explore why post-quantum preparation needs to begin now, and what it means for protocols that aim to remain secure and usable over the long term.
If you’re planning to attend TezDev, it’s worth noting that EthCC[9] is happening the same week in Cannes, making it an ideal opportunity to catch both events.
Between ecosystem meetups, developer talks, and protocol discussions, it’s shaping up to be a busy week on the French Riviera, hope to catch you there!
Tezos Events
Tez/Dev 2026: Registration is Now Open!
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
🔴 Now Streaming: Why Major Art Institutions Are Choosing Tezos
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Vinciane Jones, Art Vertical Partnership Manager at Trilitech, and Aleksandra Art, Head of Arts at Trilitech, to explore how Tezos art is stepping further into the institutional world.
With newly announced partnerships involving HEK Basel and the renewed collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image, the conversation centers on what it means for blockchain-based art to be exhibited, studied, and supported by established cultural institutions.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
The Internet Is Evolving
The Expansion of The World Wide Web
I still remember the AOL floppy disk arriving in the mail. I remember hearing my first “You’ve got mail” notification. It felt like receiving a letter, except now that feeling could happen anytime, right there on a screen. Everything was new, and because of that novelty, everything seemed to matter.
It’s easy to forget what we actually got online to do in those early days. It wasn’t about building a following, streaming endless media, or filling shopping carts. In the beginning, the internet existed primarily to spread knowledge and connect people. Much of the work behind the scenes came from small groups of enthusiasts experimenting in garages and home offices, quietly building the foundations of what the web would become.
For the average user, logging on felt meaningful. Interaction had not yet been reduced to likes, reposts, and engagement metrics. We signed on, hoping to discover something unexpected. Discovery was the point, and connection was the reward.
As the web expanded, music downloads, early social media platforms, and video streaming opened new ways to share culture online. Much of this happened before large-scale monetization arrived, and for many people, it felt like a renaissance for art, stories, and creativity. No algorithms were deciding what you should see, and no platforms were studying your behavior to maximize engagement. People simply found each other through curiosity and shared interests.
Few people at the time could clearly see where all of this would eventually lead.
The Timeline So Far
Once commerce entered the picture, the internet’s evolution accelerated rapidly. Businesses realized that the web could facilitate buying and selling on a global scale, and digital payments soon followed as supporting infrastructure.
Platforms such as eBay, Amazon, and PayPal proved that entire markets could exist online. Soon, every company needed a website, and internet traffic exploded alongside the demand for domain space and hosting.
Financial institutions quickly recognized the opportunity. Credit card companies promoted online spending, making it possible to borrow money and purchase almost anything within seconds. Convenience increased dramatically, but so did consumer debt and the commercial influence woven throughout online platforms.
Attention gradually became a measurable asset. Platforms learned to track engagement, optimize feeds, and monetize user behavior. What once felt like an open cultural exchange slowly evolved into a system designed to extract economic value from human interaction.
Despite all the technological progress on the surface, the financial architecture underneath the web barely changed. Banks still sat at the center of the system. Governments still controlled currency. Payment processors continued acting as intermediaries between individuals and their money.
In many ways, we digitized the interface of finance without redesigning the system itself.
Convenience gradually concentrated power. Data became centralized within large platforms, and a relatively small number of corporations began deciding who gets seen, who gets paid, and who gets access. People built audiences on infrastructure they didn’t actually own, while privacy slowly eroded through long chains of user agreements.
For a while, this arrangement appeared to work well enough. Markets expanded, businesses grew, and transactions cleared reliably. When systems appear to trend upward, few people stop to question their underlying structure.
Eventually, the weaknesses begin to show.
Financial crises expose fragile foundations. Inflation quietly erodes savings. Accounts can freeze without warning, and access to financial networks often depends on institutions whose incentives do not always align with those of their users.
None of this emerged from a single decision. The system simply scaled faster than our ability to question it.
Over time, the feeling many of us associated with the early internet began to fade. We had built a borderless communication network while leaving its economic core tied to systems designed to centralize control.
What Was Missing
One question sits at the center of the next phase of the internet.
If information can move freely across a global network without permission, why can’t value?
The web created a universal communication system, but never developed a native way to own or transfer value within it. Financial activity still relied on intermediaries, balances still depended on institutional trust, and agreements still required external enforcement.
Blockchain technology emerged in response to that gap.
At the heart of the idea is a decentralized ledger, a shared record that no single entity controls, but anyone can verify. Instead of trusting institutions operating behind closed doors, the rules governing the system exist in transparent code validated across a distributed network.
This structure introduces something fundamentally new to the digital environment. Value can move peer-to-peer across the internet without requiring approval from centralized thirdparties. Ownership can exist natively online, and agreements can be executed automatically through programmable smart contracts.
Some people call this Web3. Others debate whether the term is useful at all. The label matters less than the transition taking place.
The internet is gradually shifting from systems controlled by platforms toward systems coordinated by participants. Instead of environments where a handful of companies capture most of the value, new networks allow users themselves to hold a stake.
The shift is subtle but significant. It moves the internet from rented ground toward shared digital infrastructure.
Interoperability
The future internet will not belong to a single group, platform, or blockchain.
Different networks are being built with different priorities. Some emphasize security, others speed, privacy, or programmability. Each contributes something distinct to the emerging architecture.
The real challenge is not deciding which blockchain wins. It is building infrastructure that allows these systems to communicate and cooperate.
Interoperability is essential because no single design can solve every problem. A network with a fixed monetary supply might function as a powerful store of value but could also concentrate wealth over time. Complementary systems with adaptable governance allow protocols to evolve without fragmenting into competing versions.
Smart contracts must be secure and verifiable because financial infrastructure cannot rely on guesswork. Bridges between ecosystems, shared standards, and interoperable execution environments are all part of the connective tissue required for a decentralized internet.
These ideas are already taking shape in networks like Tezos. Designed with self-amending governance, the protocol can evolve through on-chain upgrades without disruptive splits. It also adopted Proof of Stake early, prioritizing sustainability and long-term participation.
Smart contracts on Tezos are designed with formal verification in mind, reflecting the understanding that financial infrastructure demands a higher standard of reliability. The network’s evolving roadmap focuses heavily on interoperability and expanding connections between blockchain ecosystems.
The goal is not isolation between networks. The goal is cooperation.
Building With Perspective
The early web carried a sense of possibility that is difficult to recreate today. Messages arrived unexpectedly. Communities formed organically. Connecting with people across the world still felt extraordinary.
Over time, we learned what happens when open systems drift toward centralization. Convenience can slowly erode autonomy, and digitizing money without redesigning it often reproduces the same limitations.
Many communities building decentralized networks today are trying to move forward with those lessons in mind. The focus is less on hype and more on infrastructure that can endure. Systems that support persistent ownership, adaptive governance, and collaboration between networks rather than competition for dominance.
Whether the term Web3 survives its current debates may not matter much. What matters is that the transition is already underway.
A growing number of builders are logging on again with a new set of tools. Efforts are in full force with AI now accelerating development potential. Decentralized protocols and open infrastructure are forming the next layer of the internet.
What we build during this period may determine whether the next century online can rediscover a bit of the spirit that defined the early World Wide Web.
So, build for the future of the internet and everything we now know that entails. Blockchains are not stocks. They are not companies. They are networks of people attempting to rebuild the third evolution of the internet.
The Internet Is Evolving was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
I still remember the AOL floppy disk arriving in the mail. I remember hearing my first “You’ve got mail” notification. It felt like receiving a letter, except now that feeling could happen anytime, right there on a screen. Everything was new, and because of that novelty, everything seemed to matter.
It’s easy to forget what we actually got online to do in those early days. It wasn’t about building a following, streaming endless media, or filling shopping carts. In the beginning, the internet existed primarily to spread knowledge and connect people. Much of the work behind the scenes came from small groups of enthusiasts experimenting in garages and home offices, quietly building the foundations of what the web would become.
For the average user, logging on felt meaningful. Interaction had not yet been reduced to likes, reposts, and engagement metrics. We signed on, hoping to discover something unexpected. Discovery was the point, and connection was the reward.
As the web expanded, music downloads, early social media platforms, and video streaming opened new ways to share culture online. Much of this happened before large-scale monetization arrived, and for many people, it felt like a renaissance for art, stories, and creativity. No algorithms were deciding what you should see, and no platforms were studying your behavior to maximize engagement. People simply found each other through curiosity and shared interests.
Few people at the time could clearly see where all of this would eventually lead.
The Timeline So Far
Once commerce entered the picture, the internet’s evolution accelerated rapidly. Businesses realized that the web could facilitate buying and selling on a global scale, and digital payments soon followed as supporting infrastructure.
Platforms such as eBay, Amazon, and PayPal proved that entire markets could exist online. Soon, every company needed a website, and internet traffic exploded alongside the demand for domain space and hosting.
Financial institutions quickly recognized the opportunity. Credit card companies promoted online spending, making it possible to borrow money and purchase almost anything within seconds. Convenience increased dramatically, but so did consumer debt and the commercial influence woven throughout online platforms.
Attention gradually became a measurable asset. Platforms learned to track engagement, optimize feeds, and monetize user behavior. What once felt like an open cultural exchange slowly evolved into a system designed to extract economic value from human interaction.
Despite all the technological progress on the surface, the financial architecture underneath the web barely changed. Banks still sat at the center of the system. Governments still controlled currency. Payment processors continued acting as intermediaries between individuals and their money.
In many ways, we digitized the interface of finance without redesigning the system itself.
Convenience gradually concentrated power. Data became centralized within large platforms, and a relatively small number of corporations began deciding who gets seen, who gets paid, and who gets access. People built audiences on infrastructure they didn’t actually own, while privacy slowly eroded through long chains of user agreements.
For a while, this arrangement appeared to work well enough. Markets expanded, businesses grew, and transactions cleared reliably. When systems appear to trend upward, few people stop to question their underlying structure.
Eventually, the weaknesses begin to show.
Financial crises expose fragile foundations. Inflation quietly erodes savings. Accounts can freeze without warning, and access to financial networks often depends on institutions whose incentives do not always align with those of their users.
None of this emerged from a single decision. The system simply scaled faster than our ability to question it.
Over time, the feeling many of us associated with the early internet began to fade. We had built a borderless communication network while leaving its economic core tied to systems designed to centralize control.
What Was Missing
One question sits at the center of the next phase of the internet.
If information can move freely across a global network without permission, why can’t value?
The web created a universal communication system, but never developed a native way to own or transfer value within it. Financial activity still relied on intermediaries, balances still depended on institutional trust, and agreements still required external enforcement.
Blockchain technology emerged in response to that gap.
At the heart of the idea is a decentralized ledger, a shared record that no single entity controls, but anyone can verify. Instead of trusting institutions operating behind closed doors, the rules governing the system exist in transparent code validated across a distributed network.
This structure introduces something fundamentally new to the digital environment. Value can move peer-to-peer across the internet without requiring approval from centralized thirdparties. Ownership can exist natively online, and agreements can be executed automatically through programmable smart contracts.
Some people call this Web3. Others debate whether the term is useful at all. The label matters less than the transition taking place.
The internet is gradually shifting from systems controlled by platforms toward systems coordinated by participants. Instead of environments where a handful of companies capture most of the value, new networks allow users themselves to hold a stake.
The shift is subtle but significant. It moves the internet from rented ground toward shared digital infrastructure.
Interoperability
The future internet will not belong to a single group, platform, or blockchain.
Different networks are being built with different priorities. Some emphasize security, others speed, privacy, or programmability. Each contributes something distinct to the emerging architecture.
The real challenge is not deciding which blockchain wins. It is building infrastructure that allows these systems to communicate and cooperate.
Interoperability is essential because no single design can solve every problem. A network with a fixed monetary supply might function as a powerful store of value but could also concentrate wealth over time. Complementary systems with adaptable governance allow protocols to evolve without fragmenting into competing versions.
Smart contracts must be secure and verifiable because financial infrastructure cannot rely on guesswork. Bridges between ecosystems, shared standards, and interoperable execution environments are all part of the connective tissue required for a decentralized internet.
These ideas are already taking shape in networks like Tezos. Designed with self-amending governance, the protocol can evolve through on-chain upgrades without disruptive splits. It also adopted Proof of Stake early, prioritizing sustainability and long-term participation.
Smart contracts on Tezos are designed with formal verification in mind, reflecting the understanding that financial infrastructure demands a higher standard of reliability. The network’s evolving roadmap focuses heavily on interoperability and expanding connections between blockchain ecosystems.
The goal is not isolation between networks. The goal is cooperation.
Building With Perspective
The early web carried a sense of possibility that is difficult to recreate today. Messages arrived unexpectedly. Communities formed organically. Connecting with people across the world still felt extraordinary.
Over time, we learned what happens when open systems drift toward centralization. Convenience can slowly erode autonomy, and digitizing money without redesigning it often reproduces the same limitations.
Many communities building decentralized networks today are trying to move forward with those lessons in mind. The focus is less on hype and more on infrastructure that can endure. Systems that support persistent ownership, adaptive governance, and collaboration between networks rather than competition for dominance.
Whether the term Web3 survives its current debates may not matter much. What matters is that the transition is already underway.
A growing number of builders are logging on again with a new set of tools. Efforts are in full force with AI now accelerating development potential. Decentralized protocols and open infrastructure are forming the next layer of the internet.
What we build during this period may determine whether the next century online can rediscover a bit of the spirit that defined the early World Wide Web.
So, build for the future of the internet and everything we now know that entails. Blockchains are not stocks. They are not companies. They are networks of people attempting to rebuild the third evolution of the internet.
The Internet Is Evolving was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Month At a Glance — February 2026
A quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones within the Tezos ecosystem for February 2026.
Welcome to our latest issue, Month At A Glance (February 2026), where we give a quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones in the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.
February was a forward-looking month for the ecosystem. Early previews for the upcoming U upgrade opened the door for community feedback, while new financial products, infrastructure tooling, and cultural initiatives showed steady expansion beyond the core protocol. It was a mix of preparation for what’s next and tangible progress happening in parallel.
Let’s break it all down.
Ecosystem Insights
Early Previews for the “U” Upgrade Go Public
February gave us an early look at what’s being planned for the upcoming U protocol upgrade, and instead of dropping everything at once, core developers started sharing individual feature previews on Tezos Agora to gather feedback ahead of time. This is the kind of process that often goes unnoticed, but it’s where a lot of the important shaping happens. Before anything hits the on-chain proposal stage, ideas are opened up to scrutiny, discussion, and refinement.
The first feature preview introduces support for post-quantum user keys. In simple terms, this is about future-proofing Tezos cryptography against the long-term threat of quantum computing. It doesn’t replace existing signature schemes overnight and it doesn’t require users to take action today. Instead, it adds support for a NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology)-standardized quantum-resistant scheme so wallets, custodians, and tooling providers can begin integrating and testing early. It’s a proactive move, not reacting to a crisis, but preparing for one that may eventually come.
The second feature preview focuses on a major increase to the Data-Availability Layer (DAL) bandwidth, raising it from roughly 0.66 MB/s to 10 MB/s. That’s a significant jump and directly impacts scalability for rollups and high-throughput applications.
These are just the first two features shared publicly, with more expected to follow. If you care about where the protocol is heading, now is the time to keep an eye on Tezos Agora and contribute to the discussion while these ideas are still taking shape.
TezDev 2026 Tickets Go Live
February also brought some forward-looking energy to the calendar: TezDev 2026 was officially announced, and ticket registration is now open. If you’re planning to attend, now’s the time to secure your spot (link to registration page).
TezDev has been the main annual gathering point for the Tezos ecosystem. It’s where protocol engineers, tooling teams, DeFi projects, artists, bakers, and curious newcomers and enthusiasts all end up in the same rooms, not just listening to talks, but actually exchanging ideas and building relationships. Some of the most interesting collaborations in this ecosystem have started from conversations at previous editions.
With just about a month to go, this is the moment to reserve your spot. TezDev has genuinely leveled up year after year, with stronger speaker lineups, deeper technical sessions, more side events, and better hallway conversations. If that trend continues (and it usually does), this edition could easily be the best one yet.
If you’re building on Tezos, or even seriously exploring it, don’t leave it to the last minute. Grab your ticket, lock in your travel plans, and make sure you’re in the room when the ecosystem gathers to compare notes and shape what comes next.
News From The Tezos Ecosystem: Quick Bits
Beyond those insights, the ecosystem saw plenty of other noteworthy developments worth a quick look:
Critical Mass Podcast LaunchUranium.io launched its new podcast, Critical Mass, in February, with two episodes already live. The show explores uranium, energy markets, and the broader nuclear narrative, and is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Bitnomial Lists First U.S.-Regulated Tezos FuturesBitnomial launched the first-ever U.S.-regulated futures contract for Tezos (XTZ), marking a notable step for institutional access. The move introduces regulated derivatives exposure to Tezos in the U.S. market, expanding the range of financial products available around the asset and signaling continued maturation of its trading infrastructure.
Revoke Adds Support for EtherlinkRevoke has added support for Etherlink, giving users an easy way to review and revoke token approvals on the network. It’s a small but important infrastructure addition that improves security hygiene, especially as activity across Etherlink continues to grow.
Chief Baker’s Installation Night OffChief Baker, aka Chris Pinnock, together with co-host Germán Delbianco, ran an Installation Night session walking through how to set up a Tezos node and baker using Octez. If you’ve ever wanted to see the process step by step, or are considering running infrastructure yourself, it’s a solid recording to learn from.
MoMI × Tezos Foundation Programming Opens in NYCNew programming from Tezos Foundation in collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) is now open in New York City. The series continues bringing blockchain-powered digital art and cultural conversations into an established institutional setting, reinforcing Tezos’ growing footprint in the creative world and offering the public direct access to artist-led talks, screenings, and exhibitions.
Events
Tuesday🎙Tezday w Kevin Mehrabi — February 3rd
Artz Fridays w Jeni (OneLoveArtDao)— February 6th
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — February 10th
Artz Fridays w Jose Antonio Ojeda — February 13th
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — February 17th
Artz Fridays w Mi Retratito — February 20th
Tuesday🎙Tezday w Ryan Tanaka — February 24th
Artz Fridays February’s Community Call— February 27th
Stay in the Conversation, Stay in the Know
Tezos Commons hosts a variety of community-oriented events and content. From podcasts, X-spaces, and long-form content, there’s something for everyone.
TezTalks Live
TezTalks Radio
X Spaces
X Shorts
Baking Sheet Newsletter
In-Depth Articles
You can also contact us on X or via email at social@tezoscommons.org.
Month At A Glance — February 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Welcome to our latest issue, Month At A Glance (February 2026), where we give a quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones in the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.
February was a forward-looking month for the ecosystem. Early previews for the upcoming U upgrade opened the door for community feedback, while new financial products, infrastructure tooling, and cultural initiatives showed steady expansion beyond the core protocol. It was a mix of preparation for what’s next and tangible progress happening in parallel.
Let’s break it all down.
Ecosystem Insights
Early Previews for the “U” Upgrade Go Public
February gave us an early look at what’s being planned for the upcoming U protocol upgrade, and instead of dropping everything at once, core developers started sharing individual feature previews on Tezos Agora to gather feedback ahead of time. This is the kind of process that often goes unnoticed, but it’s where a lot of the important shaping happens. Before anything hits the on-chain proposal stage, ideas are opened up to scrutiny, discussion, and refinement.
The first feature preview introduces support for post-quantum user keys. In simple terms, this is about future-proofing Tezos cryptography against the long-term threat of quantum computing. It doesn’t replace existing signature schemes overnight and it doesn’t require users to take action today. Instead, it adds support for a NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology)-standardized quantum-resistant scheme so wallets, custodians, and tooling providers can begin integrating and testing early. It’s a proactive move, not reacting to a crisis, but preparing for one that may eventually come.
The second feature preview focuses on a major increase to the Data-Availability Layer (DAL) bandwidth, raising it from roughly 0.66 MB/s to 10 MB/s. That’s a significant jump and directly impacts scalability for rollups and high-throughput applications.
These are just the first two features shared publicly, with more expected to follow. If you care about where the protocol is heading, now is the time to keep an eye on Tezos Agora and contribute to the discussion while these ideas are still taking shape.
TezDev 2026 Tickets Go Live
February also brought some forward-looking energy to the calendar: TezDev 2026 was officially announced, and ticket registration is now open. If you’re planning to attend, now’s the time to secure your spot (link to registration page).
TezDev has been the main annual gathering point for the Tezos ecosystem. It’s where protocol engineers, tooling teams, DeFi projects, artists, bakers, and curious newcomers and enthusiasts all end up in the same rooms, not just listening to talks, but actually exchanging ideas and building relationships. Some of the most interesting collaborations in this ecosystem have started from conversations at previous editions.
With just about a month to go, this is the moment to reserve your spot. TezDev has genuinely leveled up year after year, with stronger speaker lineups, deeper technical sessions, more side events, and better hallway conversations. If that trend continues (and it usually does), this edition could easily be the best one yet.
If you’re building on Tezos, or even seriously exploring it, don’t leave it to the last minute. Grab your ticket, lock in your travel plans, and make sure you’re in the room when the ecosystem gathers to compare notes and shape what comes next.
News From The Tezos Ecosystem: Quick Bits
Beyond those insights, the ecosystem saw plenty of other noteworthy developments worth a quick look:
Critical Mass Podcast LaunchUranium.io launched its new podcast, Critical Mass, in February, with two episodes already live. The show explores uranium, energy markets, and the broader nuclear narrative, and is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Bitnomial Lists First U.S.-Regulated Tezos FuturesBitnomial launched the first-ever U.S.-regulated futures contract for Tezos (XTZ), marking a notable step for institutional access. The move introduces regulated derivatives exposure to Tezos in the U.S. market, expanding the range of financial products available around the asset and signaling continued maturation of its trading infrastructure.
Revoke Adds Support for EtherlinkRevoke has added support for Etherlink, giving users an easy way to review and revoke token approvals on the network. It’s a small but important infrastructure addition that improves security hygiene, especially as activity across Etherlink continues to grow.
Chief Baker’s Installation Night OffChief Baker, aka Chris Pinnock, together with co-host Germán Delbianco, ran an Installation Night session walking through how to set up a Tezos node and baker using Octez. If you’ve ever wanted to see the process step by step, or are considering running infrastructure yourself, it’s a solid recording to learn from.
MoMI × Tezos Foundation Programming Opens in NYCNew programming from Tezos Foundation in collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) is now open in New York City. The series continues bringing blockchain-powered digital art and cultural conversations into an established institutional setting, reinforcing Tezos’ growing footprint in the creative world and offering the public direct access to artist-led talks, screenings, and exhibitions.
