Tezos (XTZ) Could Be The Next Top NFT Network?

Decentralized open-source blockchain, Tezos (XTZ) is making a foray into the DeFi and NFT ecosystem. This move is also the result of a tri-partnership with three different projects namely; Opus Dei, Sad Python, and the Gebo Wallet.
In a recent interview with Tezos (XTZ), the founders of the projects discussed in-depth their individual projects. Also, on how the projects are interconnected to make Tezos (XTZ) the perfect DeFi and NFT ecosystem.

More on the Projects
As previously indicated, the projects include;

Opus Dei Money Protocol – It is a decentralized multi-chain platform for trading, creating, and exchanging digital assets. Simply put, it is also a peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and borrowing platform, accepting Tezos assets as collateral. Interestingly, Opus Dei is also a community-governed money protocol. This means that major decisions need to be approved by community members.
Opus Dei will also facilitate the development of DeFi-as-a-Service (DaaS), Gebo wallet, and DAO functionalities.

Sad Python – is the flagship NFT project of the Tezos (XTZ) ecosystem. It is also a unique and top-notch NFT project that is designed with DeFi features. Also, its DeFi features are made possible via its PYTH token. PYTH is the native token of the Sad Python ecosystem.

Tether Launches on Polygon, USDT Stablecoin Now Hosted on 11 Blockchain Networks

Following the company launching a fiat-pegged tied to the value of the Mexican peso, Tether, the stablecoin issuer has announced the firm has launched tether tokens on the Polygon network. The Polygon integration follows the stablecoin being added to the Avalanche and Kusama blockchain networks.

Tether Joins the Polygon Blockchain Ecosystem
The largest stablecoin by market capitalization, tether (USDT), is now supported on the Polygon blockchain (formally called Matic). USDT's market valuation today is $72.6 billion and the stablecoin trade volume is $59.15 billion out of the $106.34 billion in global trade volume on Friday.
Tether Launches on Polygon, USDT Stablecoin Now Hosted on 11 Blockchain Networks

In addition to Polygon, USDT is supported on the Omni Layer blockchain, Ethereum, Tron, EOS, Liquid, Algorand, Solana, Bitcoin Cash (SLP), Kusama, and Avalanche. Furthermore, €195,998,829 worth of EURT, ¥20,503,468 worth of CHNT, and 226,289 XAUT (tether gold) have been issued by the firm.
Expanding to the Polygon network's layer two (L2) scaling solution on top of the Ethereum blockchain will provide tether (USDT) users with cheaper transfer fees. Polygon has more than 19,000 decentralized applications (dapps) and the network's native token MATIC is the 21st largest by market valuation.

"We're excited to launch USDT on Polygon, offering its community access to the most liquid, stable, and trusted stablecoin in the digital token space," Paolo Ardoino, the CTO at Tether said in a statement sent to Bitcoin.com News. "The Polygon ecosystem has witnessed historical growth this year and we believe Tether will be essential in helping it continue to thrive," the Tether CTO added.
The Polygon team confirmed the launch on Friday when the official Twitter page tweeted: "Tether USDT launches on Polygon."

In addition to tether (USDT) launching on Polygon, Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt explained that the team had put together a multi-million dollar fund to help Terra blockchain developers migrate to Polygon.
Tether says the Polygon announcement on Friday, "further solidifies Tether's position as the most widely adopted stablecoin."

The news of tether (USDT) being implemented on the Polygon network follows the token's market capitalization losing $10.4 billion since May 10, 2022. On that day, USDT's market valuation was $83 billion and today it's approximately $72.6 billion.
Furthermore, Tether launched a fiat-pegged token tied to the Mexican peso called MXNT on May 26, and MXNT tokens will be available on Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon as well.

Lisk at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit

The most accessible blockchain application platform was in France on April 12th to 14th for the Paris Blockchain Week Summit. Joining a long list of heavyweight blockchain projects, several key Lisk figures were present at the event to showcase its latest developments in Lisk's thriving ecosystem.

With over 3,000 attendees and more than 250 confirmed speakers, PBWS was a resounding success, and Lisk certainly benefited from that.

The project's Community Lead, Miguel, took part in a panel discussion at the Junior stage of the event, and was later interviewed by David Lin, for Kitco News.
Additionally, the Marketing team at Lisk took up residence in a booth, very close to the entrance of the Palais Brongniart, making it easy to get noticed, and ultimately resulting in two days of mingling, interviews, and brand awareness.

If you missed the event, here is the recap from Lisk at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit.

