Two years since the very first version of the Baking Bad Tezos staking auditor was released. We couldn’t have imagined it would be the beginning of a whole new era for our team! Tezos blockchain ecosystem has become our “on-chain home”! 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 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.
In addition to that, we released a comprehensive guide on how to choose a baker.
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 😃
# PyTezos — Python SDK for Tezos
The minimal setup requires only a browser — you can manage Tezos contracts using Google Colaboratory, or any other online service that allows you to run Jupyter notebooks. PyTezos is capable of almost everything tezos-client 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, and some articles with real use cases.
# NeTezos — C# SDK for Tezos
Some of our team members really enjoy C# 😃 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.
# 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 😉 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.
# Tezos DApp store
On top of Better Call Dev explorer, we have recently launched the first Tezos DApps listing 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 “TzKT” can be deservedly pronounced as “tee-zee-kitty”.
From another angle, TzKT 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
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
If you think it's hard to write in pure Michelson, take our interactive course. 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 — 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.
If you are a developer or just a user who needs test Tezos coins, just enter your address into the Faucet bot.
# Tezos wallet and Atomic swap
Atomex 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 (Tezos wrapped Bitcoin) in order to take advantage of the emerging Tezos DeFi ecosystem!
Read more about the Atomic Swap cross-chain technology here.
You can track Atomex trading volumes using BCD DApp store: 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:
- ConseilPy — Python toolkit for Conseil blockchain indexer.
- Michelson syntax highlighter — Visual Studio Code extension providing syntax highlighting for Michelson and Morley source files.
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:
- Tezos wallet working group
- Kiln consortium
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:
- Tezos meetup | Vienna | April 2019 [Youtube]
- TQuorum | Berlin | August 2019 [Atomex tips blogpost]
- The First Eastern European Tezos Hackathon | Kyiv | September 2019 [Hackathon blogpost]
- The First Tezos meetup in Moscow | November 2019 [Youtube]
- Tezos Bakers Summit | Vienna | February 2020 [Emmy+ analysis blogpost]
- Brief introduction to Tezos with Bloggeeks | June 2019 [Youtube]
- TezTalks Live #1 | April 2020 [Youtube]
- TQ + CoinList Tezos Hackathon | May - June 2020 [Youtube]
- TQuorum Tezos Baking with Kiln | September 2020 [Youtube]
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 😃
# 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 — 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!