Events
Tuesday🎙Tezday w Kevin Mehrabi — February 3rd
Artz Fridays w Jeni (OneLoveArtDao)— February 6th
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — February 10th
Artz Fridays w Jose Antonio Ojeda — February 13th
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — February 17th
Artz Fridays w Mi Retratito — February 20th
Tuesday🎙Tezday w Ryan Tanaka — February 24th
Artz Fridays February’s Community Call— February 27th
Stay in the Conversation, Stay in the Know
Tezos Commons hosts a variety of community-oriented events and content. From podcasts, X-spaces, and long-form content, there’s something for everyone.
TezTalks Live
TezTalks Radio
X Spaces
X Shorts
Baking Sheet Newsletter
In-Depth Articles
You can also contact us on X or via email at social@tezoscommons.org.
Month At A Glance — February 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The Baking Sheet - Issue #297
Welcome Tezos Community, another week, and another issue of the Baking Sheet delivered straight to you.
First, there’s a clearer look at where the ecosystem stands today. The State of Tezos report for Q4 2025 has landed, offering a snapshot of the network as it moves into a new year. It highlights the continued growth of Etherlink activity along with broader patterns shaping how Tezos is being used.
At the same time, new places to follow the ecosystem are starting to take shape. A fresh Tezos hub on Blockster has launched, giving the community another window into the projects, conversations, and stories forming around the protocol.
And while those updates come into view, core development continues to move forward. This week, Nomadic Labs shared an early proposal to simplify Tezos’ on-chain governance, inviting bakers and the wider community to weigh in before the next phase of upgrades begins to take form.
This week’s edition moves across those threads. A look at the latest data, new spaces where the ecosystem is showing up, and the conversations for what comes next.
Let’s talk about it all below.
State of Tezos Q4 2025
First up this week, a new quarterly report from Messari was released offering a snapshot of where the Tezos ecosystem stood at the end of 2025, and one theme stands out clearly: activity continues to shift toward Etherlink.
During Q4, Etherlink processed 18.6 million transactions, a 50% increase quarter over quarter, while daily active addresses on the network nearly doubled to around 9,860. The growth reflects a broader trend across the ecosystem as developers and users increasingly move execution-heavy activity to the L2.
Several infrastructure milestones helped drive that momentum. Two kernel upgrades, Ebisu in October and Farfadet in December, significantly expanded Etherlink’s capacity. Together, they pushed throughput from 8 million gas per second to 27 million, while also introducing instant transaction confirmations, allowing users and applications to receive transaction receipts before block production.
Q4 by the Numbers
Several indicators highlighted growing activity across the ecosystem during the quarter:
• Etherlink transactions: ↑ 50% QoQ → 18.6M• Etherlink daily active addresses: ↑ 96.6% QoQ → ~9.9K• Active validators: ↑ 3% QoQ → 264• Monthly active developers: ↑ 16.2% QoQ → 229 contributors across 4,300+ repositories
These numbers reinforce a broader trend the report points to: as Etherlink’s infrastructure expands, more execution and user activity are naturally gravitating toward the L2.
Infrastructure Leads the Story
While market conditions were softer during the quarter, infrastructure progress stood out.
Etherlink’s upgrades dramatically expanded throughput while keeping fees low, allowing the network to absorb rising transaction demand without congestion. On the Layer 1 side, the Tallinn protocol upgrade moved through governance and was later activated in January 2026, reducing block times from eight seconds to six and introducing improvements like the Address Indexing Registry.
Developer activity also continued to grow, with 229 monthly active contributors working across more than 4,300 repositories, a 16% increase QoQ.
Culture and Community
Outside of infrastructure, the Tezos art ecosystem had one of its strongest quarters of the year.
The Art on Tezos: Berlin festival brought together more than 700 visitors and 200 artists, while the Francisco Carolinum museum acquired multiple TeleNFT works exhibited at the event. Meanwhile, the partnership between the Museum of the Moving Image and the Tezos Foundation continued to expand its programming around blockchain as a creative medium.
Heading into 2026, the key question is whether the ecosystem’s growing infrastructure can translate into sustained activity beyond incentive programs.
With Etherlink’s throughput expanded, Tallinn improving Layer-1 efficiency, and new applications continuing to launch, the foundation for the next phase of growth is clearly being put in place.
If the past quarter showed anything, it’s that Tezos’ center of gravity is evolving and Etherlink is increasingly where much of the action is happening.
Read the full report.
Tezos Hub Goes Live on Blockster
Alongside the latest research and ecosystem reports, a new channel has opened for people who want to follow Tezos developments in one place.
A dedicated Tezos hub is now live on Blockster, bringing together stories, updates, and ecosystem highlights around the self-upgrading protocol.
The hub acts as a central feed for Tezos-related coverage on Blockster, giving readers an easy way to keep track of what’s happening across the network. Expect everything from ecosystem news and product launches to deeper looks at the teams building on Tezos.
Readers can also subscribe to receive the latest posts as they’re published, along with occasional behind-the-scenes insights and previews of upcoming stories.
For anyone looking to stay plugged into the pace of development across Tezos, it’s a simple new place to keep an eye on the conversation.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Simplifying On-Chain Governance on Tezos
Beyond reports and new hubs, there’s also an important conversation unfolding around how the protocol itself evolves. This week, developers from Nomadic Labs are cooking and shared an early proposal outlining ways to simplify Tezos’ governance process as part of the upcoming Protocol “U” upgrade.
The goal is straightforward: make governance faster, easier for bakers to manage, and less operationally heavy, while preserving the decentralization and legitimacy that have defined Tezos upgrades from the beginning.
Governance is such a foundational part of the protocol, the proposal is being shared early so the community can review it and offer input before anything moves forward.
What the Proposal Aims to Fix
Over time, a few recurring challenges have surfaced:
• Bakers currently vote up to three times per governance cycle, which can create voting fatigue• The current cycle lasts about 70 days, slowing iteration on upgrades• Communication and coordination around votes can become heavy for both bakers and developers
The proposed adjustments aim to streamline that process without weakening safeguards.
What Could Change
If implemented in Protocol U, the governance cycle could shift to a simpler structure:
• Total cycle duration: reduced from 70 days → 28 days• Voting periods: reduced from 14 days → 7 days• Voting rounds: reduced from three votes → two votes• Persistent votes: votes cast in the first round automatically carry into the second unless changed• Quorum opt-out: bakers can opt out of quorum participation if they prefer not to vote
The simplified structure would look like this:
Selection (7 days)Bakers upvote proposals. A candidate moves forward if it reaches 20% support.
Promotion (7 days)A final ratification vote requiring 80% supermajority with a quorum.
Adoption (14 days)A preparation window before the protocol activates automatically.
Faster Iteration, Same Safeguards
The changes aim to reduce friction while maintaining legitimacy.
Shorter voting windows concentrate attention around governance discussions, while persistent votes reduce operational overhead for bakers who already support a proposal.
Meanwhile, the 80% supermajority requirement and quorum rules remain unchanged, ensuring that protocol upgrades still require broad consensus.
Feedback Requested
Nomadic Labs shared the proposal early specifically to gather input from the community, especially bakers, who are the core participants in the governance process.
Key areas where feedback is requested include:
• The proposed 7-day voting periods• The 20% threshold during the Selection stage• How quorum should be recalibrated after introducing the new system• Operational impacts on baker workflows
If you are a baker or closely involved in governance, this is a good moment to review the proposal and share your thoughts.
Feedback is encouraged directly on Tezos Agora, where the discussion is already underway.
Tezos Events
Tez/Dev 2026: Registration is Now Open!
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
🔴 Now Streaming: Why Major Art Institutions Are Choosing Tezos
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Vinciane Jones, Art Vertical Partnership Manager at Trilitech, and Aleksandra Art, Head of Arts at Trilitech, to explore how Tezos art is stepping further into the institutional world.
With newly announced partnerships involving HEK Basel and the renewed collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image, the conversation centers on what it means for blockchain-based art to be exhibited, studied, and supported by established cultural institutions.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
First, there’s a clearer look at where the ecosystem stands today. The State of Tezos report for Q4 2025 has landed, offering a snapshot of the network as it moves into a new year. It highlights the continued growth of Etherlink activity along with broader patterns shaping how Tezos is being used.
At the same time, new places to follow the ecosystem are starting to take shape. A fresh Tezos hub on Blockster has launched, giving the community another window into the projects, conversations, and stories forming around the protocol.
And while those updates come into view, core development continues to move forward. This week, Nomadic Labs shared an early proposal to simplify Tezos’ on-chain governance, inviting bakers and the wider community to weigh in before the next phase of upgrades begins to take form.
This week’s edition moves across those threads. A look at the latest data, new spaces where the ecosystem is showing up, and the conversations for what comes next.
Let’s talk about it all below.
State of Tezos Q4 2025
First up this week, a new quarterly report from Messari was released offering a snapshot of where the Tezos ecosystem stood at the end of 2025, and one theme stands out clearly: activity continues to shift toward Etherlink.
During Q4, Etherlink processed 18.6 million transactions, a 50% increase quarter over quarter, while daily active addresses on the network nearly doubled to around 9,860. The growth reflects a broader trend across the ecosystem as developers and users increasingly move execution-heavy activity to the L2.
Several infrastructure milestones helped drive that momentum. Two kernel upgrades, Ebisu in October and Farfadet in December, significantly expanded Etherlink’s capacity. Together, they pushed throughput from 8 million gas per second to 27 million, while also introducing instant transaction confirmations, allowing users and applications to receive transaction receipts before block production.
Q4 by the Numbers
Several indicators highlighted growing activity across the ecosystem during the quarter:
• Etherlink transactions: ↑ 50% QoQ → 18.6M• Etherlink daily active addresses: ↑ 96.6% QoQ → ~9.9K• Active validators: ↑ 3% QoQ → 264• Monthly active developers: ↑ 16.2% QoQ → 229 contributors across 4,300+ repositories
These numbers reinforce a broader trend the report points to: as Etherlink’s infrastructure expands, more execution and user activity are naturally gravitating toward the L2.
Infrastructure Leads the Story
While market conditions were softer during the quarter, infrastructure progress stood out.
Etherlink’s upgrades dramatically expanded throughput while keeping fees low, allowing the network to absorb rising transaction demand without congestion. On the Layer 1 side, the Tallinn protocol upgrade moved through governance and was later activated in January 2026, reducing block times from eight seconds to six and introducing improvements like the Address Indexing Registry.
Developer activity also continued to grow, with 229 monthly active contributors working across more than 4,300 repositories, a 16% increase QoQ.
Culture and Community
Outside of infrastructure, the Tezos art ecosystem had one of its strongest quarters of the year.
The Art on Tezos: Berlin festival brought together more than 700 visitors and 200 artists, while the Francisco Carolinum museum acquired multiple TeleNFT works exhibited at the event. Meanwhile, the partnership between the Museum of the Moving Image and the Tezos Foundation continued to expand its programming around blockchain as a creative medium.
Heading into 2026, the key question is whether the ecosystem’s growing infrastructure can translate into sustained activity beyond incentive programs.
With Etherlink’s throughput expanded, Tallinn improving Layer-1 efficiency, and new applications continuing to launch, the foundation for the next phase of growth is clearly being put in place.
If the past quarter showed anything, it’s that Tezos’ center of gravity is evolving and Etherlink is increasingly where much of the action is happening.
Read the full report.
Tezos Hub Goes Live on Blockster
Alongside the latest research and ecosystem reports, a new channel has opened for people who want to follow Tezos developments in one place.
A dedicated Tezos hub is now live on Blockster, bringing together stories, updates, and ecosystem highlights around the self-upgrading protocol.
The hub acts as a central feed for Tezos-related coverage on Blockster, giving readers an easy way to keep track of what’s happening across the network. Expect everything from ecosystem news and product launches to deeper looks at the teams building on Tezos.
Readers can also subscribe to receive the latest posts as they’re published, along with occasional behind-the-scenes insights and previews of upcoming stories.
For anyone looking to stay plugged into the pace of development across Tezos, it’s a simple new place to keep an eye on the conversation.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Simplifying On-Chain Governance on Tezos
Beyond reports and new hubs, there’s also an important conversation unfolding around how the protocol itself evolves. This week, developers from Nomadic Labs are cooking and shared an early proposal outlining ways to simplify Tezos’ governance process as part of the upcoming Protocol “U” upgrade.
The goal is straightforward: make governance faster, easier for bakers to manage, and less operationally heavy, while preserving the decentralization and legitimacy that have defined Tezos upgrades from the beginning.
Governance is such a foundational part of the protocol, the proposal is being shared early so the community can review it and offer input before anything moves forward.
What the Proposal Aims to Fix
Over time, a few recurring challenges have surfaced:
• Bakers currently vote up to three times per governance cycle, which can create voting fatigue• The current cycle lasts about 70 days, slowing iteration on upgrades• Communication and coordination around votes can become heavy for both bakers and developers
The proposed adjustments aim to streamline that process without weakening safeguards.
What Could Change
If implemented in Protocol U, the governance cycle could shift to a simpler structure:
• Total cycle duration: reduced from 70 days → 28 days• Voting periods: reduced from 14 days → 7 days• Voting rounds: reduced from three votes → two votes• Persistent votes: votes cast in the first round automatically carry into the second unless changed• Quorum opt-out: bakers can opt out of quorum participation if they prefer not to vote
The simplified structure would look like this:
Selection (7 days)Bakers upvote proposals. A candidate moves forward if it reaches 20% support.
Promotion (7 days)A final ratification vote requiring 80% supermajority with a quorum.
Adoption (14 days)A preparation window before the protocol activates automatically.
Faster Iteration, Same Safeguards
The changes aim to reduce friction while maintaining legitimacy.
Shorter voting windows concentrate attention around governance discussions, while persistent votes reduce operational overhead for bakers who already support a proposal.
Meanwhile, the 80% supermajority requirement and quorum rules remain unchanged, ensuring that protocol upgrades still require broad consensus.
Feedback Requested
Nomadic Labs shared the proposal early specifically to gather input from the community, especially bakers, who are the core participants in the governance process.
Key areas where feedback is requested include:
• The proposed 7-day voting periods• The 20% threshold during the Selection stage• How quorum should be recalibrated after introducing the new system• Operational impacts on baker workflows
If you are a baker or closely involved in governance, this is a good moment to review the proposal and share your thoughts.
Feedback is encouraged directly on Tezos Agora, where the discussion is already underway.
Tezos Events
Tez/Dev 2026: Registration is Now Open!
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
🔴 Now Streaming: Why Major Art Institutions Are Choosing Tezos
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Vinciane Jones, Art Vertical Partnership Manager at Trilitech, and Aleksandra Art, Head of Arts at Trilitech, to explore how Tezos art is stepping further into the institutional world.
With newly announced partnerships involving HEK Basel and the renewed collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image, the conversation centers on what it means for blockchain-based art to be exhibited, studied, and supported by established cultural institutions.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
The Value of Social Escrow
The Real Wealth of Any Network Is The People
The most valuable asset within any network doesn’t appear on a chart. It cannot be tracked or reduced to engagement metrics. No one manufactures it through marketing campaigns or unlocks it through incentive structures. It accumulates quietly in the spaces between transactions. It’s the goodwill showcased by the humans that use the network.
Some might call this karma. That word carries real cultural weight, and it has been stretched well beyond its origins, but the underlying principle is sound. What you put into a system consistently, without a guarantee of return, shapes the reality you eventually live within. For this article, I have coined a new term that captures both the mechanism and the stakes within blockchain networks.
I call it social escrow.
What Is Social Escrow
Social escrow functions like a collective savings account for integrity. It accumulates when participants choose open collaboration over isolation, inclusion over gatekeeping, and pioneering over profiteering. Unlike financial capital, it does not appear on a balance sheet. It compounds in the background, becoming the invisible infrastructure that supports coordination, resilience, and long-term belief.
The important distinction, and the reason karma is actually a useful comparison here, is that social escrow cannot be spent in any traditional sense. You do not withdraw it and exchange it for something else. What it does is create a cushion. A community with deep reserves of social escrow can absorb pressure that would otherwise fracture it. It does not eliminate difficulty. It determines whether the community remains coherent on the other side of each hurdle.
That is a different kind of wealth. It is the kind most ecosystems fail to measure until it is already gone.
Hic et Nunc Was the First Deposit
To understand where Tezos stands today, it helps to look at the origins of its community's social escrow reserve.
Most of it came from Hic et Nunc, which was not a polished product. It was a rough, fast, genuinely open platform that attracted artists who were tired of being priced out of participation elsewhere. The energy that formed around it was not manufactured. It emerged from people who showed up before there was any certainty of return, who minted work on a wonky user interface, swapped each other's art, built tools, wrote documentation, and formed relationships that had nothing to do with evaluations.
When HEN went dark, something remarkable happened. The community did not dissolve. It didn’t “fork” in the traditional sense. It became TEIA.art emerging from the ashes, not because of superior infrastructure or better funding, but because the people involved had already accumulated enough social escrow to trust each other through uncertainty. The platform was almost secondary to keeping the movement itself alive.
Thousands of artists and builders across a period of genuine creative momentum did not disappear when the market contracted. They deposited social escrow into the reserve, and it’s been cushioning the community ever since.
A Strong Foundation
Most blockchains are vulnerable to fragmentation: the hard fork. When a community fractures over a governance dispute and splits into competing chains, trust divides with it. Social escrow does not transfer cleanly. It erodes in the conflict.
Tezos was designed to prevent exactly that.
The self-amending ledger and on-chain governance are not just technical features. They are a social infrastructure. By allowing the protocol to upgrade itself through formal governance, Tezos preserves its community.
Disagreements become proposals. Proposals become votes. The community moves forward as a whole.
This architectural decision compounds over time in ways that are easy to underestimate. Every upgrade cycle that resolves without a fork is another deposit into the social escrow. We’ve had twenty successful protocol upgrades. Every governance vote that proceeds transparently, even when contested, reinforces the belief that the system is worth participating in. The technical and the cultural are not separate layers; they reinforce each other.
What Depletes the Reserve
Social escrow depletes through fragmentation, through disillusionment, and through the quiet (and loud) departures of influential builders. These withdrawals do not always announce themselves. Sometimes a community only notices the drain in retrospect, when the energy required to coordinate something that once felt easy suddenly feels heavier than it should.
The Tezos ecosystem has not been immune to this. Cycles of enthusiasm and contraction have come and gone. Prominent contributors have moved on. Attention has scattered. Frequent volatility drains morale.
Yet the forums have not gone silent. Artists are still minting. Writers are still documenting. Governance debates are still happening. Deepened through years of grassroots organizing and tested by conditions that cleared out less committed ecosystems, serious talent keeps building on Tezos.
That persistence is not accidental. It is evidence that the reserve is real and currently being drawn upon.
Sustaining the Reserves
The current moment in Tezos asks something specific of its participants. Not blind optimism. Not performative loyalty. Something closer to the original disposition that created the reserve in the first place.
Builders who continue developing without guaranteed audiences are making deposits. Artists who show up for each other’s work during slow markets are making deposits. Public voices continuing to host spaces even when no one is paying close attention are making deposits. Each of these acts, repeated over time without expectation of immediate return, deepens the reserve that allows the ecosystem to absorb the next wave of pressure.
Keep showing up. Keep contributing in ways that serve the collective rather than just the individual. Keep treating the network as something worth protecting, not just something worth extracting from when conditions are favorable. If we collectively showcase our potential, we can grow our social escrow reserve tenfold.
Beyond the Balance Sheet
Conversations about sustainability tend to center on treasury allocations, revenue models, and measurable growth. These are legitimate concerns. Infrastructure requires funding, grants keep being approved, and long-term viability demands responsible stewardship of capital.
Financial capital funds infrastructure. Social escrow sustains belief. Without belief, infrastructure becomes transactional and brittle. With belief, experimentation remains viable even when outcomes are uncertain.
Tezos was designed with generational thinking in mind. Formal verification, on-chain governance, seamless upgradeability. These decisions were not optimized for rapid monetization. They reflect a commitment to durability over speed. This is how participants should treat each other, and why they support work that does not immediately produce revenue. More aware of the time horizon they are building toward.
Social escrow cannot be rushed or manufactured. It accumulates through repeated acts of integrity in the quiet expanse of time. It is already present in this ecosystem in meaningful depth.
The reserve is holding. The question now is whether enough people understand what they are sitting on. As a commonwealth, we need to choose to keep adding to it. The true war chest of Tezos is the Tezos Community.
We‘ve already built generational wealth together, at least in social escrow.
The Value of Social Escrow was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The most valuable asset within any network doesn’t appear on a chart. It cannot be tracked or reduced to engagement metrics. No one manufactures it through marketing campaigns or unlocks it through incentive structures. It accumulates quietly in the spaces between transactions. It’s the goodwill showcased by the humans that use the network.
Some might call this karma. That word carries real cultural weight, and it has been stretched well beyond its origins, but the underlying principle is sound. What you put into a system consistently, without a guarantee of return, shapes the reality you eventually live within. For this article, I have coined a new term that captures both the mechanism and the stakes within blockchain networks.
I call it social escrow.
What Is Social Escrow
Social escrow functions like a collective savings account for integrity. It accumulates when participants choose open collaboration over isolation, inclusion over gatekeeping, and pioneering over profiteering. Unlike financial capital, it does not appear on a balance sheet. It compounds in the background, becoming the invisible infrastructure that supports coordination, resilience, and long-term belief.
The important distinction, and the reason karma is actually a useful comparison here, is that social escrow cannot be spent in any traditional sense. You do not withdraw it and exchange it for something else. What it does is create a cushion. A community with deep reserves of social escrow can absorb pressure that would otherwise fracture it. It does not eliminate difficulty. It determines whether the community remains coherent on the other side of each hurdle.
That is a different kind of wealth. It is the kind most ecosystems fail to measure until it is already gone.
Hic et Nunc Was the First Deposit
To understand where Tezos stands today, it helps to look at the origins of its community's social escrow reserve.
Most of it came from Hic et Nunc, which was not a polished product. It was a rough, fast, genuinely open platform that attracted artists who were tired of being priced out of participation elsewhere. The energy that formed around it was not manufactured. It emerged from people who showed up before there was any certainty of return, who minted work on a wonky user interface, swapped each other's art, built tools, wrote documentation, and formed relationships that had nothing to do with evaluations.
When HEN went dark, something remarkable happened. The community did not dissolve. It didn’t “fork” in the traditional sense. It became TEIA.art emerging from the ashes, not because of superior infrastructure or better funding, but because the people involved had already accumulated enough social escrow to trust each other through uncertainty. The platform was almost secondary to keeping the movement itself alive.
Thousands of artists and builders across a period of genuine creative momentum did not disappear when the market contracted. They deposited social escrow into the reserve, and it’s been cushioning the community ever since.
A Strong Foundation
Most blockchains are vulnerable to fragmentation: the hard fork. When a community fractures over a governance dispute and splits into competing chains, trust divides with it. Social escrow does not transfer cleanly. It erodes in the conflict.
