Celebrating 2 years with Tezos Baking Bad!

Tezos Baking Bad is two years old! Read how we ended up where we are and what we accomplished in our short recap.

Vladimir
Vladimir ย  Follow

Two years since the very first version of the Baking Bad Tezos staking auditor was released. We couldnโ€™t have imagined it would be the beginning of a whole new era for our team! Tezos (opens new window) blockchain ecosystem has become our โ€œon-chain homeโ€! Therefore, we want to thank every member of the Tezos community, developers, and Tezos Foundation for the warm welcome and for supporting the growth of our team. Without you, nothing would have happened!

Looking back, we want to summarize our accomplishments and share the most important ones with you.

# Tezos staking rewards auditor + Bakers listing

Staking rewards in Tezos are distributed manually by bakers. This is exactly the reason why we developed the Baking Bad dashboard so that everyone can check the correctness of payments from bakers. We did our best to cover as many cases and payout schemes as possible to make it easier for users to check the correctness of staking rewards. Nevertheless, user action is required in some rare cases, so we've made video guides on our youtube channel (opens new window) explaining how to manually configure the Baking Bad dashboard.

After a while, we added a fully-fledged listing of bakers where one of the key metrics is payout accuracy. Also, we highlighted bakers that contribute to the Tezos Ecosystem and warn about those ignoring their voting responsibilities in Tezos on-chain governance. There actually a dozen of various metrics, they are documented and explained in details on our documentation portal (opens new window).

In addition to that, we released a comprehensive guide on how to choose a baker (opens new window).

All bakers listing data is available through API for third-party services like wallets or exchanges.

# Tezos bakers insurance

We decided to refuse premium accounts in our listing because that would be against our philosophy of an independent staking rewards auditor. Instead, we decided to make a service that would allow us to be responsible for bakers' payouts. In short, baker trusts us with the insurance deposit, and we guarantee his clients will receive staking rewards no matter what. This very simple yet viable model became a proof of concept, and we planned to eventually move all settlements and relationships with the insured bakers on-chain. Unfortunately, the project with the code name "SureDAO" still has not come to life due to several reasons and its future is still foggy.

Why is SureDAO still not released to the public?

You may have heard that Tezos core devs are working on a feature enabling baking from a smart contract, which in turn will allow bakers to make on-chain reward distribution as well as automate it entirely. It's clear that the insurance service with its current model will become obsolete, no matter where settlement is, on-chain or off-chain. We are still not sure whether this change will be made, that's why SureDAO is on a break. It makes no sense to spend time on a tool that will stop being useful with the next update while there is so much to be done, and as you will see, we are not wasting time ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

# PyTezos โ€” Python SDK for Tezos

Python SDK for Tezos

The minimal setup requires only a browser โ€” you can manage Tezos contracts using Google Colaboratory (opens new window), or any other online service that allows you to run Jupyter (opens new window) notebooks. PyTezos is capable of almost everything tezos-client (opens new window) can do, so you can automate any CI/CD task, key management, data conversion, or other. PyTezos is perfect when you need to do something fast: the default node and key settings allow you to get started right away, and the built-in documentation allows you to avoid switching between windows. PyTezos is built as flexible as possible: in most cases, you will need only high-level interfaces, but at any moment you can go deeper and customize the logic. You can find documentation, and even an interactive PyTezos training course at https://pytezos.org, (opens new window) and some articles with real use cases (opens new window).

# NeTezos โ€” C# SDK for Tezos

Some of our team members really enjoy C# ๐Ÿ˜ƒ We created a .NET library for working with Tezos for our own needs initially, and then made it public for everyone. CLR (.NET runtime) as well as JVM bindings are very important for Tezos in the long-term, because it's a frequently used stack for building financial applications and services for enterprise. You can find articles about NeTezos and examples of its usage in our blog (opens new window).

# Better Call Dev smart contract explorer

If you are a Tezos contract developer, there is a big chance you have used Better Call Dev (or just BCD) explorer at least once, and if not, you definitely have to try it out ๐Ÿ˜‰ BCD is originally a tool for viewing the history of changes in smart contract states for each particular invocation. Later we added a code viewer, storage inspector, a list of duplicates and similar contracts, extended token support, and many more. BCD users also have access to a personal dashboard where they can manage event subscriptions, compile and upload contracts, as well as verify the source code of existing contracts. BCD allows to simulate operations and actually interact with contracts using popular Tezos wallets such as Thanos, Beacon, etc. Check out our blog to learn more about BCD (opens new window).