Sponsoring PBWS: Tech Track by Lisk
Lisk is honored to have taken part in this exclusive event and thankful for the opportunity to sponsor the conference's tech talks, featuring highly renowned developers, startups and researchers in the blockchain industry, covering topics such as the metaverse, DAOs, NFTs and, of course, Interoperability.

Miguel discusses with the panel
Lisk is happy to report that this exposure led to productive and successful talks with numerous acclaimed companies, investors, and developers, who showed great interest in the project.

Building Awareness: Conference Booth
In Retrospect
The marketing team at Lisk made more than 100 contacts in the industry, opening up new avenues for potential partnerships, as well as educating potential future users and developers about the platform and its vision. The team is confident that sponsoring a booth was vital for that purpose.

The marketing team at the PBWS
Lisk booth at PBWS
Insights
Representing one of Lisk's USPs, the illustration below was the main attraction of the project's booth, featuring two high fiving characters dressed as Lisk and JavaScript respectively.

Miguel and David Lin after the interview
In speaking to developers, they were pleased to find out that with Lisk one can build a blockchain application, fully customizable, soon interoperable, written entirely in JavaScript and TypeScript, removing the hassle of having to learn a new programming language, and/or having to code in an unfriendly tool-kit.

Building Interest: Media Opportunities
Kitco News
Invited by David Lin, Kitco News' anchor, Lisk's Community Lead Miguel discussed a number of blockchain-related topics including:

The state of the cryptocurrency industry
The current and potential use cases for NFTs
How GameFI can contribute to mainstream adoption
How Lisk approaches Interoperability
New Lisk Illustration representing the project's USP.
New Lisk Illustration representing the project's USP.
Throughout the interview, Miguel also shared some light on his career path leading onto his current role, motivating aspiring blockchain enthusiasts to get involved regardless of their professional background.  

The full interview is now available on Kitco News' channel on YouTube.

Panel Discussion: Junior Stage
Moderated by Orian Tal from Market Across, Lisk's Community Lead, Miguel, provided his insights into "how to land a job in Blockchain".

Together with Jeremy Wauquier, Alyra's President, Miguel discussed a number of topics including:

How to find a job
Valuable skills to have
Work environment
Pro's and con's
Trends in the space
Miguel speaks with the panel on stage
"At the end of the day, having an interest in the industry will set you apart." - Miguel.

Do you want to land a job in blockchain? Click here to watch the full discussion, and don't forget to check out Lightcurve's latest openings.

Marek Stiller, Kryptowaluty
The last highlight is Marek Stiller's interview with Lisk's Marketing Manager, Michal, where the latter took the opportunity to reflect on Lisk's development. In Polish, both discussed a number of topics including the vision for the project, the importance of interoperability as well as other upcoming milestones. Here is the full interview in Polish, with English subtitles.

Michal gets interviewed at the Lisk booth
Building Conversion: Online Activity
Lisk was also active throughout the whole event on social media, live tweeting from the conference with photos and videos, which received great support and engagement from the project's community. As a result, the team intends to continue this trend at future events.

If you are curious as to Lisk's main takeaway's from the conference's talks check out this thread.

A la prochaine fois, Paris
Lisk is thrilled about its successful attendance and participation in PBWS, one of Europe's biggest blockchain events.

The venue of the PBWS on the last day
Finally, as a result of the great support and engagement received from the community during the week, the team at Lisk has revealed that it has other exciting plans throughout the year, and will announce all upcoming events on its socials in due course.

The getaway to blockchain is coming to you. Stay tuned.

Decathlon Use Tezos To Add An NFT Experience To The Séan Garnier Street Football Boots Product

Decathlon
Decathlon is a French sporting retail giant with 2080 stores in 56 countries. In 2020, they generated $11.4 billion in revenue and have close to 100,000 employees.

In 1976 the first Decathlon store was opened in Lille by Michel Leclercq, France, now it is known as the largest sporting goods retailer worldwide.

Séan Garnier
Séan Garnier is a French freestyle footballer. He is a two-time Football Freestyle World Champion, a three-time French champion, a Red Bull athlete, Urbanball Ambassador and Founder and member of S3 crew.

He a very large social following with over 3.74 million YouTube subscribers and over 5.4 million Instagram followers.

Tezos Technology Used In The Decathlon X Séan Garnier Street Football Boots
Now, it has been announced that Tezos technology has been used in the Decathlon X Séan Garnier Street Football Boots product line in order to provide an NFT experience.

The collaboration has been done with the help and support of Nomadic Labs.