Tezos was designed to prevent exactly that.
The self-amending ledger and on-chain governance are not just technical features. They are a social infrastructure. By allowing the protocol to upgrade itself through formal governance, Tezos preserves its community.
Disagreements become proposals. Proposals become votes. The community moves forward as a whole.
This architectural decision compounds over time in ways that are easy to underestimate. Every upgrade cycle that resolves without a fork is another deposit into the social escrow. We’ve had twenty successful protocol upgrades. Every governance vote that proceeds transparently, even when contested, reinforces the belief that the system is worth participating in. The technical and the cultural are not separate layers; they reinforce each other.
What Depletes the Reserve
Social escrow depletes through fragmentation, through disillusionment, and through the quiet (and loud) departures of influential builders. These withdrawals do not always announce themselves. Sometimes a community only notices the drain in retrospect, when the energy required to coordinate something that once felt easy suddenly feels heavier than it should.
The Tezos ecosystem has not been immune to this. Cycles of enthusiasm and contraction have come and gone. Prominent contributors have moved on. Attention has scattered. Frequent volatility drains morale.
Yet the forums have not gone silent. Artists are still minting. Writers are still documenting. Governance debates are still happening. Deepened through years of grassroots organizing and tested by conditions that cleared out less committed ecosystems, serious talent keeps building on Tezos.
That persistence is not accidental. It is evidence that the reserve is real and currently being drawn upon.
Sustaining the Reserves
The current moment in Tezos asks something specific of its participants. Not blind optimism. Not performative loyalty. Something closer to the original disposition that created the reserve in the first place.
Builders who continue developing without guaranteed audiences are making deposits. Artists who show up for each other’s work during slow markets are making deposits. Public voices continuing to host spaces even when no one is paying close attention are making deposits. Each of these acts, repeated over time without expectation of immediate return, deepens the reserve that allows the ecosystem to absorb the next wave of pressure.
Keep showing up. Keep contributing in ways that serve the collective rather than just the individual. Keep treating the network as something worth protecting, not just something worth extracting from when conditions are favorable. If we collectively showcase our potential, we can grow our social escrow reserve tenfold.
Beyond the Balance Sheet
Conversations about sustainability tend to center on treasury allocations, revenue models, and measurable growth. These are legitimate concerns. Infrastructure requires funding, grants keep being approved, and long-term viability demands responsible stewardship of capital.
Financial capital funds infrastructure. Social escrow sustains belief. Without belief, infrastructure becomes transactional and brittle. With belief, experimentation remains viable even when outcomes are uncertain.
Tezos was designed with generational thinking in mind. Formal verification, on-chain governance, seamless upgradeability. These decisions were not optimized for rapid monetization. They reflect a commitment to durability over speed. This is how participants should treat each other, and why they support work that does not immediately produce revenue. More aware of the time horizon they are building toward.
Social escrow cannot be rushed or manufactured. It accumulates through repeated acts of integrity in the quiet expanse of time. It is already present in this ecosystem in meaningful depth.
The reserve is holding. The question now is whether enough people understand what they are sitting on. As a commonwealth, we need to choose to keep adding to it. The true war chest of Tezos is the Tezos Community.
We‘ve already built generational wealth together, at least in social escrow.
The Value of Social Escrow was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The Baking Sheet - Issue #296
We’re hitting one of those weeks where Tezos feels present in two very different ways at once.
On one side, there’s a clear point on the calendar to rally around. Tez/Dev is officially set for March 30 in Cannes, and you can already feel people shifting into planning mode, thinking about what they want to ship, who they want to meet, and what conversations they want to be part of when the ecosystem gathers in person.
And on the other side, Tezos is showing up exactly where it’s always had its own kind of strength: in culture. MoMI’s new MoMI × Tezos Foundation 2025–2026 programming is now live in New York, opening with a commission you can see in a real museum space, plus a free process mint that brings the work back into the hands of the community.
So this issue is a simple one, in the best way. One update to help you plan what’s ahead, and one update to remind you what’s already happening on the ground.
Let’s get into it.
Tez/Dev 2026: Cannes is on the calendar
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
MoMI × Tezos Foundation programming is now open in NYC
If Tez/Dev is the moment the ecosystem gathers in one place and compares notes face to face, this next update is the reminder that the cultural side of Tezos keeps moving too, in public, in a real museum, with work you can actually go see.
The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) and the Tezos Foundation have officially opened their 2025–2026 programming in New York, continuing a partnership that treats Tezos as a creative material rather than a backdrop.
The shape of the program this year is broader than a single exhibition cycle. It includes:
Five artist-pair commissions that will appear on MoMI’s Schlosser Media Wall
A new FA2 Fellowship is designed to bring artists and developers into the same room
Microgrants supporting artists working with Tezos as a medium
Live performances and time-based works
The first round of artist pairings sets the tone right away, with names that span internet-native practice, institutional critique, and time-based work: James Bloom × Gottfried Jäger, Sarah Friend × Yehwan Song, Linda Dounia × Rhea Myers, and Jonas Lund × Yoshi Sodeoka.
Now on view: “Lick Pic” (Sarah Friend × Yehwan Song)
The first commission to go live is “Lick Pic”, a collaborative work by Sarah Friend and Yehwan Song, on view at MoMI from February 19 to May 10, 2026.
At a glance, it’s immediately memorable: four mechanical tongue sculptures “lick” mounted phones and tablets, and the screens cycle through images from MoMI’s collection.
But the part that makes it feel especially “Tezos” is how it stays connected to a living context. The installation is tethered to activity on objkt, linking what’s happening in the market in real time with what’s happening on the wall in the museum. It turns scrolling and collecting into part of the artwork’s pacing, which is exactly the kind of feedback loop this partnership tends to explore.
And there’s a collector-friendly layer baked in, too. Each MoMI × Tezos commission is accompanied by a process image that anyone can collect at no cost, so visitors and community members can take a fragment of the work home in a way that feels accessible, not gated.
Free collect link (process image).
If you’re in NYC over the next couple of months, this is a great excuse to make the trip to Astoria and see what Tezos looks like when it’s framed as museum-scale moving image work instead of a timeline update.
🔴 Now Streaming: Why Major Art Institutions Are Choosing Tezos
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Vinciane Jones, Art Vertical Partnership Manager at Trilitech, and Aleksandra Art, Head of Arts at Trilitech, to explore how Tezos art is stepping further into the institutional world.
With newly announced partnerships involving HEK Basel and the renewed collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image, the conversation centers on what it means for blockchain-based art to be exhibited, studied, and supported by established cultural institutions.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
On one side, there’s a clear point on the calendar to rally around. Tez/Dev is officially set for March 30 in Cannes, and you can already feel people shifting into planning mode, thinking about what they want to ship, who they want to meet, and what conversations they want to be part of when the ecosystem gathers in person.
And on the other side, Tezos is showing up exactly where it’s always had its own kind of strength: in culture. MoMI’s new MoMI × Tezos Foundation 2025–2026 programming is now live in New York, opening with a commission you can see in a real museum space, plus a free process mint that brings the work back into the hands of the community.
So this issue is a simple one, in the best way. One update to help you plan what’s ahead, and one update to remind you what’s already happening on the ground.
Let’s get into it.
Tez/Dev 2026: Cannes is on the calendar
Tez/Dev is officially back, and this is the kind of date worth circling early.
Monday, March 30, 2026, the Tezos ecosystem heads back to Cannes for the next edition of Tez/Dev, once again hosted at the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette. Registration is live now, with the full agenda and experience details still to come.
This is one of those anchor moments in the year where everything feels more connected. You can follow updates online all month long, but Tez/Dev is where the conversations tend to tighten up. Builders get face time. Teams show what is actually working. People who have been moving in parallel finally end up in the same room. It is a day that usually leaves you with new context, new contacts, and a clearer sense of what is getting traction across the ecosystem.
What we know so far is the shape of the day, even if the schedule is still being built:
Dev updates and panel deep-dives
Hands-on time with apps and teams
A chance to compete for prizes
An immersive art party to close the night
A quick practical note for anyone planning ahead: registration on Luma is required for approval, and it says you will be asked to verify token ownership with your wallet as part of the process.
If you are already mapping out EthCC week in Cannes (March 30 to April 2), Tez/Dev sits right at the start of the week, which makes it a strong first touchpoint for meeting people and setting the tone for everything that follows.
Event basics
Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Venue: Hôtel Martinez, 73 Bd de la Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France
Registration: https://luma.com/tezdev-2026
If you are planning to attend, getting your request in early is the move as the program reveal will drop soon.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
MoMI × Tezos Foundation programming is now open in NYC
If Tez/Dev is the moment the ecosystem gathers in one place and compares notes face to face, this next update is the reminder that the cultural side of Tezos keeps moving too, in public, in a real museum, with work you can actually go see.
The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) and the Tezos Foundation have officially opened their 2025–2026 programming in New York, continuing a partnership that treats Tezos as a creative material rather than a backdrop.
The shape of the program this year is broader than a single exhibition cycle. It includes:
Five artist-pair commissions that will appear on MoMI’s Schlosser Media Wall
A new FA2 Fellowship is designed to bring artists and developers into the same room
Microgrants supporting artists working with Tezos as a medium
Live performances and time-based works
The first round of artist pairings sets the tone right away, with names that span internet-native practice, institutional critique, and time-based work: James Bloom × Gottfried Jäger, Sarah Friend × Yehwan Song, Linda Dounia × Rhea Myers, and Jonas Lund × Yoshi Sodeoka.
Now on view: “Lick Pic” (Sarah Friend × Yehwan Song)
The first commission to go live is “Lick Pic”, a collaborative work by Sarah Friend and Yehwan Song, on view at MoMI from February 19 to May 10, 2026.
At a glance, it’s immediately memorable: four mechanical tongue sculptures “lick” mounted phones and tablets, and the screens cycle through images from MoMI’s collection.
But the part that makes it feel especially “Tezos” is how it stays connected to a living context. The installation is tethered to activity on objkt, linking what’s happening in the market in real time with what’s happening on the wall in the museum. It turns scrolling and collecting into part of the artwork’s pacing, which is exactly the kind of feedback loop this partnership tends to explore.
And there’s a collector-friendly layer baked in, too. Each MoMI × Tezos commission is accompanied by a process image that anyone can collect at no cost, so visitors and community members can take a fragment of the work home in a way that feels accessible, not gated.
Free collect link (process image).
If you’re in NYC over the next couple of months, this is a great excuse to make the trip to Astoria and see what Tezos looks like when it’s framed as museum-scale moving image work instead of a timeline update.
🔴 Now Streaming: Why Major Art Institutions Are Choosing Tezos
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Vinciane Jones, Art Vertical Partnership Manager at Trilitech, and Aleksandra Art, Head of Arts at Trilitech, to explore how Tezos art is stepping further into the institutional world.
With newly announced partnerships involving HEK Basel and the renewed collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image, the conversation centers on what it means for blockchain-based art to be exhibited, studied, and supported by established cultural institutions.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
TEIA.ART Today
The Big Picture And How It’s Being Painted
After observing multiple market cycles, one pattern continues to arise. When speculation drains from the space, what remains are the systems built with intention and the communities that were never here, based on momentum alone. Within the Tezos ecosystem, TEIA.art stands as one of those remaining roots. The tide has receded more than ever, yet the foundation holds, still resonating with the energy that began with Hic et Nunc.
Born from the ashes of HEN in early 2022, TEIA inherited more than code. It inherited a community that had already demonstrated its priorities. There were no celebrity endorsements and no venture capital runway cushioning the fall. What persisted were artists, collectors, and builders choosing community over convenience. That collective decision, repeated quietly over time, has matured into something structurally significant.
Functional Governance
Skepticism around governance in Web3 is understandable. The language of decentralization is frequently used to sound smart when lacking substance.
On TEIA, governance is not symbolic. The word “DAO” actually holds its own weight. Officially registered and operational. Voting executes directly through smart contracts, and token balances are snapshotted at proposal creation to prevent manipulation. Quorum requirements adjust dynamically based on participation, and major protocol changes require supermajority approval. Treasury decisions pass through a Core Team multisig operating at a 55% quorum threshold. But let’s not get too into the word-weeds.
Most users will not analyze these mechanics line by line, just as most people outside the art world do not study art theory. Yet the impact is real. Participants are not observers of decisions. Instead, they are contributors to them. Direction, funding, and development priorities are influenced by those who show up and engage.
Infrastructure by Design
TEIA follows a disciplined philosophy: wallet as identity, smart contracts as logic, multisig as governance. The interface is simple. There are no email logins, no surveillance-based growth mechanisms, and no unnecessary centralization beyond what is required to index and render content.
This architectural clarity remains in the 2026 development roadmap. The trajectory is not toward superficial feature expansion but toward deepening the on-chain social layer when people need that most. Social media is a train wreck. We need a real web3 solution.
Rather than relying on external platforms to carry cultural weight or pave the way forward, the objective at TEIA is to turn the interface into an undeniably necessary tool for culture to communicate and expand.
Combined Forces & New Features
Development work originating from teia.cafe is being integrated directly into TEIA.art. This means users will gain copyright tooling, reimagined curation systems, registration infrastructure, on-chain messaging contracts, and more. All of the developments are converging into a single interface that anyone can access with a Tezos wallet.
The on-chain blogging system is promising. Posts and comments can be sent directly to contracts, with tag-based notifications and a reverse chronological public feed. Embedded artworks are native to the environment, and when a user includes another artist’s work within a post, the interface can automatically generate revenue splits that allocate primary and royalty percentages in real time. Attributing and compensating creators becomes trustless. They are encoded into each interaction.
A wallet-to-wallet messaging contract has already been completed and awaits integration. Communication occurs without centralized servers, account recovery processes, or custodial databases. Control remains with the key holder, aligning communication with ownership at the protocol level.
Additional layers include a structured calendar system, a simplified on-chain wiki editable by multisig with community-suggested updates, public task boards for accountability, and a minting contract v2 introducing expanded metadata capabilities.
A proposed 0.1 XTZ minting fee would help to keep the treasury funded. All proposals will remain transparent and adjustable through governance. Sustainability is being addressed actively at the contract layer rather than deferred to future speculation.
The Wager
What TEIA is building is straightforward, and the community keeps building while no one is watching. Visibility fluctuates, but a strong foundation and purpose must persist for culture to flourish.
The contracts are live. Governance operates. The community remains engaged. The next phase is increasing participation, deepening engagement, and positioning the platform for partnerships, grants, and long-term sustainability. A natural growth, from strengthening the connective tissue between artists, collectors, and builders who already recognize the value of shared infrastructure.
Why Tezos Still Matters
My own writing about the Tezos ecosystem has rarely focused on the standard metrics. What continues to differentiate this space is the culture it attracts and retains. The people who remain tend to value creative sovereignty, collaboration, and experimentation over spectacle.
TEIA reflects that ethos in practice. What began as a continuation of HEN has evolved into a deliberate attempt to construct a fully on-chain social layer for art, governed by its participants and sustained through collective effort. It represents a model where infrastructure and culture reinforce one another rather than compete for attention.
Core contributor Malicious Sheep articulated the direction ahead in a way that captures the spirit of this next chapter:
The next phase of Teia developments aims to engage more directly the community by expanding accessibility features and creating more opportunities for onboarding and engaging already present artists and collectors.
As an artist I most look forward to community events and curations, not that I can appropriately participate in these as an artist due to my role, but it is ever inspiring to see what my peers create in both themed and curated events.
Being part of the DAO and Teia Community gives artists and collectors direct input into shaping Teia and what it will become. Creating and voting in polls and volunteering skills and time to contribute to Teia are two direct ways community members can participate in the shaping of Teia. It is built and maintained by volunteers, who are all also artists and creatives. With our artist first approach, and creative problem solving skills, the community meets our own needs together.
That orientation may ultimately be TEIA’s most important feature. The infrastructure matters. The contracts matter. The governance mechanisms matter. Yet what sustains them is a group of people who choose to build together simply because the work itself matters.
TEIA.ART Keeps Building
TEIA does not need to be the loudest thing in the room. It never did. What it needs is people who understand that the most meaningful infrastructure is often built in the quiet stretches, between the hype cycles, by those who show up not because the timing is right but because the work is worth doing. If you have been watching from the trenches, now is a good time to step closer. The foundation is solid, the tools are coming online, and the community is still here, still building, still strong.
TEIA.ART Today was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
After observing multiple market cycles, one pattern continues to arise. When speculation drains from the space, what remains are the systems built with intention and the communities that were never here, based on momentum alone. Within the Tezos ecosystem, TEIA.art stands as one of those remaining roots. The tide has receded more than ever, yet the foundation holds, still resonating with the energy that began with Hic et Nunc.
Born from the ashes of HEN in early 2022, TEIA inherited more than code. It inherited a community that had already demonstrated its priorities. There were no celebrity endorsements and no venture capital runway cushioning the fall. What persisted were artists, collectors, and builders choosing community over convenience. That collective decision, repeated quietly over time, has matured into something structurally significant.
Functional Governance
Skepticism around governance in Web3 is understandable. The language of decentralization is frequently used to sound smart when lacking substance.
On TEIA, governance is not symbolic. The word “DAO” actually holds its own weight. Officially registered and operational. Voting executes directly through smart contracts, and token balances are snapshotted at proposal creation to prevent manipulation. Quorum requirements adjust dynamically based on participation, and major protocol changes require supermajority approval. Treasury decisions pass through a Core Team multisig operating at a 55% quorum threshold. But let’s not get too into the word-weeds.
Most users will not analyze these mechanics line by line, just as most people outside the art world do not study art theory. Yet the impact is real. Participants are not observers of decisions. Instead, they are contributors to them. Direction, funding, and development priorities are influenced by those who show up and engage.
Infrastructure by Design
TEIA follows a disciplined philosophy: wallet as identity, smart contracts as logic, multisig as governance. The interface is simple. There are no email logins, no surveillance-based growth mechanisms, and no unnecessary centralization beyond what is required to index and render content.
This architectural clarity remains in the 2026 development roadmap. The trajectory is not toward superficial feature expansion but toward deepening the on-chain social layer when people need that most. Social media is a train wreck. We need a real web3 solution.
Rather than relying on external platforms to carry cultural weight or pave the way forward, the objective at TEIA is to turn the interface into an undeniably necessary tool for culture to communicate and expand.
Combined Forces & New Features
Development work originating from teia.cafe is being integrated directly into TEIA.art. This means users will gain copyright tooling, reimagined curation systems, registration infrastructure, on-chain messaging contracts, and more. All of the developments are converging into a single interface that anyone can access with a Tezos wallet.
The on-chain blogging system is promising. Posts and comments can be sent directly to contracts, with tag-based notifications and a reverse chronological public feed. Embedded artworks are native to the environment, and when a user includes another artist’s work within a post, the interface can automatically generate revenue splits that allocate primary and royalty percentages in real time. Attributing and compensating creators becomes trustless. They are encoded into each interaction.
A wallet-to-wallet messaging contract has already been completed and awaits integration. Communication occurs without centralized servers, account recovery processes, or custodial databases. Control remains with the key holder, aligning communication with ownership at the protocol level.
Additional layers include a structured calendar system, a simplified on-chain wiki editable by multisig with community-suggested updates, public task boards for accountability, and a minting contract v2 introducing expanded metadata capabilities.
A proposed 0.1 XTZ minting fee would help to keep the treasury funded. All proposals will remain transparent and adjustable through governance. Sustainability is being addressed actively at the contract layer rather than deferred to future speculation.
The Wager
What TEIA is building is straightforward, and the community keeps building while no one is watching. Visibility fluctuates, but a strong foundation and purpose must persist for culture to flourish.
The contracts are live. Governance operates. The community remains engaged. The next phase is increasing participation, deepening engagement, and positioning the platform for partnerships, grants, and long-term sustainability. A natural growth, from strengthening the connective tissue between artists, collectors, and builders who already recognize the value of shared infrastructure.
Why Tezos Still Matters
My own writing about the Tezos ecosystem has rarely focused on the standard metrics. What continues to differentiate this space is the culture it attracts and retains. The people who remain tend to value creative sovereignty, collaboration, and experimentation over spectacle.
TEIA reflects that ethos in practice. What began as a continuation of HEN has evolved into a deliberate attempt to construct a fully on-chain social layer for art, governed by its participants and sustained through collective effort. It represents a model where infrastructure and culture reinforce one another rather than compete for attention.
Core contributor Malicious Sheep articulated the direction ahead in a way that captures the spirit of this next chapter:
The next phase of Teia developments aims to engage more directly the community by expanding accessibility features and creating more opportunities for onboarding and engaging already present artists and collectors.
As an artist I most look forward to community events and curations, not that I can appropriately participate in these as an artist due to my role, but it is ever inspiring to see what my peers create in both themed and curated events.
Being part of the DAO and Teia Community gives artists and collectors direct input into shaping Teia and what it will become. Creating and voting in polls and volunteering skills and time to contribute to Teia are two direct ways community members can participate in the shaping of Teia. It is built and maintained by volunteers, who are all also artists and creatives. With our artist first approach, and creative problem solving skills, the community meets our own needs together.
That orientation may ultimately be TEIA’s most important feature. The infrastructure matters. The contracts matter. The governance mechanisms matter. Yet what sustains them is a group of people who choose to build together simply because the work itself matters.
TEIA.ART Keeps Building
TEIA does not need to be the loudest thing in the room. It never did. What it needs is people who understand that the most meaningful infrastructure is often built in the quiet stretches, between the hype cycles, by those who show up not because the timing is right but because the work is worth doing. If you have been watching from the trenches, now is a good time to step closer. The foundation is solid, the tools are coming online, and the community is still here, still building, still strong.
TEIA.ART Today was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The Baking Sheet - Issue #295
We’re well into February now, and you can feel the tempo picking up.
At the protocol level, the focus is long-term as Nomadic Labs is giving us pieces for the next protocol upgrade that includes quantum readiness and 15x increase in DAL bandwidth. This is the kind of foundational work that shapes what the network can handle years from now.
At the same time, teams are packing for ETHDenver. Booth setups. Early mornings. Real conversations that only happen face to face. There’s a different kind of energy when the community gathers in person, and it carries momentum back into the ecosystem.
And alongside that, new tools are going live. The Tezlink portal is open. Builders can connect, claim test tez, and start experimenting with what faster execution actually feels like. It shifts from roadmap to hands-on experience.
This week moves across all of it. Deep infrastructure upgrades, IRL momentum, and practical tools that expand what builders can build.
Let’s get into it.
🧧 Happy Lunar New Year
Before we get into upgrades, events, and everything unfolding across the ecosystem, we want to pause for a moment and say something simple.
Happy Lunar New Year to the entire Tezos community!
To everyone building new products, baking blocks, collecting art, shipping code, debating proposals on Agora, organizing meetups, or supporting things behind the scenes, you matter. This network runs because of you.