# Tezos DApp store

Tezos DApp listing: summary, statistics, volumes etc

On top of Better Call Dev explorer, we have recently launched the first Tezos DApps listing (opens new window) allowing us to track the Tezos ecosystem growth. It shows aggregated DApps usage stats, DEX token turnover, affiliated smart contracts, screenshots, social links, and much more.

# Tezos block explorer TzKT

Tezos is a unique blockchain with unique features, many of which are quite difficult to understand for even experienced users. Therefore, we tried to create a Tezos explorer that provides main aspects of Tezos in the most accessible form, making it easy for even a new user to understand it. Naturally, the cherry on the cake is a service that generates unique cat avatars for each address, so that โ€œTzKTโ€ can be deservedly pronounced as โ€œtee-zee-kittyโ€.

From another angle, TzKT (opens new window) can also be called "Account explorer" because it is particularly suitable for surfing, investigating, and finding links between accounts. It is kind of a search engine for Tezos blockchain with the most complete and constantly growing database of known/public addresses with aliases, contact information, etc.

Under the hood you will find:

  • A super-reliable open-source Tezos blockchain indexer
  • A super-fast Tezos API available to everyone
  • Advanced Tezos blockchain API on top of TzKT and PostgREST enabling sophisticated queries like if you were writing in pure SQL https://pro.tzkt.io (opens new window)

We're working hard every day to add new features to both the Explorer and the Indexer & API, so there's a lot of exciting stuff ahead!

# Michelson labs and Michelson kernel

Michelson labs and Michelson kernel

If you think it's hard to write in pure Michelson, take our interactive course (opens new window). Together with Claude Barde, we've tried to make the native language for writing Tezos smart contracts available to everyone! Partially this is possible thanks to the Michelson kernel tool โ€” Tezos native contract language REPL in a Jupyter notebook.

# Tezos Telegram bots

We created a Baking Bad Bot in Telegram so that delegators stay up to date and early discover issues with payouts. For usage instructions check out our explanatory article (opens new window).

If you are a developer or just a user who needs test Tezos coins, just enter your address into the Faucet bot (opens new window).

# Tezos wallet and Atomic swap

Atomex (opens new window) is a multicurrency wallet with a built-in Atomic swap exchange, available for all platforms and web.

With Atomex you can safely buy Tezos for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies and tokens, as well as swap your BTC for tzBTC (opens new window) (Tezos wrapped Bitcoin) in order to take advantage of the emerging Tezos DeFi ecosystem!

Read more about the Atomic Swap cross-chain technology here (opens new window).

You can track Atomex trading volumes using BCD DApp store (opens new window): It's currently close to 1 million tez for XTZ pairs and more than 42 bitcoins for TzBTC pairs.

Extensive Tezos support is one of our primary targets, and currently Atomex:

  • Ensures users pick the right baker through Baking Bad API
  • Allows multi delegation from different accounts
  • Separates delegation rewards from ordinary transactions
  • Displays aliases for known addresses using TzKT API

# Other Projects

Besides the services and libraries we mentioned, there are a couple of projects left behind or maintained in the background, namely:

We also have our own public delegation service, which has been running practically since the start of the Tezos mainnet. We don't advertise it and have never used our name to attract delegation, to avoid violating the philosophy of the independent Baker Auditor. However, we vote with you, support the network, and believe in the sustainable growth of Tezos!

# Social activity

Tezos community is awesome, but Tezos developer community is really something incredible! We try to stay connected with various teams across the ecosystem, participate in standard development and other initiatives. Recently we are mostly into the following topics:

  • TZIP-20 Off-chain events
  • TZIP-16 Contract-level metadata
  • TZIP-12 Multi-asset interface & token-level metadata

Also we are the members of:

We feel that we have a responsibility to share the knowledge we have collected by pieces over these years. Besides our educational initiative (Tezos Labs), we presented our tools and services on several offline and online events. You can find materials for the following ones:

Baking Bad at TQuorum Berlin

We have to say that every Tezos offline event is truly a celebration and a happy reunion of the community. And it's really sad that we cannot meet in person for the next months or even years. But hopefully this will be over sometime ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

# Better days ahead

It seems like we've only been in Tezos for a couple of months, but we've actually come a long way, and we feel like we can do a lot more with the expertise we've gained. In many ways this is not only to our credit, but also to all those who support and inspire us โ€” thank you very much, Tezos Foundation, TQTezos, Tezos Commons, Arthur, Jacob, Charlie, Shaun, Zed, and many others!

It's time to wrap things up, and we want to remind that your questions and suggestions are always welcome, contact us in any way without hesitation:

Also you can keep track of our progress and follow us in social networks:

See you soon!