The football boots come with an attached NFT 'Golden Ticket' which is said to: 'give access to new personalized and exclusive experiences with the world champion… a golden ticket that extends the experience!'

On the Golden Ticket NFT experience Decathlon stated:

'This is the first step in building a future where digital goods are connected to physical goods.'

This suggests that more utilization of Tezos blockchain technology will accompany Decathlon products in the future.

Tezos Upgrades A Ninth Time And Switches Consensus Algorithm As ‘Ithaca 2’ Gets Activated

Ithaca 2 Activates And The Tenderbake Consensus Algorithm Is Now Live
'Ithaca 2' – the ninth Tezos core protocol upgrade has been activated and this upgrade switches out the Tezos consensus algorithm from Emmy* to Tenderbake.

This means that the consensus algorithm has changed from being a Nakamoto style algorithm (Emmy*), to a BFT-style algorithm (Tenderbake).

This upgrade lowers block times, delivers faster finality, and has the potential to be optimized further down the line to deliver advanced scaling solutions.

It's been a long journey towards Tenderbake activation for the Tezos community and now it has recently happened with Ithaca 2.

The first research paper on Tenderbake was submitted in early 2020. This research paper included notable people and organizations such as CEA List, Université Paris-Saclay, and Nomadic Labs among others.

CEA List, who are part of the CEA, otherwise known as the French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission. The French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission have an annual budget of €5 billion and have over 20,000 employees.

In April 2021, Tenderbake was launched on testnet.

In early 2022 Tenderbake could have also been activated in 'Ithaca 1', however that amendment upgrade did not quite secure enough of a supermajority to push it over the line.

Now, Tenderbake has been activated with the Ithaca 2 core protocol amendment upgrade on the 1st of April 2022.

Summarized optimizations included in Ithaca 2:

Lower blocktimes and improved finality.

Faster transactions.

Smoother running applications.

Preparation for scaling solutions including transaction and smart contract optimistic rollups (expected to be enshrined into the blockchain itself), and enabling WASM and EVM compatibility.

Reducing the requirement to become a network validator ("baker") by 25% from 8,000 tez to 6,000 tez, strengthening the decentralized nature of Tezos.

GrantShares DAO launching to support ecosystem growth and grassroots initiatives

The GrantShares DAO is launching on Neo N3 to distribute funding to grassroots developers and ecosystem beneficial projects. The DAO will manage an initial treasury funded by the Neo Foundation.

As the first DAO to launch on Neo N3, GrantShares is designed to provide financial support to smaller initiatives that do not currently fit the scope of Neo's existing grant programs. Voting members of the organization include COZ, AxLabs, Red4Sec, NGD Enterprise, NeoResearch, NEXT, Neo SPCC, Neo Foundation, Neo Global Development, and Neo News Today.

Anyone is encouraged to submit a proposal for the members of the DAO to discuss and vote.

The initial funding limit for GrantShares is $50,000 per proposal, and can be used to fund local events, dApps, developer tools, education initiatives, and more. Projects seeking larger amounts should apply for grants through one of Neo's Eco Support tracks.

The DAO's smart contracts are developed and maintained by AxLabs and have already been deployed to the Neo MainNet. In the coming weeks, AxLabs aims to release the accompanying dApp for applicants to submit proposals. The dApp will create an issue in the GrantShares repository where DAO members can discuss the potential grantee's proposal before voting.

In addition to distributing funding, AxLabs designed the GrantShares smart contracts to serve as a reference implementation for other N3 developers. The DAO contracts are open-source on the GrantShares repository.

The GrantShares dApp is tentatively expected to launch in mid-April 2022.

Papa John’s Use The Tezos Blockchain To Give Away Free NFT Bags

Papa John's NFT Bag Giveaway
Papa John's is using the Tezos blockchain to give away free NFT bags designed by two talented NFT designers; Tom Hoff and Ash Sketch. One lucky winner given the chance to with a real-life version. The NFTs can be claimed here.

There are nine NFT bags from 19,840 to choose from and claiming a bag enters the owner into a draw to win a collectible real-life Papa John's bag, with the winner being chosen on the 14th April 2022. This will be the 'Papa 1984' yellow bag, by Ash Sketch.

The bag is worth £250 and users are able to mint one NFT bag per wallet in order to enter the draw.