The Lunar New Year is rooted in renewal, intention, and forward movement. That feels especially fitting for Tezos right now. There’s a steady energy building. New ideas are taking shape. Conversations are turning into action.
So here’s what we’re hoping this year brings:
New ideas that turn into real products.Partnerships that stretch across borders and time zones.Governance that stays thoughtful and steady.Creativity in every form, from art to code to games and finance.Builders who keep showing up, even on the quiet days.
Tezos has always been global at its core. Different cultures. Different languages. Different paths into the ecosystem. What connects it all is a shared belief in building something that lasts.
Wherever you’re celebrating from, we’re wishing you clarity in your decisions, courage in your work, and good fortune in the year ahead.
Let’s make it count.
Etherlink at ETHDenver
From Lunar New Year celebrations straight to boots on the ground in Colorado, the Tezos ecosystem is moving with purpose.
This week, it’s builder mode.
If you’re at ETHDenver, stop by the Etherlink booth and come say hello.
📍 Booth 510D in Devtopia
Here’s what you’ll find:
The Proof of Speed challenge. Step up and put your typing skills to the test against Instant Confirmations.
The fastest participant each day walks away with a mechanical keyboard.
Fresh merch dropping throughout the week.
A Uranium.io giveaway is happening right at the booth.
More than anything, this is a chance to see Etherlink’s sub-50ms confirmations in real time. You can feel the difference when something responds instantly. It changes how apps behave and how users experience them.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem The Road to Protocol ‘U’: DAL Bandwidth Set to Increase 15x in Protocol U
If Protocol “U” is laying the groundwork for long-term cryptographic security, it is also unlocking something much more immediate: scale.
Alongside post-quantum preparation, Nomadic Labs previewed a major upgrade to the Data Availability Layer. If approved, DAL usable bandwidth would increase from roughly 0.66 MB/s to 10 MB/s which is a 15x jump.
That shift completes another milestone on the Tezos X roadmap and removes one of the last structural ceilings for high-throughput applications on Etherlink and Tezlink.
Before any transaction can be executed on a rollup, its data has to be published securely and verifiably on Layer 1. Execution may still be the limiting factor today, but data publication can become the bottleneck tomorrow.
At 10 MB per second, the network can publish hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at low cost. That opens the door to:
Data-intensive games
High-frequency DeFi systems
Complex on-chain applications that would previously worry about bandwidth ceilings
Sustained high-throughput L2 usage without congestion risk
In short, it gives builders room to think bigger.
How the Increase Works
The bandwidth jump does not come from weakening security assumptions. It comes from optimization.
On the software side:
Shard verification has been batched and parallelized
Validation now scales efficiently across multiple CPU cores
On the protocol side:
The number of slots and slot sizes are increased
Attestation thresholds remain the same
Reward mechanics remain unchanged
Redundancy and reconstruction guarantees remain intact
Security and economic incentives stay consistent. Capacity expands.
What Bakers Need to Know
The increased bandwidth comes with modest hardware guidance updates.
For the majority of bakers — those under ~2% of total stake — existing setups remain sufficient.
For larger bakers, especially those in the 5–10% range, moving toward 8-core or 16-core CPUs is recommended to future-proof against peak DAL load.
Importantly:
No new slashing conditions are introduced
The only risk of underpowered hardware is partial DAL attestation loss
That would affect DAL-related rewards only, not core baking safety
This guidance is based on worst-case sustained peak usage scenarios. In normal conditions, most setups will perform comfortably.
The DAL upgrade brings Tezos firmly into the multi-megabyte-per-second era without raising the barrier to participation.
It is a careful balance: ambitious enough to support serious applications, conservative enough to preserve decentralization.
When builders begin pushing throughput limits on Etherlink and Tezlink, the data layer will not be the constraint. We’re excited to see what people can build with the power of scaling and it shows yet again how Tezos is always a few steps ahead of other chains thanks to its governance model.
Last thing on the plate for this week is that Tezlink Shadownet portal is now live, giving builders a simple way to connect, grab test tez, and start experimenting with the Michelson runtime under the Tezos X roadmap.
Getting started takes just a few steps:
• Add the Tezlink Shadownet network to Temple• Claim test tez from the faucet• Deploy and interact with Michelson contracts
That’s it. You’re running in a test environment built for sub-second performance.
Tezlink brings Michelson into a faster execution layer while keeping the tools developers already use. You can build with SmartPy or LIGO, connect familiar wallets, and navigate with TzKT. With latency under 500 milliseconds, it feels dramatically more responsive than Layer 1’s six-second block time, while still anchoring back to Tezos L1 for security.
And this is only the beginning.
Atomic composability with Etherlink, shared sequencing, and deeper liquidity access are on the way, opening the door for Michelson and EVM contracts to interact inside the same rollup architecture.
Tezlink is early by design as it’s a live test environment meant for real experimentation.
If you’ve built on Tezos before, this is your chance to see how that experience evolves in a faster lane. If you haven’t, this might be the cleanest place to start.
🔴 Now Streaming: Latency, Instant Confirmation, and the Next Phase of Tezos
This week on TezTalks Radio, host Brandon Langston speaks with Yann Régis-Gianas, Head of Engineering at Nomadic Labs, about what Tezos X is and more importantly, what it changes for the people actually using Tezos.
Rather than focusing on abstract architecture, this conversation centers on experience. What does latency really mean? What is instant confirmation in practical terms? And when these pieces come together, how different does Tezos feel?
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
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At the protocol level, the focus is long-term as Nomadic Labs is giving us pieces for the next protocol upgrade that includes quantum readiness and 15x increase in DAL bandwidth. This is the kind of foundational work that shapes what the network can handle years from now.
At the same time, teams are packing for ETHDenver. Booth setups. Early mornings. Real conversations that only happen face to face. There’s a different kind of energy when the community gathers in person, and it carries momentum back into the ecosystem.
And alongside that, new tools are going live. The Tezlink portal is open. Builders can connect, claim test tez, and start experimenting with what faster execution actually feels like. It shifts from roadmap to hands-on experience.
This week moves across all of it. Deep infrastructure upgrades, IRL momentum, and practical tools that expand what builders can build.
Let’s get into it.
🧧 Happy Lunar New Year
Before we get into upgrades, events, and everything unfolding across the ecosystem, we want to pause for a moment and say something simple.
Happy Lunar New Year to the entire Tezos community!
To everyone building new products, baking blocks, collecting art, shipping code, debating proposals on Agora, organizing meetups, or supporting things behind the scenes, you matter. This network runs because of you.
The Lunar New Year is rooted in renewal, intention, and forward movement. That feels especially fitting for Tezos right now. There’s a steady energy building. New ideas are taking shape. Conversations are turning into action.
So here’s what we’re hoping this year brings:
New ideas that turn into real products.Partnerships that stretch across borders and time zones.Governance that stays thoughtful and steady.Creativity in every form, from art to code to games and finance.Builders who keep showing up, even on the quiet days.
Tezos has always been global at its core. Different cultures. Different languages. Different paths into the ecosystem. What connects it all is a shared belief in building something that lasts.
Wherever you’re celebrating from, we’re wishing you clarity in your decisions, courage in your work, and good fortune in the year ahead.
Let’s make it count.
Etherlink at ETHDenver
From Lunar New Year celebrations straight to boots on the ground in Colorado, the Tezos ecosystem is moving with purpose.
This week, it’s builder mode.
If you’re at ETHDenver, stop by the Etherlink booth and come say hello.
📍 Booth 510D in Devtopia
Here’s what you’ll find:
The Proof of Speed challenge. Step up and put your typing skills to the test against Instant Confirmations.
The fastest participant each day walks away with a mechanical keyboard.
Fresh merch dropping throughout the week.
A Uranium.io giveaway is happening right at the booth.
More than anything, this is a chance to see Etherlink’s sub-50ms confirmations in real time. You can feel the difference when something responds instantly. It changes how apps behave and how users experience them.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem The Road to Protocol ‘U’: DAL Bandwidth Set to Increase 15x in Protocol U
If Protocol “U” is laying the groundwork for long-term cryptographic security, it is also unlocking something much more immediate: scale.
Alongside post-quantum preparation, Nomadic Labs previewed a major upgrade to the Data Availability Layer. If approved, DAL usable bandwidth would increase from roughly 0.66 MB/s to 10 MB/s which is a 15x jump.
That shift completes another milestone on the Tezos X roadmap and removes one of the last structural ceilings for high-throughput applications on Etherlink and Tezlink.
Before any transaction can be executed on a rollup, its data has to be published securely and verifiably on Layer 1. Execution may still be the limiting factor today, but data publication can become the bottleneck tomorrow.
At 10 MB per second, the network can publish hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at low cost. That opens the door to:
Data-intensive games
High-frequency DeFi systems
Complex on-chain applications that would previously worry about bandwidth ceilings
Sustained high-throughput L2 usage without congestion risk
In short, it gives builders room to think bigger.
How the Increase Works
The bandwidth jump does not come from weakening security assumptions. It comes from optimization.
On the software side:
Shard verification has been batched and parallelized
Validation now scales efficiently across multiple CPU cores
On the protocol side:
The number of slots and slot sizes are increased
Attestation thresholds remain the same
Reward mechanics remain unchanged
Redundancy and reconstruction guarantees remain intact
Security and economic incentives stay consistent. Capacity expands.
What Bakers Need to Know
The increased bandwidth comes with modest hardware guidance updates.
For the majority of bakers — those under ~2% of total stake — existing setups remain sufficient.
For larger bakers, especially those in the 5–10% range, moving toward 8-core or 16-core CPUs is recommended to future-proof against peak DAL load.
Importantly:
No new slashing conditions are introduced
The only risk of underpowered hardware is partial DAL attestation loss
That would affect DAL-related rewards only, not core baking safety
This guidance is based on worst-case sustained peak usage scenarios. In normal conditions, most setups will perform comfortably.
The DAL upgrade brings Tezos firmly into the multi-megabyte-per-second era without raising the barrier to participation.
It is a careful balance: ambitious enough to support serious applications, conservative enough to preserve decentralization.
When builders begin pushing throughput limits on Etherlink and Tezlink, the data layer will not be the constraint. We’re excited to see what people can build with the power of scaling and it shows yet again how Tezos is always a few steps ahead of other chains thanks to its governance model.
Last thing on the plate for this week is that Tezlink Shadownet portal is now live, giving builders a simple way to connect, grab test tez, and start experimenting with the Michelson runtime under the Tezos X roadmap.
Getting started takes just a few steps:
• Add the Tezlink Shadownet network to Temple• Claim test tez from the faucet• Deploy and interact with Michelson contracts
That’s it. You’re running in a test environment built for sub-second performance.
Tezlink brings Michelson into a faster execution layer while keeping the tools developers already use. You can build with SmartPy or LIGO, connect familiar wallets, and navigate with TzKT. With latency under 500 milliseconds, it feels dramatically more responsive than Layer 1’s six-second block time, while still anchoring back to Tezos L1 for security.
And this is only the beginning.
Atomic composability with Etherlink, shared sequencing, and deeper liquidity access are on the way, opening the door for Michelson and EVM contracts to interact inside the same rollup architecture.
Tezlink is early by design as it’s a live test environment meant for real experimentation.
If you’ve built on Tezos before, this is your chance to see how that experience evolves in a faster lane. If you haven’t, this might be the cleanest place to start.
🔴 Now Streaming: Latency, Instant Confirmation, and the Next Phase of Tezos
This week on TezTalks Radio, host Brandon Langston speaks with Yann Régis-Gianas, Head of Engineering at Nomadic Labs, about what Tezos X is and more importantly, what it changes for the people actually using Tezos.
Rather than focusing on abstract architecture, this conversation centers on experience. What does latency really mean? What is instant confirmation in practical terms? And when these pieces come together, how different does Tezos feel?
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
Tezos Community Rewards — January 2026
Announcing the CRP Winners for January 2026!
Greetings Tezos Community,
We are pleased to announce the winners of the “Community Rewards Program” CRP for the month of January 2026!
For more details about the various categories, please refer to the rewards page on the Tezos Commons website.
The Community Rewards Program is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month up to 5,000 tez are rewarded to those that stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole.
In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it takes less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.
Don’t have 30 seconds? You can tag any Discord message, Reddit post or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well!
This is the fifth iteration of the program, and we will continue to make changes based on community feedback. Just like the Tezos blockchain, we will be continually evolving this program.
Numerous factors are used when evaluating submissions, such as quality of submissions, quality of activity, number of submissions, and verifiable proof of activity done by the nominee (no single factor is determinative of a winner, as all factors were weighed to select winners). The judges would like to note that for each category, they are looking for the respective monthly related activity, meaning submissions should reflect activities done for that current month, i.e.; month of January activities.
Without further delay, here are the results of the winners, below.
Drill Sergeant Award
@skllzarmy
Helping Hand Award
@TheTezos
@StrokeDriven
@devahan
@AuRo404
@malsheep56
@rociomiobosque
@theglitchrama
Influencer Award
@xSAMGADx
@idjasaund
@HashSosaHash
@CoinSeer
@NftyTrap
Tez Dev Award
@JackTezos
@webidente
@FromFriends__
@BakingBenjamins
Assimilation Award
@KOLLECTOR_OG
@ZeroUnboundArt
@mamaralic
@_TransparentArt
@NurArt_
@MiRetratito
@nectar_ph
Patissier Award
@Zir0h
@blockbakery
@riseuptez
@fafo_lab
Tezos Tutor Award
@cletusEllijah
@proto_designer
@TozartWeb3
@SkullDegenClub_
@tezosartnetwork
Formal Verification Award
@paraxenod
TEO Award
@NFTBiker
@BosqueGracias
@NikoAlerce
@sansfomo
Nominations Are Open For February
With February underway, we have begun accepting nominations for this month. If you know someone who deserves a reward for their contributions to the community or have ideas about other categories that should be recognized, then please fill out a nomination form located here, or you can tag a post (or discord message) with #TezosCRP.
As mentioned previously, we are still working on long-term improvements to this program. We know this program is far from perfect, so please bear with us while we strive to improve this program based on community feedback. Stay tuned, stay creative, and keep nominating!
As a reminder to the reward winners, the awards are all distributed through Kukai and DirectAuth. If you have issues claiming your awards, please message us here.
Tezos Community Rewards — January 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Greetings Tezos Community,
We are pleased to announce the winners of the “Community Rewards Program” CRP for the month of January 2026!
For more details about the various categories, please refer to the rewards page on the Tezos Commons website.
The Community Rewards Program is a Tezos Commons Foundation initiative aimed at fostering adoption and supporting the Tezos ecosystem. Every month up to 5,000 tez are rewarded to those that stand out in merit and act in the interest of the Tezos ecosystem as a whole.
In an endeavor to make it easier for community members to nominate their favorite contributors to the ecosystem, the nomination form has been drastically streamlined. Now containing only three questions, it takes less than 30 seconds to submit a nomination.
Don’t have 30 seconds? You can tag any Discord message, Reddit post or tweet with #TezosCRP and we will collect them as well!
This is the fifth iteration of the program, and we will continue to make changes based on community feedback. Just like the Tezos blockchain, we will be continually evolving this program.
Numerous factors are used when evaluating submissions, such as quality of submissions, quality of activity, number of submissions, and verifiable proof of activity done by the nominee (no single factor is determinative of a winner, as all factors were weighed to select winners). The judges would like to note that for each category, they are looking for the respective monthly related activity, meaning submissions should reflect activities done for that current month, i.e.; month of January activities.
Without further delay, here are the results of the winners, below.
Drill Sergeant Award
@skllzarmy
Helping Hand Award
@TheTezos
@StrokeDriven
@devahan
@AuRo404
@malsheep56
@rociomiobosque
@theglitchrama
Influencer Award
@xSAMGADx
@idjasaund
@HashSosaHash
@CoinSeer
@NftyTrap
Tez Dev Award
@JackTezos
@webidente
@FromFriends__
@BakingBenjamins
Assimilation Award
@KOLLECTOR_OG
@ZeroUnboundArt
@mamaralic
@_TransparentArt
@NurArt_
@MiRetratito
@nectar_ph
Patissier Award
@Zir0h
@blockbakery
@riseuptez
@fafo_lab
Tezos Tutor Award
@cletusEllijah
@proto_designer
@TozartWeb3
@SkullDegenClub_
@tezosartnetwork
Formal Verification Award
@paraxenod
TEO Award
@NFTBiker
@BosqueGracias
@NikoAlerce
@sansfomo
Nominations Are Open For February
With February underway, we have begun accepting nominations for this month. If you know someone who deserves a reward for their contributions to the community or have ideas about other categories that should be recognized, then please fill out a nomination form located here, or you can tag a post (or discord message) with #TezosCRP.
As mentioned previously, we are still working on long-term improvements to this program. We know this program is far from perfect, so please bear with us while we strive to improve this program based on community feedback. Stay tuned, stay creative, and keep nominating!
As a reminder to the reward winners, the awards are all distributed through Kukai and DirectAuth. If you have issues claiming your awards, please message us here.
Tezos Community Rewards — January 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Unifying to Empower: Exploring Tesserart’s Storefront
A chat with Tesserart developer Ibon Escalada about Tesserart’s Storefront platform and what it has to offer for Tezos artists
The story of blockchain-powered art is still being written.
As this intriguing new medium continues to shake off the residue of the much-maligned NFT hype cycle and ensuing NFT winter, a new generation of artists has emerged to push the boundaries of this global digital art movement. An inconsistent market and shifting public sentiment have done little to dissuade the artists, collectors, builders, and communities behind this exciting art scene. In fact, this movement continues to pick up steam.
From a crowded field of chains and ecosystems vying for the title of “the art chain”, the Tezos ecosystem has emerged as a global leader. Its bustling community, filled to bursting with talented and innovative artists, has proven to be surprisingly resilient in the face of shifting public perception.
And, to hear Tesserart developer Ibon Escalada tell it, there are very good, and very important, reasons for this…
“From what I’ve experienced, the Tezos art ecosystem thrives because it’s built on accessibility, with affordable transaction costs that keep the door open for artists at every level. This foundation has allowed an incredibly diverse culture of mutual support to grow, where platforms like Teia, Objkt, FxHash, and more recently EditArt among others have played a vital role in fostering a wide range of expression. It’s a community where artists don’t just sell work; they actively lift each other up and push creative boundaries within a space that values the collective journey. This shared spirit is anchored by a commitment to an energy-efficient ecosystem, ensuring the focus remains on the artists and the lasting connections they build rather than just the mechanics of the trade.” — Ibon Escalada
And still, even as the Tezos art ecosystem and the community behind it have come into their own, there remains much work to be done.
Enter, Tesserart
As the blockchain art landscape continues to take shape both here in the Tezos ecosystem and beyond, there remain many complex problems to be resolved. From market fragmentation to inconsistent user experience, these issues continue to hold the larger blockchain art scene back from reaching its true potential.
While great strides have been made toward bringing the amazing blockchain-powered art currently being produced to the world, the intersection between artists, art marketplaces, and collectors is still very much evolving. Questions about the nature of this intersection and how it will be managed moving forward abound.
Blockchain art minting platforms and marketplaces have risen to provide simple processes for artists to bring their art to the blockchain and market their work to collectors — and have filled these needs admirably. However, as this process has unfolded, art marketplaces have also taken on the role of the de facto key interface between artists and their audience. Aside from the content of their work itself, artists have very little control over or input into how their work is presented or the branding around it.
Tesserart’s mission: to put artists back in control, where they belong…
“We created Tesserart as an on-chain suite for artists, brands, and collectors. The vision is to build a network of technical solutions and art experiences where creators really take control. We also recognized early on that there is no one-size- fits-all solution in digital art. That flexibility is something we care a lot about, supporting everything from exhibitions and live minting to native artist solutions on demand, like a printshop or a notification system for their collectors. The goal is to ensure the creator is at the center of it all, extending far beyond just the marketplaces. At its core, Tesserart is both a launchpad for creative ideas and a community-built network that removes barriers, so creators can focus on the art rather than the technical side.” — Ibon Escalada
Introducing: Storefront
Tesserart’s Storefront was designed to bring together the disparate elements of the existing artist — art consumer interface in one place — a one-stop-shop where artworks from multiple marketplaces can be managed and displayed to the artist’s liking.
While the included artworks still exist within the digital art marketplaces where they are minted, bought, and sold, they also exist in Storefront under a unique custom domain name and user interface completely owned, managed, and controlled by the artist who created them.
For a deeper dive, I’ll let Tesserart Developer Ibon Escalada explain…
“Storefront is a unified home for your digital identity, built for artists, collectors, and galleries to have total control over their presentation across marketplaces. By combining web services with a no-code admin panel, Storefront allows you to launch a high-performance gallery under your own custom domain. This establishes a permanent, professional home for your brand that offers the reliability and “always-on” presence of a dedicated website and foundation to build upon. A Unified Presence Storefront brings clarity to your digital footprint by connecting directly with leading Tezos marketplaces like Objkt, FxHash, EditArt, and ZeroUnbound. This ensures your entire body of work or curated collection is accessible in one cohesive space.
To provide a truly complete overview, it also includes read-only support for Ethereum and EVM tokens, recognizing that many creators today have a footprint across multiple chains while keeping it Tezos-first. You can easily import your projects and organize them into featured highlights that tell your story exactly how you want. Built for growth, we designed Storefront to evolve with you. Whether you’re just starting out, organizing an exhibition, or launching a printshop, the process remains easy to handle through simple admin tools. If your vision outgrows a template, you can move up to our Platform or Application tiers for a setup fully tailored to your specific needs. Ultimately, it’s about giving you the power to grow using shared tools without sacrificing your independence. You manage your entire presence, from your domain to your data, through one simple dashboard.” — Ibon Escalada
Here’s how to get started…
Getting Started Guide
Getting started with Storefront is a relatively simple process (assuming you already have a Tezos-enabled wallet).
You’ll also (obviously) need some minted art in order to have something to put in your Storefront once it’s up and running. Before beginning to experiment with Storefront, I carefully curated a collection of my favourite pieces of my 7-year-old daughter’s artwork on objkt.com (which was also a relatively simple process)…
And voilà! I was ready to go.
Assuming you’re an artist with work already minted in the Tezos art ecosystem, you can just go to the Tesserart website, click the “start now” button…
Click “use existing wallet”…
And select/connect your wallet…
You’ll be directed straight to the Storefront builder page, where you can enter the basic information for your store…
In the Store Manager feature, you can add relevant social links, a logo image, your chosen domain name, etc…
and begin configuring your store…
Now it’s time to customize your store’s theme. You’ll find several options for adjusting how your storefront will appear, from the text fonts used to the background, text, and border colours that will be visible once your Storefront is live…
You can work through each of these elements using the handy dandy dropdown menus available for each one…
Once you’ve made your selections, your new Tesserart Storefront will render right before your eyes. You’ll now have access to several tabs for tracking your page’s performance, choosing pieces to be highlighted in your page’s “highlights” hero banner, and more…
And don’t worry, if you chose colours that don’t really work together at all (like I did!), or want to reconfigure your Storefront’s appearance some other way, you can do that too!
Once configured to your liking and connected to your wallet, your Storefront will automatically populate with the artworks you’ve minted and collected on the marketplaces your wallet is connected to.
Congratulations! Your own personal Tesserart Storefront is now up and running, and you’re free to explore the platform and all of its features as you please!
As a newly-minted digital artist myself, it wasn’t easy for me to get my head around exactly what a platform like Tesserart’s Storefront has to offer. Luckily for me, I knew quite a few who did, and when I asked Tezos art legend Retro Manni to lay it out for me, he did just that:
“I get to use my own domain name — https://store.retromanni.xyz/.
Custom-style the site to match the rest of my personal website — retromanni.xyz.
Have an ‘above the fold’ hero slideshow to promote whichever pieces I want.
Import all of my collections, but also leave out collections of my choosing (i.e., old works).
Have a responsive site that allows collectors/visitors to browse my work
And still maintain the majority of marketplace features we expect like buying/price/marketplace origin/place offers, etc.
And I can change things around whenever I choose.” — Retro Manni
What exactly does this all mean for Tezos artists? I’ll let Ibon Escalada explain once again…
“Tesserart represents a community-driven space where creators aren’t boxed in by a rigid set of rules. We want independent artists to have the freedom to grow without losing their identity. You can see that range in our current ecosystem: we have artists like Victor Doval, Retro Manni, and Distcs using our Storefront tier to build their own unique presence, while the Platform tier allowed Motus to create a live minting experience for the Volumens Festival in Valencia. For those pushing the absolute limits, our Application tier powers projects like Vandalo’s DarkTales.xyz leading the experimental landscape, using fully custom smart contracts to power AI-augmented literature. By offering these different paths, we’re making sure that whether you’re just starting a portfolio or building a complex, custom experience, you have the tools to stay at the center of your own work. We are building a future where the technology serves the artist’s vision, ensuring that as the ecosystem evolves, the power to innovate remains firmly in the hands of the creators themselves.” — Ibon Escalada
Storefront’s ambitious vision represents a stark departure from the current user experience available for blockchain artists. And, given the Tezos art ecosystem’s reputation for innovative thinking and artist-centric ethos, it comes as little surprise that this fascinating tool has emerged within it.
As with all things blockchain art, Tesserart’s Storefront remains an evolving work in progress, but, to hear Tezos artists tell it, Storefront is already having an impact on the Tezos art world and their place within it.
Unifying to Empower: Exploring Tesserart’s Storefront was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The story of blockchain-powered art is still being written.
As this intriguing new medium continues to shake off the residue of the much-maligned NFT hype cycle and ensuing NFT winter, a new generation of artists has emerged to push the boundaries of this global digital art movement. An inconsistent market and shifting public sentiment have done little to dissuade the artists, collectors, builders, and communities behind this exciting art scene. In fact, this movement continues to pick up steam.
From a crowded field of chains and ecosystems vying for the title of “the art chain”, the Tezos ecosystem has emerged as a global leader. Its bustling community, filled to bursting with talented and innovative artists, has proven to be surprisingly resilient in the face of shifting public perception.
And, to hear Tesserart developer Ibon Escalada tell it, there are very good, and very important, reasons for this…
“From what I’ve experienced, the Tezos art ecosystem thrives because it’s built on accessibility, with affordable transaction costs that keep the door open for artists at every level. This foundation has allowed an incredibly diverse culture of mutual support to grow, where platforms like Teia, Objkt, FxHash, and more recently EditArt among others have played a vital role in fostering a wide range of expression. It’s a community where artists don’t just sell work; they actively lift each other up and push creative boundaries within a space that values the collective journey. This shared spirit is anchored by a commitment to an energy-efficient ecosystem, ensuring the focus remains on the artists and the lasting connections they build rather than just the mechanics of the trade.” — Ibon Escalada
And still, even as the Tezos art ecosystem and the community behind it have come into their own, there remains much work to be done.
Enter, Tesserart
As the blockchain art landscape continues to take shape both here in the Tezos ecosystem and beyond, there remain many complex problems to be resolved. From market fragmentation to inconsistent user experience, these issues continue to hold the larger blockchain art scene back from reaching its true potential.
While great strides have been made toward bringing the amazing blockchain-powered art currently being produced to the world, the intersection between artists, art marketplaces, and collectors is still very much evolving. Questions about the nature of this intersection and how it will be managed moving forward abound.
Blockchain art minting platforms and marketplaces have risen to provide simple processes for artists to bring their art to the blockchain and market their work to collectors — and have filled these needs admirably. However, as this process has unfolded, art marketplaces have also taken on the role of the de facto key interface between artists and their audience. Aside from the content of their work itself, artists have very little control over or input into how their work is presented or the branding around it.
Tesserart’s mission: to put artists back in control, where they belong…
“We created Tesserart as an on-chain suite for artists, brands, and collectors. The vision is to build a network of technical solutions and art experiences where creators really take control. We also recognized early on that there is no one-size- fits-all solution in digital art. That flexibility is something we care a lot about, supporting everything from exhibitions and live minting to native artist solutions on demand, like a printshop or a notification system for their collectors. The goal is to ensure the creator is at the center of it all, extending far beyond just the marketplaces. At its core, Tesserart is both a launchpad for creative ideas and a community-built network that removes barriers, so creators can focus on the art rather than the technical side.” — Ibon Escalada
Introducing: Storefront
Tesserart’s Storefront was designed to bring together the disparate elements of the existing artist — art consumer interface in one place — a one-stop-shop where artworks from multiple marketplaces can be managed and displayed to the artist’s liking.
While the included artworks still exist within the digital art marketplaces where they are minted, bought, and sold, they also exist in Storefront under a unique custom domain name and user interface completely owned, managed, and controlled by the artist who created them.
For a deeper dive, I’ll let Tesserart Developer Ibon Escalada explain…
“Storefront is a unified home for your digital identity, built for artists, collectors, and galleries to have total control over their presentation across marketplaces. By combining web services with a no-code admin panel, Storefront allows you to launch a high-performance gallery under your own custom domain. This establishes a permanent, professional home for your brand that offers the reliability and “always-on” presence of a dedicated website and foundation to build upon. A Unified Presence Storefront brings clarity to your digital footprint by connecting directly with leading Tezos marketplaces like Objkt, FxHash, EditArt, and ZeroUnbound. This ensures your entire body of work or curated collection is accessible in one cohesive space.
To provide a truly complete overview, it also includes read-only support for Ethereum and EVM tokens, recognizing that many creators today have a footprint across multiple chains while keeping it Tezos-first. You can easily import your projects and organize them into featured highlights that tell your story exactly how you want. Built for growth, we designed Storefront to evolve with you. Whether you’re just starting out, organizing an exhibition, or launching a printshop, the process remains easy to handle through simple admin tools. If your vision outgrows a template, you can move up to our Platform or Application tiers for a setup fully tailored to your specific needs. Ultimately, it’s about giving you the power to grow using shared tools without sacrificing your independence. You manage your entire presence, from your domain to your data, through one simple dashboard.” — Ibon Escalada
Here’s how to get started…
Getting Started Guide
Getting started with Storefront is a relatively simple process (assuming you already have a Tezos-enabled wallet).
You’ll also (obviously) need some minted art in order to have something to put in your Storefront once it’s up and running. Before beginning to experiment with Storefront, I carefully curated a collection of my favourite pieces of my 7-year-old daughter’s artwork on objkt.com (which was also a relatively simple process)…
And voilà! I was ready to go.
Assuming you’re an artist with work already minted in the Tezos art ecosystem, you can just go to the Tesserart website, click the “start now” button…
Click “use existing wallet”…
And select/connect your wallet…
You’ll be directed straight to the Storefront builder page, where you can enter the basic information for your store…
In the Store Manager feature, you can add relevant social links, a logo image, your chosen domain name, etc…
and begin configuring your store…
Now it’s time to customize your store’s theme. You’ll find several options for adjusting how your storefront will appear, from the text fonts used to the background, text, and border colours that will be visible once your Storefront is live…
You can work through each of these elements using the handy dandy dropdown menus available for each one…
Once you’ve made your selections, your new Tesserart Storefront will render right before your eyes. You’ll now have access to several tabs for tracking your page’s performance, choosing pieces to be highlighted in your page’s “highlights” hero banner, and more…
And don’t worry, if you chose colours that don’t really work together at all (like I did!), or want to reconfigure your Storefront’s appearance some other way, you can do that too!
Once configured to your liking and connected to your wallet, your Storefront will automatically populate with the artworks you’ve minted and collected on the marketplaces your wallet is connected to.
Congratulations! Your own personal Tesserart Storefront is now up and running, and you’re free to explore the platform and all of its features as you please!
As a newly-minted digital artist myself, it wasn’t easy for me to get my head around exactly what a platform like Tesserart’s Storefront has to offer. Luckily for me, I knew quite a few who did, and when I asked Tezos art legend Retro Manni to lay it out for me, he did just that:
“I get to use my own domain name — https://store.retromanni.xyz/.
Custom-style the site to match the rest of my personal website — retromanni.xyz.
Have an ‘above the fold’ hero slideshow to promote whichever pieces I want.
Import all of my collections, but also leave out collections of my choosing (i.e., old works).
Have a responsive site that allows collectors/visitors to browse my work
And still maintain the majority of marketplace features we expect like buying/price/marketplace origin/place offers, etc.
And I can change things around whenever I choose.” — Retro Manni
What exactly does this all mean for Tezos artists? I’ll let Ibon Escalada explain once again…
“Tesserart represents a community-driven space where creators aren’t boxed in by a rigid set of rules. We want independent artists to have the freedom to grow without losing their identity. You can see that range in our current ecosystem: we have artists like Victor Doval, Retro Manni, and Distcs using our Storefront tier to build their own unique presence, while the Platform tier allowed Motus to create a live minting experience for the Volumens Festival in Valencia. For those pushing the absolute limits, our Application tier powers projects like Vandalo’s DarkTales.xyz leading the experimental landscape, using fully custom smart contracts to power AI-augmented literature. By offering these different paths, we’re making sure that whether you’re just starting a portfolio or building a complex, custom experience, you have the tools to stay at the center of your own work. We are building a future where the technology serves the artist’s vision, ensuring that as the ecosystem evolves, the power to innovate remains firmly in the hands of the creators themselves.” — Ibon Escalada
Storefront’s ambitious vision represents a stark departure from the current user experience available for blockchain artists. And, given the Tezos art ecosystem’s reputation for innovative thinking and artist-centric ethos, it comes as little surprise that this fascinating tool has emerged within it.
As with all things blockchain art, Tesserart’s Storefront remains an evolving work in progress, but, to hear Tezos artists tell it, Storefront is already having an impact on the Tezos art world and their place within it.
Unifying to Empower: Exploring Tesserart’s Storefront was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Why I’m Still Here
Personal reflections on why Tezos is still where I choose to be
There’s a question I get sometimes, especially during rough market periods: Why are you still here? Not in an aggressive way. More in that curious, slightly tired tone people use when they’ve watched cycles come and go and are trying to decide where they still want to spend their time and energy.
And honestly, it’s a fair question.
If you’ve been in crypto long enough, you’ve seen entire narratives disappear. Entire sectors that were “the future” for a year. Entire blockchains that felt unstoppable until suddenly they weren’t part of the conversation anymore. That’s just the reality of a space that moves this fast. So yeah, it makes sense to ask why anyone stays anywhere in this industry for years.
I’ve thought about that a lot myself. Not from a price perspective, and not from a “which chain wins” perspective, but from a much more personal place. After enough time in this space, you either drift toward whatever is trending, or you decide where you actually want to spend your time building and contributing.
For me, over time, the answer started to become clearer. This isn’t about saying Tezos is perfect, and it isn’t about pretending every experiment works. It’s definitely not about trying to convince anyone else what they should or shouldn’t focus on. This is just me trying to put into words the things I’ve seen and experienced over the years that made me keep showing up and keep paying attention to this ecosystem.
When I really break it down, a few patterns keep coming up. Not headlines. Not narratives. Just patterns you start noticing when you’ve watched something evolve over multiple cycles.
The first one is persistence. I’ve watched Tezos move through multiple cycles now. Not always loudly. Not always at the center of attention. But it keeps moving. It keeps upgrading. It keeps adapting. It keeps shipping.
Part of that persistence comes from the people who keep building and participating through every cycle, and part of it comes from a design that was built to evolve instead of staying fixed. Over time, persistence stops looking boring and starts looking rare.
A lot of things in crypto are built to win a moment. Tezos has always felt like it was built to survive many moments. And after enough time in this space, you start to understand how valuable that is. Surviving cycles isn’t flashy, but it’s usually how real infrastructure gets built.
Another big reason I’m still here is adaptation.
What kept me paying attention over the years is that Tezos never really acted like it was “finished.” The assumption always seemed to be that it would need to evolve. New ideas, new roles, new technical approaches, new experiments. Not chasing whatever is trending that month, but also not pretending the world isn’t changing.
There’s a difference between chasing trends and refusing to get left behind. Tezos, to me, has usually tried to live somewhere in the middle of that. And that balance, in my opinion, matters more than people think, especially if you’re thinking in years instead of quarters.
Then there’s the community aspect, which honestly became more important to me over time than I expected.
I’ve seen moments where the community didn’t just react to decisions, it helped shape conversations around them. Not perfectly. Not instantly. But meaningfully. There are ecosystems where direction feels like it lives very far away from the people actually building and using the technology. Tezos has never really felt like that to me.
Messy sometimes? Sure. Debated sometimes? Also yes. But alive. Participatory. Influenced by the people inside it.
And to be clear, I don’t agree with everything that happens. I don’t agree with every decision, and I don’t agree with every direction. No long-running ecosystem gets everything right all the time.
But at the same time, over the years, I’ve found myself trusting the broader direction more often than not. Not blindly, but because again and again, especially on the technical side, the long-term approach tends to age well. We’ve seen ideas that once felt niche or over-engineered slowly become industry standard, sometimes years later.
Love him or hate him, Arthur Breitman has been right more times than not when it comes to long-term technical thinking. And when you watch those patterns repeat over enough years, it becomes easier to stay patient even when you don’t agree with every individual step along the way.
For me, the fact that discussion exists and that direction can be influenced matters more than the illusion of perfection, and after enough years, you stop looking at individual decisions and start looking at the bigger picture.
Last but not least, we have the ideals and overall ethos.
For me, the original blockchain ideals played a huge role in why I got involved in this space in the first place. Things like open participation, reducing reliance on centralized control, giving users real ownership, and building systems that could be upgraded without depending on a single company or authority. Those ideas weren’t just technical concepts, they were the whole point.
Over time, you start noticing which projects quietly move away from those ideas when it becomes convenient, and which ones keep building around them even when it’s harder, slower, or less marketable in the short term. Tezos is one of the few ecosystems that has kept those core principles close to how it actually operates, even when it would have been easier to compromise them.
And then there’s the part people don’t talk about enough: history and personal investment.
At some point, it stops being just about technology. It becomes about the people you met, the projects you watched grow, the experiments you saw succeed and fail, the meetups, the conversations, and the shared wins and shared frustrations. You build knowledge, relationships, and context, and that matters more than people like to admit.
Ecosystems aren’t just tech stacks. They’re communities of people trying to build something together, usually under a lot of uncertainty.
All of that is why, after all this time, I don’t really look at Tezos through the lens of single cycles anymore.
I don’t expect every experiment to work. I don’t expect every decision to be perfect. And I don’t expect every market phase to favor us. And I definitely don’t get frustrated immediately with every decision I don’t like the first time I see it, the way I probably did when I first joined this space. Time and experience change how you look at these things.
What I do look for now is whether an ecosystem keeps building when things get quiet. Whether it keeps adapting when the landscape changes. Whether the people inside it keep showing up even when attention moves somewhere else.
In this space, sentiment can change faster than people think. We’ve seen projects spend years building quietly before suddenly finding themselves back in the spotlight. Even if it doesn’t happen often, it proves how quickly perception can shift. I’m pretty sure many people felt it was “too late” for Zcash before its recent surge in attention.
Sometimes it really does only take one moment, one breakthrough, or one narrative shift to change how the broader space looks at an ecosystem.
And I genuinely believe that Tezos still has those moments ahead of it. Not because of hype or market cycles, but because the technology and the ecosystem keep getting stronger. That’s part of why I’m excited about what’s coming next.
Between the continued evolution of the protocol, what we’re likely to see coming out of TezDev this year, and the long-term impact of the Tezos X roadmap as it continues to be implemented, it feels like we’re moving into a phase where a lot of years of groundwork start compounding.
I don’t expect everything to work. I don’t expect progress to always be linear. But I do believe the most important chapters of this ecosystem are still ahead.
And those are more than enough reasons for me to stay, keep building, and keep showing up for what comes next.
Why I’m Still Here was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
There’s a question I get sometimes, especially during rough market periods: Why are you still here? Not in an aggressive way. More in that curious, slightly tired tone people use when they’ve watched cycles come and go and are trying to decide where they still want to spend their time and energy.
And honestly, it’s a fair question.
If you’ve been in crypto long enough, you’ve seen entire narratives disappear. Entire sectors that were “the future” for a year. Entire blockchains that felt unstoppable until suddenly they weren’t part of the conversation anymore. That’s just the reality of a space that moves this fast. So yeah, it makes sense to ask why anyone stays anywhere in this industry for years.
I’ve thought about that a lot myself. Not from a price perspective, and not from a “which chain wins” perspective, but from a much more personal place. After enough time in this space, you either drift toward whatever is trending, or you decide where you actually want to spend your time building and contributing.
For me, over time, the answer started to become clearer. This isn’t about saying Tezos is perfect, and it isn’t about pretending every experiment works. It’s definitely not about trying to convince anyone else what they should or shouldn’t focus on. This is just me trying to put into words the things I’ve seen and experienced over the years that made me keep showing up and keep paying attention to this ecosystem.
When I really break it down, a few patterns keep coming up. Not headlines. Not narratives. Just patterns you start noticing when you’ve watched something evolve over multiple cycles.
The first one is persistence. I’ve watched Tezos move through multiple cycles now. Not always loudly. Not always at the center of attention. But it keeps moving. It keeps upgrading. It keeps adapting. It keeps shipping.
Part of that persistence comes from the people who keep building and participating through every cycle, and part of it comes from a design that was built to evolve instead of staying fixed. Over time, persistence stops looking boring and starts looking rare.
A lot of things in crypto are built to win a moment. Tezos has always felt like it was built to survive many moments. And after enough time in this space, you start to understand how valuable that is. Surviving cycles isn’t flashy, but it’s usually how real infrastructure gets built.
Another big reason I’m still here is adaptation.
What kept me paying attention over the years is that Tezos never really acted like it was “finished.” The assumption always seemed to be that it would need to evolve. New ideas, new roles, new technical approaches, new experiments. Not chasing whatever is trending that month, but also not pretending the world isn’t changing.
There’s a difference between chasing trends and refusing to get left behind. Tezos, to me, has usually tried to live somewhere in the middle of that. And that balance, in my opinion, matters more than people think, especially if you’re thinking in years instead of quarters.
Then there’s the community aspect, which honestly became more important to me over time than I expected.
I’ve seen moments where the community didn’t just react to decisions, it helped shape conversations around them. Not perfectly. Not instantly. But meaningfully. There are ecosystems where direction feels like it lives very far away from the people actually building and using the technology. Tezos has never really felt like that to me.
Messy sometimes? Sure. Debated sometimes? Also yes. But alive. Participatory. Influenced by the people inside it.
And to be clear, I don’t agree with everything that happens. I don’t agree with every decision, and I don’t agree with every direction. No long-running ecosystem gets everything right all the time.
But at the same time, over the years, I’ve found myself trusting the broader direction more often than not. Not blindly, but because again and again, especially on the technical side, the long-term approach tends to age well. We’ve seen ideas that once felt niche or over-engineered slowly become industry standard, sometimes years later.
Love him or hate him, Arthur Breitman has been right more times than not when it comes to long-term technical thinking. And when you watch those patterns repeat over enough years, it becomes easier to stay patient even when you don’t agree with every individual step along the way.
For me, the fact that discussion exists and that direction can be influenced matters more than the illusion of perfection, and after enough years, you stop looking at individual decisions and start looking at the bigger picture.
Last but not least, we have the ideals and overall ethos.
For me, the original blockchain ideals played a huge role in why I got involved in this space in the first place. Things like open participation, reducing reliance on centralized control, giving users real ownership, and building systems that could be upgraded without depending on a single company or authority. Those ideas weren’t just technical concepts, they were the whole point.
Over time, you start noticing which projects quietly move away from those ideas when it becomes convenient, and which ones keep building around them even when it’s harder, slower, or less marketable in the short term. Tezos is one of the few ecosystems that has kept those core principles close to how it actually operates, even when it would have been easier to compromise them.
And then there’s the part people don’t talk about enough: history and personal investment.
At some point, it stops being just about technology. It becomes about the people you met, the projects you watched grow, the experiments you saw succeed and fail, the meetups, the conversations, and the shared wins and shared frustrations. You build knowledge, relationships, and context, and that matters more than people like to admit.
Ecosystems aren’t just tech stacks. They’re communities of people trying to build something together, usually under a lot of uncertainty.
All of that is why, after all this time, I don’t really look at Tezos through the lens of single cycles anymore.
I don’t expect every experiment to work. I don’t expect every decision to be perfect. And I don’t expect every market phase to favor us. And I definitely don’t get frustrated immediately with every decision I don’t like the first time I see it, the way I probably did when I first joined this space. Time and experience change how you look at these things.
What I do look for now is whether an ecosystem keeps building when things get quiet. Whether it keeps adapting when the landscape changes. Whether the people inside it keep showing up even when attention moves somewhere else.
In this space, sentiment can change faster than people think. We’ve seen projects spend years building quietly before suddenly finding themselves back in the spotlight. Even if it doesn’t happen often, it proves how quickly perception can shift. I’m pretty sure many people felt it was “too late” for Zcash before its recent surge in attention.
Sometimes it really does only take one moment, one breakthrough, or one narrative shift to change how the broader space looks at an ecosystem.
And I genuinely believe that Tezos still has those moments ahead of it. Not because of hype or market cycles, but because the technology and the ecosystem keep getting stronger. That’s part of why I’m excited about what’s coming next.
Between the continued evolution of the protocol, what we’re likely to see coming out of TezDev this year, and the long-term impact of the Tezos X roadmap as it continues to be implemented, it feels like we’re moving into a phase where a lot of years of groundwork start compounding.
I don’t expect everything to work. I don’t expect progress to always be linear. But I do believe the most important chapters of this ecosystem are still ahead.