Papa John's is the fourth-largest pizza delivery restaurant chain in the United States, operating over 5000 restaurant locations worldwide. The pizza bag giveaway will represent the company's first foray into the NFT market and for this they chose to utilize the environmentally friendly Tezos blockchain in order to distribute the offering.
Papa John's stated:

Most Proof of Work blockchains are very inefficient and wasteful by design. They can use millions of times more energy than modern Proof of Stake blockchains like Tezos. By comparison, creating and trading NFTs on Tezos takes around the same amount of energy as sending an email or a social media post.

Last year big rival Pizza Hut entered the NFT market with their pizza art NFT offering.

People will be able to buy the real-life versions of these bags in an exclusive drop of five real Papa 1984, Papa Cheese Melt and Papa Tag bags which will go on sale via Depop, the fashion marketplace, on 7 March 2022. 

Tezos Records Highest Number Of Contract Calls In January With Several Dapps Set To Launch

A Smart Contract Call Record
Contract calls are interactions with smart contracts in the form of transactions. This is an important metric to see growth in the adoption rate of mainnet smart contracts. Since July 2020, the amount of contract calls has increased to 1,209% of the July total.

Every month we've seen a new record in the number of contract calls (except for November, which had a 10% drop).

January saw a 22% increase compared to December. At 22% it sounds ok, but if put this growth into perspective, we see that that 22% is 2.2 times the total amount of contract calls in July last year. We're witnessing exponential growth.

If we're looking at developer activity, we also continue to see growth in activity. In December, we saw an average of 700 daily new deployments on testnets. But in January, we see an average of 930 daily new deployments.

February is set to bring a lot of new launches and milestones.

Edo
The latest protocol upgrade will go live on mainnet in the second week of February. This is a feature-packed upgrade that includes privacy features.

This means that developers can easily integrate privacy into their smart contracts, which will enable them to provide private transactions and develop "privacy-conscious" applications.

Edo also introduces Tickets. Tickets is a convenient mechanism for smart contracts to grant portable permissions to other smart contracts or to issue tokens.

Tickets will be improving challenges like concurrency, which is a general issue developers face, especially in decentralized smart contract platforms.

Tickets also enable a more efficient way of interacting between contracts. It will enable self-custody of first-class coins/token permissions and improve the developer experience.

These are just a few of the advantages Tickets will bring and you can read more about tickets here.

Kalamint
Kalamint is a platform that can be used to create, sell and collect NFT's. Besides the advantage of low Tezos fees over high fees on Ethereum-based NFT platforms, Kalamint will have a unique governance design that includes a Guild.

We'll do an extensive article on Kalamint before they launch the platform on the 18th of February.

TEZEX
TEZEX is a cross-chain gateway to Tezos. It will enable value to come from Ethereum to Tezos DeFi in a few clicks. After that, users can move away from the current fees on Ethereum, and experience a drop in costs that is on average 3,000 times cheaper on Tezos.

When TEZEX launches, another crucial instrument joins the Tezos DeFi landscape.

Quipuswap
This is the second Decentralized Exchange (DEX) that is built on Tezos. Chances are that it will launch in February. This does, however, depend on the progress of the external audit of Quipuswap.

Kolibri
Kolibri is an algorithmic stable coin, built on Tezos and backed by XTZ. A February launch of Kolibri could be a bit optimistic to expect, but a testnet was released in the beginning of January, so there has some significant progress.

1,000,000 accounts
In February, Tezos will quite likely reach the milestone of 1,000,000 funded accounts.

With currently 945,284 funded accounts, and  97,253 new funded accounts in the past 30 days, ~55,000 account are likely to get created this month and break the 1 millionth milestone.

Neo project wins second place in Metaverse Alliance hackathon with 3D world platform

Neo community developer Robert Oschler has won second place in the SocialFi category of the Metaverse Alliance hackathon. Oschler's project, Neo3D Live, is a 3D metaverse world that allows users to interact with one another's avatars and participate in events like real-time auctions.

Oschler developed Neo3D Live so that anyone in any part of the world can access the 3D world, regardless of their ability to purchase powerful equipment. Neo3D Live was designed for most of the world's internet users – those without VR headsets or high-end equipment. He said:

Let Metaverse residents form meaningful connections in a virtual world that will run on common hardware, including the millions of smartphones that may be the only link to the Metaverse a citizen in an economically disadvantaged region has. This is a link that has the true power to uplift the millions, if not billions of hard-working, intelligent, decent human beings who have the misfortune of being born in a region that is not economically gifted like other parts of the world.

The platform leverages the ThreeJS graphics library, a graphics engine that is widely accessible. Neo3D Live runs on almost any browser and device, so there is no need for high-powered computer setups.