And those are more than enough reasons for me to stay, keep building, and keep showing up for what comes next.
Why I’m Still Here was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The Baking Sheet - Issue #294
We’re now deep into February, and you can feel the energy picking up again.
After a few quieter weeks at the start of the year, things are moving in very different directions at once. This week, protocol research is looking years ahead, asking what it means to prepare Tezos for a post-quantum world. Additionally, the ecosystem is packing its bags for ETHDenver, ready for handshakes, coffee meetups, and real conversations with the community face-to-face.
And in between, we’re seeing entirely new initiatives launch, like a uranium-focused podcast that zooms out from charts and tokens to talk about global energy policy and long-term supply.
This week’s edition moves between those layers. Long-term security, near-term community momentum, and the projects pushing the ecosystem forward in their own way.
Let’s get into it.
Protocol “U” Previewed: A First Step Towards Quantum Readiness
Last week, Nomadic Labs shared a preview on Tezos Agora of the next protocol proposal, currently referred to as “U.”
At first glance, it might not sound exciting. Quantum-resistant signatures. Feature flags. Cryptographic standards. Not exactly headline-grabbing stuff.
But this is one of those moments that matters precisely because it is happening early.
Blockchains rely on public key cryptography. Today, that cryptography is secure. Tomorrow? With sufficiently advanced quantum computers, that assumption could change. In theory, a powerful enough machine could derive a private key from a public key. That is not an immediate threat. But it is a real long-term consideration for every network that intends to be around for decades.
Tezos is choosing to prepare now, not later.
The important thing to understand is this: nothing is breaking, and no one needs to rush to do anything.
Elliptic curve signatures remain safe today. The upcoming proposal does not deprecate them. It does not force users to migrate. It does not disrupt wallets or custody systems.
Instead, “U” introduces the groundwork.
Specifically, it integrates ML-DSA-44, a post-quantum signature scheme standardized by NIST. On Tezos, this would appear as a new account type: tz5.
Behind the scenes, the protocol will support:
Transfers, contract calls, delegation, and staking with tz5 accounts
A formally verified Rust implementation
A feature flag that keeps it deployed but not yet user-accessible
For now, baking and native multisig remain on existing account types. Nothing changes operationally.
This is infrastructure being quietly installed before anyone needs to flip the switch.
Why Do It This Way?
Cryptographic migrations are not hard technically. They are hard socially.
Wallets need to integrate new signing schemes. Custodians need to upgrade infrastructure. Tooling needs to adapt. Users need time to understand what they are doing.
That coordination cannot happen overnight. And if the industry ever reaches a point where migration becomes urgent, it will already be too late to begin calmly planning.
By starting now, Tezos gives the ecosystem breathing room as an ounce of prevention is worth a pound in cure.
Future upgrades are expected to introduce stateful addresses, allowing multiple keys to attach to the same account. That means users could eventually add a post-quantum backup key without losing address history. For artists, collectors, DAOs, and long-lived accounts, that continuity matters.
Tezos has always taken the long view. Twenty upgrades in, the network continues to evolve without disruption. “U” follows that same philosophy.
It is not flashy. It does not change your wallet experience tomorrow. It does not alter how you stake, trade, or build this week.
But it signals something important: this network intends to stay secure not just for the next cycle, but for the next era of computing.
That is the kind of preparation you want to see long before it becomes urgent.
The Tezos Community Heads to ETHDenver 2026
Next up, while some teams are thinking decades ahead, others are packing their bags for next week.
The Tezos ecosystem is heading to ETHDenver.
If you are in Denver, make sure to swing by the Tezos booth. Full details are coming soon, but expect conversations, a bit of swag, and a few surprises along the way.
A strong group of builders will be around the Etherlink booth as well, so it is a great chance to meet the people shipping the infrastructure and applications that many of us talk about every week. Stop by, say hello, and put faces to the names.
And if you are looking for a proper start to your morning, the Tezos Breakfast Club returns:
🗓️ Tuesday, February 17 | 10:00 AM–12:30 PM (GMT-7)📍 The Wild, Denver
Coffee, pastries, and time to connect before the day kicks off.
Denver always has a way of bringing the ecosystem together. If you are attending, this is your invitation!
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Critical Mass Episode 1 Launches with the World Nuclear Association
There’s something fitting about this next story coming from the uranium corner of the ecosystem.
This week, Uranium.io officially launched a brand new show called Critical Mass, a podcast focused on nuclear energy, policy, and the forces shaping the future of the sector.
Episode one opens with a heavyweight guest: Sama Bilbao y León, Director General of the World Nuclear Association.
The conversation dives straight into the landmark declaration signed by 33 countries pledging to scale nuclear power. It unpacks what is actually driving this renewed momentum and why today’s nuclear renaissance looks fundamentally different from past cycles.
Here’s what they cover:
• The global pledge to triple nuclear capacity• Shifting public opinion around nuclear energy• The role of small modular reactors versus large-scale builds• Which regions are moving fastest and what policies are accelerating change
For anyone following uranium markets, energy infrastructure, or the broader macro context behind tokenized commodities, this podcast is a must-follow.
Listen to Episode 1 on your favorite platform.
Events
Big conference days tend to start fast, and ETHDenver is no exception. To make the morning a little easier, the Tezos Breakfast Club is back with a relaxed meetup designed to fuel conversations before the day gets busy.
If you skipped the hotel breakfast or just want a familiar place to land, this is a low-key stop for the Tezos community to connect over coffee and pastries before heading into the conference.
What to Expect
Complimentary coffee and fresh baked goods
Casual conversations about Tezos, Etherlink, and what people are building
Exclusive giveaways for attendees
A friendly starting point to ease into the ETHDenver schedule
The Breakfast Club is meant to stay simple. No panels, no presentations, just a chance to catch up with builders, artists, and ecosystem teams in a comfortable setting.
Event Details
Location: The Wild, 1660 Wynkoop St Suite 100, Denver, CO
When: During ETHDenver week
Registration: Spots are limited, so early sign-up is recommended
Grab a coffee, grab a pastry, and start your ETHDenver week with good conversations and familiar faces.
One More Thing…
We’re giving first details exclusively to you, our loyal subscribers, more information will be revealed in the near future, but save the date for Tez/Dev 2026!
🔴 Now Streaming: Inside TZ APAC and the Next Fortify Labs Cohort
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Imran Haqeem, Deputy Head of Programs at TZAPAC, for a wide-ranging conversation about how Tezos continues to take shape across the Asia Pacific region.
Imran returns to share what the TZAPAC team has been working on as 2026 begins, from ecosystem programs and regional initiatives to the next cohort of Fortify Labs projects. Together, they explore how builders’ needs are changing, what kinds of ideas are emerging, and how hands-on support can make the difference between an early concept and a real product.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Powered by beehiiv
After a few quieter weeks at the start of the year, things are moving in very different directions at once. This week, protocol research is looking years ahead, asking what it means to prepare Tezos for a post-quantum world. Additionally, the ecosystem is packing its bags for ETHDenver, ready for handshakes, coffee meetups, and real conversations with the community face-to-face.
And in between, we’re seeing entirely new initiatives launch, like a uranium-focused podcast that zooms out from charts and tokens to talk about global energy policy and long-term supply.
This week’s edition moves between those layers. Long-term security, near-term community momentum, and the projects pushing the ecosystem forward in their own way.
Let’s get into it.
Protocol “U” Previewed: A First Step Towards Quantum Readiness
Last week, Nomadic Labs shared a preview on Tezos Agora of the next protocol proposal, currently referred to as “U.”
At first glance, it might not sound exciting. Quantum-resistant signatures. Feature flags. Cryptographic standards. Not exactly headline-grabbing stuff.
But this is one of those moments that matters precisely because it is happening early.
Blockchains rely on public key cryptography. Today, that cryptography is secure. Tomorrow? With sufficiently advanced quantum computers, that assumption could change. In theory, a powerful enough machine could derive a private key from a public key. That is not an immediate threat. But it is a real long-term consideration for every network that intends to be around for decades.
Tezos is choosing to prepare now, not later.
The important thing to understand is this: nothing is breaking, and no one needs to rush to do anything.
Elliptic curve signatures remain safe today. The upcoming proposal does not deprecate them. It does not force users to migrate. It does not disrupt wallets or custody systems.
Instead, “U” introduces the groundwork.
Specifically, it integrates ML-DSA-44, a post-quantum signature scheme standardized by NIST. On Tezos, this would appear as a new account type: tz5.
Behind the scenes, the protocol will support:
Transfers, contract calls, delegation, and staking with tz5 accounts
A formally verified Rust implementation
A feature flag that keeps it deployed but not yet user-accessible
For now, baking and native multisig remain on existing account types. Nothing changes operationally.
This is infrastructure being quietly installed before anyone needs to flip the switch.
Why Do It This Way?
Cryptographic migrations are not hard technically. They are hard socially.
Wallets need to integrate new signing schemes. Custodians need to upgrade infrastructure. Tooling needs to adapt. Users need time to understand what they are doing.
That coordination cannot happen overnight. And if the industry ever reaches a point where migration becomes urgent, it will already be too late to begin calmly planning.
By starting now, Tezos gives the ecosystem breathing room as an ounce of prevention is worth a pound in cure.
Future upgrades are expected to introduce stateful addresses, allowing multiple keys to attach to the same account. That means users could eventually add a post-quantum backup key without losing address history. For artists, collectors, DAOs, and long-lived accounts, that continuity matters.
Tezos has always taken the long view. Twenty upgrades in, the network continues to evolve without disruption. “U” follows that same philosophy.
It is not flashy. It does not change your wallet experience tomorrow. It does not alter how you stake, trade, or build this week.
But it signals something important: this network intends to stay secure not just for the next cycle, but for the next era of computing.
That is the kind of preparation you want to see long before it becomes urgent.
The Tezos Community Heads to ETHDenver 2026
Next up, while some teams are thinking decades ahead, others are packing their bags for next week.
The Tezos ecosystem is heading to ETHDenver.
If you are in Denver, make sure to swing by the Tezos booth. Full details are coming soon, but expect conversations, a bit of swag, and a few surprises along the way.
A strong group of builders will be around the Etherlink booth as well, so it is a great chance to meet the people shipping the infrastructure and applications that many of us talk about every week. Stop by, say hello, and put faces to the names.
And if you are looking for a proper start to your morning, the Tezos Breakfast Club returns:
🗓️ Tuesday, February 17 | 10:00 AM–12:30 PM (GMT-7)📍 The Wild, Denver
Coffee, pastries, and time to connect before the day kicks off.
Denver always has a way of bringing the ecosystem together. If you are attending, this is your invitation!
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Critical Mass Episode 1 Launches with the World Nuclear Association
There’s something fitting about this next story coming from the uranium corner of the ecosystem.
This week, Uranium.io officially launched a brand new show called Critical Mass, a podcast focused on nuclear energy, policy, and the forces shaping the future of the sector.
Episode one opens with a heavyweight guest: Sama Bilbao y León, Director General of the World Nuclear Association.
The conversation dives straight into the landmark declaration signed by 33 countries pledging to scale nuclear power. It unpacks what is actually driving this renewed momentum and why today’s nuclear renaissance looks fundamentally different from past cycles.
Here’s what they cover:
• The global pledge to triple nuclear capacity• Shifting public opinion around nuclear energy• The role of small modular reactors versus large-scale builds• Which regions are moving fastest and what policies are accelerating change
For anyone following uranium markets, energy infrastructure, or the broader macro context behind tokenized commodities, this podcast is a must-follow.
Listen to Episode 1 on your favorite platform.
Events
Big conference days tend to start fast, and ETHDenver is no exception. To make the morning a little easier, the Tezos Breakfast Club is back with a relaxed meetup designed to fuel conversations before the day gets busy.
If you skipped the hotel breakfast or just want a familiar place to land, this is a low-key stop for the Tezos community to connect over coffee and pastries before heading into the conference.
What to Expect
Complimentary coffee and fresh baked goods
Casual conversations about Tezos, Etherlink, and what people are building
Exclusive giveaways for attendees
A friendly starting point to ease into the ETHDenver schedule
The Breakfast Club is meant to stay simple. No panels, no presentations, just a chance to catch up with builders, artists, and ecosystem teams in a comfortable setting.
Event Details
Location: The Wild, 1660 Wynkoop St Suite 100, Denver, CO
When: During ETHDenver week
Registration: Spots are limited, so early sign-up is recommended
Grab a coffee, grab a pastry, and start your ETHDenver week with good conversations and familiar faces.
One More Thing…
We’re giving first details exclusively to you, our loyal subscribers, more information will be revealed in the near future, but save the date for Tez/Dev 2026!
🔴 Now Streaming: Inside TZ APAC and the Next Fortify Labs Cohort
This week on TezTalks Live, host Stu is joined by Imran Haqeem, Deputy Head of Programs at TZAPAC, for a wide-ranging conversation about how Tezos continues to take shape across the Asia Pacific region.
Imran returns to share what the TZAPAC team has been working on as 2026 begins, from ecosystem programs and regional initiatives to the next cohort of Fortify Labs projects. Together, they explore how builders’ needs are changing, what kinds of ideas are emerging, and how hands-on support can make the difference between an early concept and a real product.
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
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When People Use Tech for Good
Examples of How Tezos Has Empowered Acts of Charity
The internet can seem like a darker place with each passing year, but there are moments when technology enables genuinely good things to happen. Times when a feature reveals a meaningful use case. Most importantly, there are moments when technology empowers people to help people.
As someone who has often been taken advantage of for being “too kind”, over the years, that tendency has come at a cost, but it also taught me to be cautious of systems, narratives, and spaces that reward performative values more than real ones. That is why the Tezos ecosystem continues to feel like a home for me.
Again and again, I have witnessed artists and builders respond to moments of real human need, not with virtue signals, but through virtuous action. Long before market narratives, before trends, before attention, there was a recurring pattern I could not ignore. When people were hurting, the Tezos community did not stop at thoughts and prayers. They organized. They built. They gave in ways that would not have been possible without the underlying technology.
That constant grassroots activism is one of the reasons I have continued to show up every day since the earliest days of Tezos. Not because the blockchain is perfect, and certainly not because of watching people get rich, but because I kept encountering individuals who were, in many ways, even more morally driven than I am. People who are likely tired of being taken advantage of, too, yet unwilling to sacrifice their principles to get ahead.
In a digital landscape that often feels chaotic, extractive, and transactional, Tezos remains one of the few places online where I am consistently inspired and challenged to become a better person.
This reflection focuses on that goodness. On how Tezos technology, when paired with art and collective action, has repeatedly created real-world impact during times of need.
Art as Infrastructure for Care
In moments of crisis, people need to act quickly, efficiently, and collectively.
Tezos enables that formula. It empowers people to organize without permission and direct resources where they are needed most. Unique smart contracts can even be deployed that remove trust from the accounting and auto-split deposits, sending funds raised directly to the people in need. This enables people to also raise funds by minting and collecting art on Tezos and has become a common mechanism for giving and receiving aid within the community.
Whether responding to natural disasters, war, displacement, censorship, or economic instability, Tezos-based initiatives have repeatedly transformed creative energy into tangible relief. Funds raised are transparent, trackable, and secure. Distribution is visible. Participation is open.
It is a rare alignment where artists volunteer their talents, collectors step into philanthropic roles, and those in need can mobilize through permissionless infrastructure. Functional forces for good are enabled by tools many dismiss as “tech bro” experiments.
When Disaster Strikes, the Network Responds
After devastating earthquakes in Turkey, Tezos artists rallied to raise significant funds for relief efforts. Collections were organized rapidly. Artists donated work. Collectors showed up. Proceeds were moved directly and transparently to support victims.
The same pattern emerged during a global conflict. When Ukraine was invaded, the Tezos NFT community mobilized within hours. Artists across borders contributed work. Collectors responded with urgency. Tens of thousands of tez were raised within days.
Similar efforts followed for Pakistan during catastrophic flooding, for Brazilian artists navigating systemic challenges, for Iranian creators facing censorship and connectivity shutdowns, and for a residency lost to the Patagonia forest fires. In several cases, the blockchain itself became a lifeline, a way to bypass broken systems and keep creative voices active and supported.
These were not isolated moments. They were recurring responses.
Why Tezos Made This Possible
The technology matters most when it enables people to support one another more effectively. Low transaction costs make participation accessible. Artists are not priced out of helping. Collectors are not discouraged from engaging repeatedly.
On-chain transparency builds trust. Contributors can see where funds are going. Communities can hold themselves accountable. Permissionless tooling allows initiatives to emerge organically. No central authority must approve time-sensitive acts of compassion.
Tezos does not force these outcomes. It makes them feasible and attracts people inclined to act on them.
Community Shapes The Protocol
Across these examples, what stands out most is not the tech stack. It is the people and the use cases they reveal.
Curators are organizing under pressure. Artists are donating work without hesitation. Collectors are giving quietly and consistently. Builders are keeping platforms operational and even expanding.
Again and again, no matter what happens to “the market”, the Tezos community continues to treat care as a shared responsibility. The chain becomes a meeting point for collaboration and shared growth instead of another battleground.
This is what blockchain looks like when the community functions as the primary layer using the technology to empower each other rather than compete.
Building Toward a Better Physical World
When blockchain helps improve the physical world, everyone benefits. If we can make that benefit louder than the negative associations, we start to have a chance at true adoption again.
Blockchain alone will not save the world. Art alone will not resolve every crisis. Together, when guided by intention, they create new pathways for action.
Tezos has demonstrated that decentralized tools can support human-centered outcomes. Art can fund relief. Communities can mobilize without permission. Digital creativity can extend beyond borders and limitations into meaningful physical impact.
If the future of blockchain is worth building, it looks like this. For my part, I will keep showing up, contributing where I can, and standing alongside the people who continue proving that technology is at its best when it helps us take care of one another.
When People Use Tech For Good was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The internet can seem like a darker place with each passing year, but there are moments when technology enables genuinely good things to happen. Times when a feature reveals a meaningful use case. Most importantly, there are moments when technology empowers people to help people.
As someone who has often been taken advantage of for being “too kind”, over the years, that tendency has come at a cost, but it also taught me to be cautious of systems, narratives, and spaces that reward performative values more than real ones. That is why the Tezos ecosystem continues to feel like a home for me.
Again and again, I have witnessed artists and builders respond to moments of real human need, not with virtue signals, but through virtuous action. Long before market narratives, before trends, before attention, there was a recurring pattern I could not ignore. When people were hurting, the Tezos community did not stop at thoughts and prayers. They organized. They built. They gave in ways that would not have been possible without the underlying technology.
That constant grassroots activism is one of the reasons I have continued to show up every day since the earliest days of Tezos. Not because the blockchain is perfect, and certainly not because of watching people get rich, but because I kept encountering individuals who were, in many ways, even more morally driven than I am. People who are likely tired of being taken advantage of, too, yet unwilling to sacrifice their principles to get ahead.
In a digital landscape that often feels chaotic, extractive, and transactional, Tezos remains one of the few places online where I am consistently inspired and challenged to become a better person.
This reflection focuses on that goodness. On how Tezos technology, when paired with art and collective action, has repeatedly created real-world impact during times of need.
Art as Infrastructure for Care
In moments of crisis, people need to act quickly, efficiently, and collectively.
Tezos enables that formula. It empowers people to organize without permission and direct resources where they are needed most. Unique smart contracts can even be deployed that remove trust from the accounting and auto-split deposits, sending funds raised directly to the people in need. This enables people to also raise funds by minting and collecting art on Tezos and has become a common mechanism for giving and receiving aid within the community.
Whether responding to natural disasters, war, displacement, censorship, or economic instability, Tezos-based initiatives have repeatedly transformed creative energy into tangible relief. Funds raised are transparent, trackable, and secure. Distribution is visible. Participation is open.
It is a rare alignment where artists volunteer their talents, collectors step into philanthropic roles, and those in need can mobilize through permissionless infrastructure. Functional forces for good are enabled by tools many dismiss as “tech bro” experiments.
When Disaster Strikes, the Network Responds
After devastating earthquakes in Turkey, Tezos artists rallied to raise significant funds for relief efforts. Collections were organized rapidly. Artists donated work. Collectors showed up. Proceeds were moved directly and transparently to support victims.
The same pattern emerged during a global conflict. When Ukraine was invaded, the Tezos NFT community mobilized within hours. Artists across borders contributed work. Collectors responded with urgency. Tens of thousands of tez were raised within days.
Similar efforts followed for Pakistan during catastrophic flooding, for Brazilian artists navigating systemic challenges, for Iranian creators facing censorship and connectivity shutdowns, and for a residency lost to the Patagonia forest fires. In several cases, the blockchain itself became a lifeline, a way to bypass broken systems and keep creative voices active and supported.
These were not isolated moments. They were recurring responses.
Why Tezos Made This Possible
The technology matters most when it enables people to support one another more effectively. Low transaction costs make participation accessible. Artists are not priced out of helping. Collectors are not discouraged from engaging repeatedly.
On-chain transparency builds trust. Contributors can see where funds are going. Communities can hold themselves accountable. Permissionless tooling allows initiatives to emerge organically. No central authority must approve time-sensitive acts of compassion.
Tezos does not force these outcomes. It makes them feasible and attracts people inclined to act on them.
Community Shapes The Protocol
Across these examples, what stands out most is not the tech stack. It is the people and the use cases they reveal.
Curators are organizing under pressure. Artists are donating work without hesitation. Collectors are giving quietly and consistently. Builders are keeping platforms operational and even expanding.
Again and again, no matter what happens to “the market”, the Tezos community continues to treat care as a shared responsibility. The chain becomes a meeting point for collaboration and shared growth instead of another battleground.
This is what blockchain looks like when the community functions as the primary layer using the technology to empower each other rather than compete.
Building Toward a Better Physical World
When blockchain helps improve the physical world, everyone benefits. If we can make that benefit louder than the negative associations, we start to have a chance at true adoption again.
Blockchain alone will not save the world. Art alone will not resolve every crisis. Together, when guided by intention, they create new pathways for action.
Tezos has demonstrated that decentralized tools can support human-centered outcomes. Art can fund relief. Communities can mobilize without permission. Digital creativity can extend beyond borders and limitations into meaningful physical impact.
If the future of blockchain is worth building, it looks like this. For my part, I will keep showing up, contributing where I can, and standing alongside the people who continue proving that technology is at its best when it helps us take care of one another.
When People Use Tech For Good was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Month At a Glance — January 2026
A quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones within the Tezos ecosystem for January 2026.
Welcome to our latest issue, Month At A Glance (January 2026), where we give a quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones in the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.
January carried a strong sense of infrastructure maturing across the ecosystem. The month leaned into core protocol progress, deeper scaling groundwork, and continued improvements to performance and developer environments. Alongside that, steady movement across tooling, integrations, and research signaled an ecosystem continuing to build with a long-term view, focusing less on noise and more on strengthening the foundations that future growth depends on.
Let’s break it all down.
Ecosystem Insights
Tallinn Goes Live — Tezos Reaches 20 Protocol Upgrades
On January 24, 2026, the Tallinn protocol upgrade activated on Tezos mainnet, marking the network’s 20th protocol upgrade. It’s another example of the upgrade cycle Tezos has settled into over the years — proposals move through governance, bakers vote, and the network upgrades without disruption.
Tallinn focuses on three practical areas: speed, security, and storage efficiency. Layer 1 block time drops from 8 seconds to 6 seconds, which improves transaction responsiveness and shortens finality time, while also benefiting Layer 2 systems like Etherlink that rely on L1 block inclusion for data publication.
The upgrade also introduces all-baker attestation (once enough bakers adopt tz4 consensus keys), improving security and making rewards more predictable through BLS signature aggregation. On the application side, the new Address Indexing Registry can significantly reduce storage requirements for large Michelson applications, which is especially relevant for apps managing large address datasets like NFT platforms or large-scale financial infrastructure.
Tezlink Shadownet Launch
Shortly after the Tallinn upgrade, Tezlink Shadownet went live as the first public test network for Tezlink, bringing the Michelson runtime for the Tezos X roadmap into a live testing environment for builders. The focus here is simple: give developers a place to experiment with running Michelson-based applications in a higher scalability environment while keeping compatibility with existing Tezos development workflows.
In practice, this means many contracts written for Layer 1 using Michelson, SmartPy, or Ligo can be deployed and tested on Tezlink Shadownet with minimal changes. The environment supports common features like smart contract deployment, calls, views, big maps, and internal operations, while intentionally excluding Layer 1 consensus features like delegation or voting, which don’t apply in a rollup context.
The current Tezlink Shadownet testnet runs as a single-runtime environment. The next planned milestone is a new testnet phase where Tezlink and Etherlink run side by side on the same rollup, allowing testing of cross-runtime interactions as the multi-runtime Tezos X architecture continues to take shape. Builders interested in Tezlink can already start deploying contracts, testing workflows, and sharing feedback through the dedicated Tezlink channel in the Tezos Discord as this part of the stack evolves.
Etherlink Introduced Instant Confirmations
January also brought a major performance milestone for Etherlink with the introduction of Instant Confirmations, reducing confirmation latency from roughly ~500ms down to under 50ms. Instead of applications reacting only after block production, transactions can now return a receipt almost immediately once the sequencer commits to including them in the next block.
The practical impact here is about shrinking the remaining execution uncertainty window and moving closer to real-time on-chain interactions. Lower latency improves trading efficiency in DeFi, enables more responsive gaming and interactive applications, and supports faster automated and agent-driven payment flows.
Instant Confirmations don’t change Etherlink’s finality model, with full settlement still anchored to Tezos Layer 1, but they significantly improve responsiveness at the execution layer. The feature is currently experimental, with feedback from builders expected to help shape how it evolves going forward.
News From The Tezos Ecosystem: Quick Bits
Beyond those insights, the ecosystem saw plenty of other noteworthy developments worth a quick look:
Tezos Baking Portal Goes LiveThe Tezos Baking Portal went live, bringing baker-focused resources into a single hub, including network stats, setup and operations guides (keys, monitoring, testnets), a governance overview, and a curated baking tool directory.
Meria Joined Tezos as a BakerMeria joined the Tezos network as a baker, contributing to network consensus while expanding access to on-chain staking through its validator infrastructure and regulated platform.
Etherlink Integrated with Ledgerhttps://x.com/etherlink/status/2016914732578648556
TenX Published a Research Thesis on TezosTenX Protocols published a research report outlining its long-term thesis on Tezos, focusing on governance-led design, validator economics, and long-term network durability. The report also highlights Tezos’ scaling direction through smart rollups, the Data Availability Layer, and Etherlink as part of its broader technical roadmap.
Events
Artz Fridays New Year’s Community Call — January 2nd
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — January 6th
Artz Fridays w LMDesigns8 — January 9th
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — January 13th
Artz Fridays w Bosque Gracias — January 16th
Tuesday🎙Tezday w Ivana on the block — January 20th
Artz Fridays w Victor Acevedi — January 23rd
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — January 27th
Artz Fridays January’s Community Call — January 30th
Stay in the Conversation, Stay in the Know
Tezos Commons hosts a variety of community-oriented events and content. From podcasts, X-spaces, and long-form content, there’s something for everyone.
TezTalks Live
TezTalks Radio
X Spaces
X Shorts
Baking Sheet Newsletter
In-Depth Articles
You can also contact us on X or via email at social@tezoscommons.org.
Month At A Glance — January 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Welcome to our latest issue, Month At A Glance (January 2026), where we give a quick rundown of the latest happenings and significant milestones in the Tezos ecosystem on a monthly cadence.
January carried a strong sense of infrastructure maturing across the ecosystem. The month leaned into core protocol progress, deeper scaling groundwork, and continued improvements to performance and developer environments. Alongside that, steady movement across tooling, integrations, and research signaled an ecosystem continuing to build with a long-term view, focusing less on noise and more on strengthening the foundations that future growth depends on.
Let’s break it all down.
Ecosystem Insights
Tallinn Goes Live — Tezos Reaches 20 Protocol Upgrades
On January 24, 2026, the Tallinn protocol upgrade activated on Tezos mainnet, marking the network’s 20th protocol upgrade. It’s another example of the upgrade cycle Tezos has settled into over the years — proposals move through governance, bakers vote, and the network upgrades without disruption.
Tallinn focuses on three practical areas: speed, security, and storage efficiency. Layer 1 block time drops from 8 seconds to 6 seconds, which improves transaction responsiveness and shortens finality time, while also benefiting Layer 2 systems like Etherlink that rely on L1 block inclusion for data publication.
The upgrade also introduces all-baker attestation (once enough bakers adopt tz4 consensus keys), improving security and making rewards more predictable through BLS signature aggregation. On the application side, the new Address Indexing Registry can significantly reduce storage requirements for large Michelson applications, which is especially relevant for apps managing large address datasets like NFT platforms or large-scale financial infrastructure.
Tezlink Shadownet Launch
Shortly after the Tallinn upgrade, Tezlink Shadownet went live as the first public test network for Tezlink, bringing the Michelson runtime for the Tezos X roadmap into a live testing environment for builders. The focus here is simple: give developers a place to experiment with running Michelson-based applications in a higher scalability environment while keeping compatibility with existing Tezos development workflows.
In practice, this means many contracts written for Layer 1 using Michelson, SmartPy, or Ligo can be deployed and tested on Tezlink Shadownet with minimal changes. The environment supports common features like smart contract deployment, calls, views, big maps, and internal operations, while intentionally excluding Layer 1 consensus features like delegation or voting, which don’t apply in a rollup context.
The current Tezlink Shadownet testnet runs as a single-runtime environment. The next planned milestone is a new testnet phase where Tezlink and Etherlink run side by side on the same rollup, allowing testing of cross-runtime interactions as the multi-runtime Tezos X architecture continues to take shape. Builders interested in Tezlink can already start deploying contracts, testing workflows, and sharing feedback through the dedicated Tezlink channel in the Tezos Discord as this part of the stack evolves.
Etherlink Introduced Instant Confirmations
January also brought a major performance milestone for Etherlink with the introduction of Instant Confirmations, reducing confirmation latency from roughly ~500ms down to under 50ms. Instead of applications reacting only after block production, transactions can now return a receipt almost immediately once the sequencer commits to including them in the next block.
The practical impact here is about shrinking the remaining execution uncertainty window and moving closer to real-time on-chain interactions. Lower latency improves trading efficiency in DeFi, enables more responsive gaming and interactive applications, and supports faster automated and agent-driven payment flows.
Instant Confirmations don’t change Etherlink’s finality model, with full settlement still anchored to Tezos Layer 1, but they significantly improve responsiveness at the execution layer. The feature is currently experimental, with feedback from builders expected to help shape how it evolves going forward.
News From The Tezos Ecosystem: Quick Bits
Beyond those insights, the ecosystem saw plenty of other noteworthy developments worth a quick look:
Tezos Baking Portal Goes LiveThe Tezos Baking Portal went live, bringing baker-focused resources into a single hub, including network stats, setup and operations guides (keys, monitoring, testnets), a governance overview, and a curated baking tool directory.
Meria Joined Tezos as a BakerMeria joined the Tezos network as a baker, contributing to network consensus while expanding access to on-chain staking through its validator infrastructure and regulated platform.
Etherlink Integrated with Ledgerhttps://x.com/etherlink/status/2016914732578648556
TenX Published a Research Thesis on TezosTenX Protocols published a research report outlining its long-term thesis on Tezos, focusing on governance-led design, validator economics, and long-term network durability. The report also highlights Tezos’ scaling direction through smart rollups, the Data Availability Layer, and Etherlink as part of its broader technical roadmap.
Events
Artz Fridays New Year’s Community Call — January 2nd
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — January 6th
Artz Fridays w LMDesigns8 — January 9th
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — January 13th
Artz Fridays w Bosque Gracias — January 16th
Tuesday🎙Tezday w Ivana on the block — January 20th
Artz Fridays w Victor Acevedi — January 23rd
Tuesday🎙Tezday Community Call — January 27th
Artz Fridays January’s Community Call — January 30th
Stay in the Conversation, Stay in the Know
Tezos Commons hosts a variety of community-oriented events and content. From podcasts, X-spaces, and long-form content, there’s something for everyone.
TezTalks Live
TezTalks Radio
X Spaces
X Shorts
Baking Sheet Newsletter
In-Depth Articles
You can also contact us on X or via email at social@tezoscommons.org.
Month At A Glance — January 2026 was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
One Love DAO
A Wholesome Art Community
When I was in Miami for Art Basel 2025, I was overwhelmed by a unique sense of hope, but it wasn’t the art on the main Art Basel floor that sparked those emotions. In fact, I spent nearly a full week in Miami before even stepping onto the official fairgrounds. That time was filled with conversations, introductions, and unexpected moments of connection. I was meeting new people at a pace I had not experienced since my freshman year of college.
Parts of that journey were covered in a recent article, yet there was still more from Miami Art Week I wanted to share. One encounter, in particular, set the tone for the rest of the week. It was my introduction to a DAO-based artist community that immediately felt familiar, almost inevitable. It felt like crossing paths with people I was always meant to find.
That feeling began the moment I walked into the Gates Hotel. Before a single formal event or panel, I was greeted by digital and physical artworks spread throughout the lobby. The space felt alive. A central wall featured dozens of Metasil digital art frames, each displaying a carefully curated selection of work. The presentation was immersive without being overwhelming, intentional without feeling rigid. A key theme ran through it all, one that felt deeply familiar to me: One Love. One HeArt.
As both a journalist and an artist, my curiosity was instantly activated. The lobby itself had become a gallery, reassuring that art, community, and presence were central to the week ahead. The digital works radiated positive, uplifting energy into a very real physical space.
Finding Immediate Alignment
Shortly after exploring the lobby, I was introduced to the founder of One Love DAO, Jenifer, also known by her artist name SirenAI. From the first conversation, there was an easy sense of relatability. Our dialogue moved naturally between art, technology, community building, and even anatomical hearts in artwork. There was no pitch and no pretense, only a shared language rooted in experience and intention.
What stood out most was how grounded those conversations felt. Through the event, Jenifer articulated ideas clearly under pressure while calmly taking action whenever something needed attention. It was an immediate impression of thoughtful leadership backed by real execution. After spending even a short amount of time around her and the surrounding artists, it became clear that One Love Art DAO is not an abstract idea. This is an organized, active community already inspiring the people it touches and achieving its goals. Naturally, I wanted to know more and felt a genuine pull to get involved.
The Origins and Mission of One Love Art DAO
One Love Art DAO emerged from a simple but powerful idea. Artists thrive when they are supported, seen, and connected in meaningful ways. The DAO was built to foster collaboration and shared growth, while encouraging artists to explore across mediums, platforms, and innovative new paths.
At its core, the mission centers on unity, creative freedom, and collective progress. Governance and decentralization matter here, but they never overshadow the human element. The DAO exists to serve its artists, not the other way around. That balance is reflected throughout both its structure and culture. As a nonprofit dedicated to empowering artists and building community, One Love Art DAO offers a grounded example of what a Web3-based organization can become when creativity, innovation, and collaboration are treated as shared values rather than buzzwords.
Today, the DAO facilitates exhibitions, residencies, workshops, and even scholarships. It stands as a rare and valuable example of what decentralized, democratic communities can look like when aligned around care, intention, and long-term thinking.
Artists, Exhibits, and Collective Energy
Now back to the storytelling. Throughout the week, I had the opportunity to experience the work of artists within the One Love Art DAO. The diversity of styles, disciplines, and perspectives was immediately apparent. Digital art, physical pieces, installations, and collaborative works all coexisted naturally, without hierarchy or separation.
What made the experience especially compelling was the dynamic between the artists themselves. Support was visible, genuine, and constant. They gravitated toward shared momentum. Accomplishments were treated as collective wins, reinforcing the idea that progress within the DAO lifts everyone involved.
One moment in particular caught me off guard. I opened my laptop to collect Me Time by DAO member and painter MykNash. The room erupted in cheers as I clicked collect, not because of the price, but because the work was seen, valued, and clearly moving people, myself included, in real life. That shared acknowledgment, that digital art mattered in that moment, lit up the entire space and etched itself into memory.
Following Up and Staying Tuned Into One Love DAO
The One Love Art DAO website serves as a clear entry point into the community. It outlines the DAO’s values, mission, and opportunities for artists to participate, while highlighting past exhibitions, partnerships, and cultural activations. Rather than acting as a static promotional page, the site functions more like a map, helping newcomers understand how the DAO operates and where they can plug in. It also includes an application for artists interested in becoming members.
For active participants, however, the true heartbeat of One Love Art DAO lives inside its Discord server. This is where artists communicate daily, share works in progress, announce open calls, coordinate exhibitions, and support one another in real time. The Discord functions as both a studio and a town hall, reinforcing the DAO’s emphasis on accessibility, transparency, and collective momentum. While the server is open to the public, members gain access to additional resources and private channels.
Open Calls, Events, and Ongoing Initiatives
One Love Art DAO consistently creates opportunities for artists to show up, contribute, and be seen, bringing real-world presence to a growing digital art movement. Open calls circulate regularly across social channels, the DAO’s Discord, and platforms like Webbie Social, inviting members to participate in curated drops, themed exhibitions, and collaborative showcases, both online and in person, including the Miami exhibition I experienced firsthand.
The DAO has built a strong presence at real-world events by investing in thoughtful, impactful ways to present digital art. From Miami Art Week activations to major Web3 conferences, One Love Art DAO continues to prioritize physical gathering alongside on-chain expression. Upcoming initiatives such as Zen Zone at ETHDenver reflect this approach, blending art, mindfulness, and community within high-energy environments.
The One Love Art Gallery on OBJKT
A cornerstone of One Love Art DAO is the One Love Art Gallery on OBJKT. Built on the Tezos blockchain, the gallery functions as a living exhibition space rather than a single moment in time. It allows the DAO to present its artists inclusively, while preserving individual works and showcasing the One Love story as it unfolds.
OBJKT’s dedicated gallery structure plays an important role in this. It gives One Love Art DAO a persistent, discoverable home where exhibitions can live beyond a single drop window. That permanence matters. It allows artists to be contextualized alongside one another, reinforcing collective identity while honoring individual voices. Over time, the gallery becomes an archive of growth, collaboration, and shared milestones.
Tezos may have its technical benefits, but the activity here is likely based on an aligned foundation. The broader Tezos art ecosystem has long emphasized sustainability, accessibility, and artist-first values. That ethos mirrors the principles at the heart of One Love Art DAO, where community, respect, and long-term thinking consistently outweigh short-term hype.
Exhibitions hosted through the gallery reflect that alignment. A wide range of artistic styles and perspectives come together under a cohesive curatorial thread rooted in unity and shared expression. For collectors, curators, and artists exploring the Tezos ecosystem, The One Love Art Gallery offers a clear window into what happens when infrastructure, values, and community genuinely move in sync. You can also find the works shown at the Gates Hotel exhibition, “Listen To Your Heart”, here.
Before You Dive Deeper Into One Love
My introduction to One Love Art DAO during Miami Art Week felt like one of the defining highlights of 2025 for me. It served as a reminder of why these spaces matter and why I continue to believe in the potential of Web3. When artists are enabled, empowered, and supported with care, they come together around shared values and mutual respect. When you give them tools to organize fairly, collaborate openly, and lead with heart, something rare and powerful emerges: art that transcends.
One Love Art DAO represents a version of Web3 that prioritizes people, creativity, and connection. It is a community built with intention, and one I look forward to continuing to learn from and grow alongside. I hope anyone reading this will feel inspired to join that journey too.
One Love DAO was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
When I was in Miami for Art Basel 2025, I was overwhelmed by a unique sense of hope, but it wasn’t the art on the main Art Basel floor that sparked those emotions. In fact, I spent nearly a full week in Miami before even stepping onto the official fairgrounds. That time was filled with conversations, introductions, and unexpected moments of connection. I was meeting new people at a pace I had not experienced since my freshman year of college.
Parts of that journey were covered in a recent article, yet there was still more from Miami Art Week I wanted to share. One encounter, in particular, set the tone for the rest of the week. It was my introduction to a DAO-based artist community that immediately felt familiar, almost inevitable. It felt like crossing paths with people I was always meant to find.
That feeling began the moment I walked into the Gates Hotel. Before a single formal event or panel, I was greeted by digital and physical artworks spread throughout the lobby. The space felt alive. A central wall featured dozens of Metasil digital art frames, each displaying a carefully curated selection of work. The presentation was immersive without being overwhelming, intentional without feeling rigid. A key theme ran through it all, one that felt deeply familiar to me: One Love. One HeArt.
As both a journalist and an artist, my curiosity was instantly activated. The lobby itself had become a gallery, reassuring that art, community, and presence were central to the week ahead. The digital works radiated positive, uplifting energy into a very real physical space.
Finding Immediate Alignment
Shortly after exploring the lobby, I was introduced to the founder of One Love DAO, Jenifer, also known by her artist name SirenAI. From the first conversation, there was an easy sense of relatability. Our dialogue moved naturally between art, technology, community building, and even anatomical hearts in artwork. There was no pitch and no pretense, only a shared language rooted in experience and intention.
What stood out most was how grounded those conversations felt. Through the event, Jenifer articulated ideas clearly under pressure while calmly taking action whenever something needed attention. It was an immediate impression of thoughtful leadership backed by real execution. After spending even a short amount of time around her and the surrounding artists, it became clear that One Love Art DAO is not an abstract idea. This is an organized, active community already inspiring the people it touches and achieving its goals. Naturally, I wanted to know more and felt a genuine pull to get involved.
The Origins and Mission of One Love Art DAO
One Love Art DAO emerged from a simple but powerful idea. Artists thrive when they are supported, seen, and connected in meaningful ways. The DAO was built to foster collaboration and shared growth, while encouraging artists to explore across mediums, platforms, and innovative new paths.
At its core, the mission centers on unity, creative freedom, and collective progress. Governance and decentralization matter here, but they never overshadow the human element. The DAO exists to serve its artists, not the other way around. That balance is reflected throughout both its structure and culture. As a nonprofit dedicated to empowering artists and building community, One Love Art DAO offers a grounded example of what a Web3-based organization can become when creativity, innovation, and collaboration are treated as shared values rather than buzzwords.
Today, the DAO facilitates exhibitions, residencies, workshops, and even scholarships. It stands as a rare and valuable example of what decentralized, democratic communities can look like when aligned around care, intention, and long-term thinking.
Artists, Exhibits, and Collective Energy
Now back to the storytelling. Throughout the week, I had the opportunity to experience the work of artists within the One Love Art DAO. The diversity of styles, disciplines, and perspectives was immediately apparent. Digital art, physical pieces, installations, and collaborative works all coexisted naturally, without hierarchy or separation.
What made the experience especially compelling was the dynamic between the artists themselves. Support was visible, genuine, and constant. They gravitated toward shared momentum. Accomplishments were treated as collective wins, reinforcing the idea that progress within the DAO lifts everyone involved.
One moment in particular caught me off guard. I opened my laptop to collect Me Time by DAO member and painter MykNash. The room erupted in cheers as I clicked collect, not because of the price, but because the work was seen, valued, and clearly moving people, myself included, in real life. That shared acknowledgment, that digital art mattered in that moment, lit up the entire space and etched itself into memory.
Following Up and Staying Tuned Into One Love DAO
The One Love Art DAO website serves as a clear entry point into the community. It outlines the DAO’s values, mission, and opportunities for artists to participate, while highlighting past exhibitions, partnerships, and cultural activations. Rather than acting as a static promotional page, the site functions more like a map, helping newcomers understand how the DAO operates and where they can plug in. It also includes an application for artists interested in becoming members.
For active participants, however, the true heartbeat of One Love Art DAO lives inside its Discord server. This is where artists communicate daily, share works in progress, announce open calls, coordinate exhibitions, and support one another in real time. The Discord functions as both a studio and a town hall, reinforcing the DAO’s emphasis on accessibility, transparency, and collective momentum. While the server is open to the public, members gain access to additional resources and private channels.
Open Calls, Events, and Ongoing Initiatives
One Love Art DAO consistently creates opportunities for artists to show up, contribute, and be seen, bringing real-world presence to a growing digital art movement. Open calls circulate regularly across social channels, the DAO’s Discord, and platforms like Webbie Social, inviting members to participate in curated drops, themed exhibitions, and collaborative showcases, both online and in person, including the Miami exhibition I experienced firsthand.
The DAO has built a strong presence at real-world events by investing in thoughtful, impactful ways to present digital art. From Miami Art Week activations to major Web3 conferences, One Love Art DAO continues to prioritize physical gathering alongside on-chain expression. Upcoming initiatives such as Zen Zone at ETHDenver reflect this approach, blending art, mindfulness, and community within high-energy environments.
The One Love Art Gallery on OBJKT
A cornerstone of One Love Art DAO is the One Love Art Gallery on OBJKT. Built on the Tezos blockchain, the gallery functions as a living exhibition space rather than a single moment in time. It allows the DAO to present its artists inclusively, while preserving individual works and showcasing the One Love story as it unfolds.
OBJKT’s dedicated gallery structure plays an important role in this. It gives One Love Art DAO a persistent, discoverable home where exhibitions can live beyond a single drop window. That permanence matters. It allows artists to be contextualized alongside one another, reinforcing collective identity while honoring individual voices. Over time, the gallery becomes an archive of growth, collaboration, and shared milestones.
Tezos may have its technical benefits, but the activity here is likely based on an aligned foundation. The broader Tezos art ecosystem has long emphasized sustainability, accessibility, and artist-first values. That ethos mirrors the principles at the heart of One Love Art DAO, where community, respect, and long-term thinking consistently outweigh short-term hype.
Exhibitions hosted through the gallery reflect that alignment. A wide range of artistic styles and perspectives come together under a cohesive curatorial thread rooted in unity and shared expression. For collectors, curators, and artists exploring the Tezos ecosystem, The One Love Art Gallery offers a clear window into what happens when infrastructure, values, and community genuinely move in sync. You can also find the works shown at the Gates Hotel exhibition, “Listen To Your Heart”, here.
Before You Dive Deeper Into One Love
My introduction to One Love Art DAO during Miami Art Week felt like one of the defining highlights of 2025 for me. It served as a reminder of why these spaces matter and why I continue to believe in the potential of Web3. When artists are enabled, empowered, and supported with care, they come together around shared values and mutual respect. When you give them tools to organize fairly, collaborate openly, and lead with heart, something rare and powerful emerges: art that transcends.
One Love Art DAO represents a version of Web3 that prioritizes people, creativity, and connection. It is a community built with intention, and one I look forward to continuing to learn from and grow alongside. I hope anyone reading this will feel inspired to join that journey too.
One Love DAO was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
TezSign and the BLS Signer Era
A Tez Capital tool designed by bakers, for bakers
From the beginning, Tezos baking was designed to be open and flexible. Anyone with tez staked and the right setup can participate in helping secure the network. Over time, this led to a clear separation of responsibilities: the Baking Stack and the Signer.
The Baking Stack includes the node, baker daemon, and accuser. Together, they maintain blockchain state, propose blocks, produce attestations, and monitor for invalid behavior. This side has always been flexible, running on everything from Raspberry Pis to cloud VMs to dedicated servers.
The Signer is far more sensitive. It authorizes consensus participation and historically held both admin and consensus keys together, meaning a single device controlled everything. For this reason, signers were isolated and hardened. Individuals relied on Ledger devices, while larger operators used HSMs or cloud KMS solutions.
Recent protocol upgrades now allow bakers to separate admin keys from consensus keys. This keeps the admin key secure while the consensus key can live on dedicated signing hardware, opening the door to new solutions.
This setup worked when signing demands were low. But as Tezos evolved toward faster blocks and universal attestations, hardware signers like Ledger devices hit their limits, setting the stage for the BLS signer era (hello Raspberry Pi’s).
Why BLS Matters
BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) is a signature scheme already used by Ethereum’s consensus layer, Zcash, and other modern proof-of-stake systems. Its defining feature is signature aggregation, which allows multiple signatures to be combined into one.
Before BLS, each block required hundreds of individual attestation signatures, consuming significant bandwidth with only partial baker participation per block. With tz4 addresses using BLS, all those signatures compress into a single aggregated attestation. This means all bakers can now attest to every block while using less bandwidth.
The network-level benefits are substantial: stronger security guarantees, predictable rewards, lower node load, cleaner protocol logic, and native multisig accounts available exclusively for tz4. The upcoming Tallinn upgrade pushes this further with faster block times.
The protocol evolved. Signer infrastructure had to follow.
The New Signer Landscape
With Ledger no longer viable for tz4 baking, several signing alternatives are emerging. Some come from the core development team and others are community-driven.
Core development options include BLS Signer by Nomadic Labs, which runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero offering a low-cost dedicated hardware option currently in prototype, and Signatory by ECAD Labs, designed for institutional operators with cloud KMS and HSM support.
Community-driven alternatives include TezSign and Russignol. What makes TezSign particularly special is that it was community-funded through the Tezos Ecosystem DAO. This represents a true community effort to offer a new solution. Seeing the Community DAO being actively used in this way is very welcomed.
TezSign, developed by TEZ Capital, is the solution I currently use for my baking operations. Its tight integration with TezBake made installation and immediate use straightforward, and it’s what enabled my migration to BLS.
TezSign Deep Dive
TezSign is not a standalone tool. It is part of a broader operational stack designed by bakers, for bakers. At its core, TezSign handles consensus signing, TezBake orchestrates baking operations, and TezPay manages reward distribution. All components are designed to work together seamlessly.
As mentioned previously, what sets TezSign apart is its community-first approach. The TEZ Capital team provides active technical support through Discord and Telegram, making it probably the most accessible solution for bakers who need hands-on help. This matters especially for small and community bakers like me, who may not have dedicated infrastructure teams. TezBake has become a popular choice among small operators precisely because of this support structure, and TezSign integrates naturally into that workflow.
The design philosophy emphasizes minimal operational overhead, tight CLI integration, open-source transparency. Instead of building a generic signing platform, TEZ Capital focused on what bakers actually need to run stable infrastructure.
As Tezos moves fully into the BLS era, signers are no longer interchangeable accessories. They are core protocol infrastructure where operational correctness matters as much as cryptography. TezSign reflects a maturing baking ecosystem, one that is moving away from consumer hardware shortcuts and toward community supported infrastructure. As a community member, I couldn’t be happier with these initiatives.
TezSign by the Numbers
TezSign is written in Go and actively maintained with 24 releases to date and 64 commits. The project is licensed under SSPL (Server Side Public License), keeping it open and transparent.
On the hardware side, TezSign supports Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, Raspberry Pi 4, and Radxa Zero 3, with entry costs starting under $20 USD. The Raspberry Pi 5 is not recommended at this time.
The architecture is built around air-gapped security: keys live on isolated hardware connected to the host via USB through a custom wire protocol. This design is hardened against power loss corruption, meaning a sudden outage will not compromise your signing environment. TezSign also supports multi-device and multi-baker setups out of the box, with optional auto-unlock on boot for operational flexibility. At roughly 200MB, the image footprint is minimal compared to other solutions.
Where We Go From Here
The shift to BLS and tz4 marks a turning point for Tezos baking.
When Ledger couldn’t adapt, the ecosystem responded with better alternatives. Signers like TezSign emerged, making baking infrastructure more professional and accessible than before.
BLS already improves consensus efficiency through signature aggregation. Looking ahead, Tezos is exploring quantum resistance. According to my early research and speculation, future protocol upgrades could potentially introduce tz5 addresses using ML-DSA-44, a quantum resistant signature method approved by NIST. While tz4 optimizes consensus today, tz5 would aim to protect against tomorrow’s quantum threats.
From aggregated signatures to quantum-proof cryptography, Tezos is building infrastructure designed to last decades (or centuries).
TezSign and the BLS Signer Era was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
From the beginning, Tezos baking was designed to be open and flexible. Anyone with tez staked and the right setup can participate in helping secure the network. Over time, this led to a clear separation of responsibilities: the Baking Stack and the Signer.
The Baking Stack includes the node, baker daemon, and accuser. Together, they maintain blockchain state, propose blocks, produce attestations, and monitor for invalid behavior. This side has always been flexible, running on everything from Raspberry Pis to cloud VMs to dedicated servers.
The Signer is far more sensitive. It authorizes consensus participation and historically held both admin and consensus keys together, meaning a single device controlled everything. For this reason, signers were isolated and hardened. Individuals relied on Ledger devices, while larger operators used HSMs or cloud KMS solutions.
Recent protocol upgrades now allow bakers to separate admin keys from consensus keys. This keeps the admin key secure while the consensus key can live on dedicated signing hardware, opening the door to new solutions.
This setup worked when signing demands were low. But as Tezos evolved toward faster blocks and universal attestations, hardware signers like Ledger devices hit their limits, setting the stage for the BLS signer era (hello Raspberry Pi’s).
Why BLS Matters
BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) is a signature scheme already used by Ethereum’s consensus layer, Zcash, and other modern proof-of-stake systems. Its defining feature is signature aggregation, which allows multiple signatures to be combined into one.
Before BLS, each block required hundreds of individual attestation signatures, consuming significant bandwidth with only partial baker participation per block. With tz4 addresses using BLS, all those signatures compress into a single aggregated attestation. This means all bakers can now attest to every block while using less bandwidth.
The network-level benefits are substantial: stronger security guarantees, predictable rewards, lower node load, cleaner protocol logic, and native multisig accounts available exclusively for tz4. The upcoming Tallinn upgrade pushes this further with faster block times.
The protocol evolved. Signer infrastructure had to follow.
The New Signer Landscape
With Ledger no longer viable for tz4 baking, several signing alternatives are emerging. Some come from the core development team and others are community-driven.
Core development options include BLS Signer by Nomadic Labs, which runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero offering a low-cost dedicated hardware option currently in prototype, and Signatory by ECAD Labs, designed for institutional operators with cloud KMS and HSM support.
Community-driven alternatives include TezSign and Russignol. What makes TezSign particularly special is that it was community-funded through the Tezos Ecosystem DAO. This represents a true community effort to offer a new solution. Seeing the Community DAO being actively used in this way is very welcomed.
TezSign, developed by TEZ Capital, is the solution I currently use for my baking operations. Its tight integration with TezBake made installation and immediate use straightforward, and it’s what enabled my migration to BLS.
TezSign Deep Dive
TezSign is not a standalone tool. It is part of a broader operational stack designed by bakers, for bakers. At its core, TezSign handles consensus signing, TezBake orchestrates baking operations, and TezPay manages reward distribution. All components are designed to work together seamlessly.
As mentioned previously, what sets TezSign apart is its community-first approach. The TEZ Capital team provides active technical support through Discord and Telegram, making it probably the most accessible solution for bakers who need hands-on help. This matters especially for small and community bakers like me, who may not have dedicated infrastructure teams. TezBake has become a popular choice among small operators precisely because of this support structure, and TezSign integrates naturally into that workflow.
The design philosophy emphasizes minimal operational overhead, tight CLI integration, open-source transparency. Instead of building a generic signing platform, TEZ Capital focused on what bakers actually need to run stable infrastructure.
As Tezos moves fully into the BLS era, signers are no longer interchangeable accessories. They are core protocol infrastructure where operational correctness matters as much as cryptography. TezSign reflects a maturing baking ecosystem, one that is moving away from consumer hardware shortcuts and toward community supported infrastructure. As a community member, I couldn’t be happier with these initiatives.
TezSign by the Numbers
TezSign is written in Go and actively maintained with 24 releases to date and 64 commits. The project is licensed under SSPL (Server Side Public License), keeping it open and transparent.
On the hardware side, TezSign supports Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, Raspberry Pi 4, and Radxa Zero 3, with entry costs starting under $20 USD. The Raspberry Pi 5 is not recommended at this time.
The architecture is built around air-gapped security: keys live on isolated hardware connected to the host via USB through a custom wire protocol. This design is hardened against power loss corruption, meaning a sudden outage will not compromise your signing environment. TezSign also supports multi-device and multi-baker setups out of the box, with optional auto-unlock on boot for operational flexibility. At roughly 200MB, the image footprint is minimal compared to other solutions.
Where We Go From Here
The shift to BLS and tz4 marks a turning point for Tezos baking.
When Ledger couldn’t adapt, the ecosystem responded with better alternatives. Signers like TezSign emerged, making baking infrastructure more professional and accessible than before.
BLS already improves consensus efficiency through signature aggregation. Looking ahead, Tezos is exploring quantum resistance. According to my early research and speculation, future protocol upgrades could potentially introduce tz5 addresses using ML-DSA-44, a quantum resistant signature method approved by NIST. While tz4 optimizes consensus today, tz5 would aim to protect against tomorrow’s quantum threats.
From aggregated signatures to quantum-proof cryptography, Tezos is building infrastructure designed to last decades (or centuries).
TezSign and the BLS Signer Era was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Drop.art By ObjktLabs
While Others Dip, Objkt Continues To Ship
As more NFT marketplaces close up shop, art on Tezos continues to deliver. This persistence is not accidental. It reflects a deeper commitment to building an art-first ecosystem that prioritizes utility and accessibility. In moments like these, the strength of art on Tezos becomes clearer than ever.
While the broader market recalibrates, the Tezos ecosystem has remained focused on infrastructure, experimentation, and long-term sustainability. Artists continue to create. Builders continue to innovate. The protocol continues to upgrade, with new partnerships bringing fresh attention to the arts.
This is why there remains a significant opportunity to be a leading NFT marketplace, not for the speculation and fear of missing out that defined 2021, but for the sustained growth of the digital art movement itself. This is something the team behind Objkt understands. A team that has not only endured, but proven its staying power. New tools, new platforms, and new ideas have steadily expanded what artists and collectors can do on Tezos.
More Than A Marketplace
Objkt began as a response to a need. As Hic et Nunc catalyzed one of the earliest and most culturally significant NFT art movements, it also revealed the importance of resilient, permissionless infrastructure. When that chapter came to an end, Objkt emerged not just to fill a gap, but to carry the momentum forward.
Over time, objkt.com grew beyond its role as a marketplace. It became a central hub for discovering, collecting, and contextualizing art on Tezos. Features expanded. Tooling improved. The platform matured alongside its community.
Rather than freezing its scope, Objkt team, now known as “Objkt Labs”, has continued to ask what artists actually need next.
Bootloader: Generative Art Experimentation
One clear answer to that question arrived with Bootloader.
Bootloader created a space for artists to experiment openly with generative, code-based art. It encouraged play, iteration, and learning in a public sandbox. Artists could release collections while exposing the underlying systems that shaped each output.
Collectors, in turn, were invited into the process. Code was visible. Structure was legible. Yet the final artwork remained unknown until after the mint and reveal. Each mint became a moment where intention, logic, and chance met directly on-chain.
Bootloader expanded what generative art could feel like on Tezos by rethinking how users interact with it. You can learn more about Bootloader here.
Drop.Art For Blind Minting
For much of Tezos NFT history, launching a blind mint required more than an artistic vision. Artists often needed to partner with an independent developer to design custom smart contracts, manage reveal logic, and handle distribution. In many cases, this meant significant upfront development costs or long-term revenue splits, placing blind minting out of reach for most creators.
Drop.art changes that equation.
Designed to make blind minting approachable even for artists without technical backgrounds, drop.art replaces the need for bespoke infrastructure with a streamlined, artist-first setup. Where blind drops once required custom development, drop.art provides everything needed to launch a dedicated minting site.
Artists configure their drops by uploading artwork files and structured metadata using a CSV format. From there, drop.art handles contract deployment, minting logic, and reveals behind the scenes. Each drop deploys as its own FA2 contract, giving artists a standalone collection that lives naturally across the Tezos ecosystem and appears on marketplaces like objkt.com without additional setup.
The result is a dedicated minting page that feels familiar to collectors while remaining distinct to each project. Artists can focus on presentation rather than code, with support for staged drops, multiple pricing tiers, allowlists, and royalties.
For collectors, the experience is equally intentional. The minting flow feels familiar and aligned with existing Tezos tooling. At the same time, collectors are not limited to a single drop. Their drop.art profile includes a collection tab, activity history, and access to other live and upcoming drops, making it easy to explore and discover without leaving the platform. Secondary market activity naturally routes back through objkt.com.
This balance between focused minting and broader discovery reduces friction on both sides. Collectors know where they are and how to participate. Artists gain a turnkey solution that removes technical barriers while preserving independence and visibility.
Drop.art also includes a ghostnet environment for testing, allowing artists to fine-tune their setup before going live. This encourages thoughtful releases and lowers the risk for first-time creators experimenting with blind drops.
The TezPole Still Grows
Another distinctive element at drop.art is the Live Pole, a growing sculpture that reflects collective activity across the platform.
Each mint contributes to the pole, gradually shaping a shared structure that all can see and become part of. Artists and collectors earn “paint” through creating and collecting, which can be used to tag and draw on the pole, leaving visual traces of engagement over time.
The Live Pole functions as more than a novelty. It acts as a public ledger of interaction, and a nod of respect to a significant piece of Tezos culture, turning participation itself into a visible artifact. Instead of highlighting only finished collections, it captures the energy of the entire community mint by mint and tag by tag.
Why This Matters
Drop.art arrives at a moment when NFT ecosystems are being forced to prove what actually sustains them. As speculation cools and marketplaces quietly shut their doors, the question shifts from hype to whether meaningful experiences are still being built.
Blind minting reframes the relationship between artist and collector. It prioritizes intention before outcome and curiosity before confirmation. By extending this release model beyond generative art, drop.art opens the door for photographers, painters, illustrators, and mixed media artists to design drops without needing to know code.
What makes this especially impactful is how grounded the experience feels. Drop.art is not a detached experiment or a siloed platform. Artists can launch their own minting sites while remaining fully integrated into the objkt ecosystem. Collectors mint through dedicated drop pages, yet still see those works immediately reflected in profiles, collections, and marketplace discovery. Nothing feels fragmented, and nothing has to be rebuilt from scratch.
From objkt.com to Bootloader and now drop.art, the ObjktLabs team has continued to build while others have stepped away. Instead of chasing trends, they have expanded the tooling available to artists and collectors who are committed to the long term. This steady approach reflects an understanding that art communities evolve and that the infrastructure must evolve with them.
As Tezos continues to upgrade and attract renewed attention from the arts, drop.art serves as a reminder that progress is enabled through consistent, thoughtful shipping. It does not claim to define the future of art on Tezos. It simply adds another path forward. In a moment where staying power matters more than noise, that choice deserves recognition. Give it a try and have fun.
Drop.art by ObjktLabs was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
As more NFT marketplaces close up shop, art on Tezos continues to deliver. This persistence is not accidental. It reflects a deeper commitment to building an art-first ecosystem that prioritizes utility and accessibility. In moments like these, the strength of art on Tezos becomes clearer than ever.
While the broader market recalibrates, the Tezos ecosystem has remained focused on infrastructure, experimentation, and long-term sustainability. Artists continue to create. Builders continue to innovate. The protocol continues to upgrade, with new partnerships bringing fresh attention to the arts.
This is why there remains a significant opportunity to be a leading NFT marketplace, not for the speculation and fear of missing out that defined 2021, but for the sustained growth of the digital art movement itself. This is something the team behind Objkt understands. A team that has not only endured, but proven its staying power. New tools, new platforms, and new ideas have steadily expanded what artists and collectors can do on Tezos.
More Than A Marketplace
Objkt began as a response to a need. As Hic et Nunc catalyzed one of the earliest and most culturally significant NFT art movements, it also revealed the importance of resilient, permissionless infrastructure. When that chapter came to an end, Objkt emerged not just to fill a gap, but to carry the momentum forward.
Over time, objkt.com grew beyond its role as a marketplace. It became a central hub for discovering, collecting, and contextualizing art on Tezos. Features expanded. Tooling improved. The platform matured alongside its community.
Rather than freezing its scope, Objkt team, now known as “Objkt Labs”, has continued to ask what artists actually need next.
Bootloader: Generative Art Experimentation
One clear answer to that question arrived with Bootloader.
Bootloader created a space for artists to experiment openly with generative, code-based art. It encouraged play, iteration, and learning in a public sandbox. Artists could release collections while exposing the underlying systems that shaped each output.
Collectors, in turn, were invited into the process. Code was visible. Structure was legible. Yet the final artwork remained unknown until after the mint and reveal. Each mint became a moment where intention, logic, and chance met directly on-chain.
Bootloader expanded what generative art could feel like on Tezos by rethinking how users interact with it. You can learn more about Bootloader here.
Drop.Art For Blind Minting
For much of Tezos NFT history, launching a blind mint required more than an artistic vision. Artists often needed to partner with an independent developer to design custom smart contracts, manage reveal logic, and handle distribution. In many cases, this meant significant upfront development costs or long-term revenue splits, placing blind minting out of reach for most creators.
Drop.art changes that equation.
Designed to make blind minting approachable even for artists without technical backgrounds, drop.art replaces the need for bespoke infrastructure with a streamlined, artist-first setup. Where blind drops once required custom development, drop.art provides everything needed to launch a dedicated minting site.
Artists configure their drops by uploading artwork files and structured metadata using a CSV format. From there, drop.art handles contract deployment, minting logic, and reveals behind the scenes. Each drop deploys as its own FA2 contract, giving artists a standalone collection that lives naturally across the Tezos ecosystem and appears on marketplaces like objkt.com without additional setup.
The result is a dedicated minting page that feels familiar to collectors while remaining distinct to each project. Artists can focus on presentation rather than code, with support for staged drops, multiple pricing tiers, allowlists, and royalties.
For collectors, the experience is equally intentional. The minting flow feels familiar and aligned with existing Tezos tooling. At the same time, collectors are not limited to a single drop. Their drop.art profile includes a collection tab, activity history, and access to other live and upcoming drops, making it easy to explore and discover without leaving the platform. Secondary market activity naturally routes back through objkt.com.
This balance between focused minting and broader discovery reduces friction on both sides. Collectors know where they are and how to participate. Artists gain a turnkey solution that removes technical barriers while preserving independence and visibility.
Drop.art also includes a ghostnet environment for testing, allowing artists to fine-tune their setup before going live. This encourages thoughtful releases and lowers the risk for first-time creators experimenting with blind drops.
The TezPole Still Grows
Another distinctive element at drop.art is the Live Pole, a growing sculpture that reflects collective activity across the platform.
Each mint contributes to the pole, gradually shaping a shared structure that all can see and become part of. Artists and collectors earn “paint” through creating and collecting, which can be used to tag and draw on the pole, leaving visual traces of engagement over time.
The Live Pole functions as more than a novelty. It acts as a public ledger of interaction, and a nod of respect to a significant piece of Tezos culture, turning participation itself into a visible artifact. Instead of highlighting only finished collections, it captures the energy of the entire community mint by mint and tag by tag.
Why This Matters
Drop.art arrives at a moment when NFT ecosystems are being forced to prove what actually sustains them. As speculation cools and marketplaces quietly shut their doors, the question shifts from hype to whether meaningful experiences are still being built.
Blind minting reframes the relationship between artist and collector. It prioritizes intention before outcome and curiosity before confirmation. By extending this release model beyond generative art, drop.art opens the door for photographers, painters, illustrators, and mixed media artists to design drops without needing to know code.
What makes this especially impactful is how grounded the experience feels. Drop.art is not a detached experiment or a siloed platform. Artists can launch their own minting sites while remaining fully integrated into the objkt ecosystem. Collectors mint through dedicated drop pages, yet still see those works immediately reflected in profiles, collections, and marketplace discovery. Nothing feels fragmented, and nothing has to be rebuilt from scratch.
From objkt.com to Bootloader and now drop.art, the ObjktLabs team has continued to build while others have stepped away. Instead of chasing trends, they have expanded the tooling available to artists and collectors who are committed to the long term. This steady approach reflects an understanding that art communities evolve and that the infrastructure must evolve with them.
As Tezos continues to upgrade and attract renewed attention from the arts, drop.art serves as a reminder that progress is enabled through consistent, thoughtful shipping. It does not claim to define the future of art on Tezos. It simply adds another path forward. In a moment where staying power matters more than noise, that choice deserves recognition. Give it a try and have fun.
Drop.art by ObjktLabs was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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