The platform's beta version allows users to congregate in a digital 3D environment. Real-time video conferencing is embedded into the moveable characters, so participants can see those they're communicating with via live video feed. Oschler said, "By combining true video conferencing where participants can see each other's faces as they talk to one another and move about a fun virtual world, people can once again feel the natural human joy of forming groups based on both social and spatial relationships like they would at a party or a shopping mall."

Oschler also incorporated other elements to make the space feel more natural and interactive. In Neo3D Live, intelligent objects are embedded in the virtual world, responding to an avatar's presence. For example, walking up to a wall with an embedded YouTube video will trigger the video to begin playing. And to create a more real-life experience, a user can hear the sounds of their movements and that of others around them.

NFT Showcase
The first demo of Neo3D Live included the NFT Showcase, a custom room where an individual can purchase an NFT on auction. A demonstration of the live auction can be found below:

The NFT designer can determine who can participate in the Showcase by whitelisting public wallet addresses on Neo N3.

The Neo3D Live smart contract supports derivative commissions, so collectors can earn profits when they sell an artist's NFTs if the artist grants them that right. Further, Oschler intends the NFTs bought and sold through Neo3D Live to be viewable and transferable via third-party marketplaces (i.e., Sky Hut, GhostMarket).

Looking forward, he aims to develop and release a drag-and-drop toolkit (that doesn't require coding ability), so anyone can build a virtual world.

Tezos Seals Partnership With Esports Giant Team Vitality

Tezos has secured a partnership with French esports giant Team Vitality. The three-year deal aims to bring Team Vitality closer to its fans than ever before by leveraging Tezos' energy-efficient blockchain.

Tezos Enters Esports Space
Tezos has entered into another game-changing partnership.

The Layer 1 blockchain, which prides itself on energy efficiency, announced a three-year partnership with French esports organization Team Vitality Thursday. Although details about what the partnership entails are still vague, Team Vitality stated that the deal would "revolutionize" its fan experience.

As part of the new deal, Team Vitality explained that the collaboration would help educate their fans on the benefits of blockchain as part of the gaming experience and showcase the advancements of these technologies. Additionally, the organization's CEO Nicolas Maurer explained what the partnership would mean for the esports team, stating:

"This is truly a game-changing partnership for Vitality, which feels appropriate given 2022 is set to be the biggest year in our history. The opportunities Tezos can bring to strengthen the relationship between us and our fans is incredibly exciting, and we're immensely proud to have Tezos join us on this journey."

For Tezos, the partnership appears to include brand visibility, possibly in the form of sponsorship logos on Team Vitality players' jerseys. "Tezos will be represented by top-performing Team Vitality rosters and star athletes and through unrivaled brand visibility across the esports ecosystem," Team Vitality said in a press release.

Last year, Tezos signed several major partnerships to boost its visibility. In June, Tezos made deals with Formula One racing teams McLaren and Red Bull Racing to launch collectible NFTs. Both teams stated that Tezos' low carbon footprint factored into partnering with the blockchain.

Last month, video game developer Ubisoft announced it would be launching NFTs on the Tezos-based Quartz platform, only to be hit with severe backlash from the gaming community. Despite this, Ubisoft put out a statement confirming that it will still pursue non-fungible tokens, explaining that the move is "a major change that will take time."

Despite attracting a lot of attention from brands, Tezos has otherwise struggled to gain significant momentum in the crypto space in recent months while other competing Layer 1 blockchains have seen huge growth. Musicians, artists, and art collectors appear to be some of the blockchain's biggest enthusiasts (besides Ethereum, Tezos is arguably the biggest hub for digital art NFTs, and it's also hosted NFT collections from the likes of Mike Shinoda and Doja Cat).  

Through its new partnership with Team Vitality, Tezos will be hoping to attract a new demographic of esports fans. However, after how poorly Ubisoft's foray into NFTs was received, whether Team Vitality's fans will be receptive remains to be seen. 

NULS Multi-signature launching soon

What is multi-signature?
Multi-signature, also known as Multi-sig, which is a digital signature that allows multiple users to sign one transaction. To address in a simpler way, an account that is owned, managed, signed by more than one party.

In most cases, there is only one private key that manages a single account, which we call it 1/1. Multi-sig is different, it goes m/n, "n" refers to the amount of private keys that are authorized to sign for the account, transactions only take effect when the number of signatures reaches to "m". In this case, "m" must be less than or equal to "n".

How is Multi-sig applied in cases
Multi-signature has many use cases in account authority management.

Assets management
Multi-sig greatly enhances security level by allowing multiple people managing one account using different private keys, which lowers the risks of assets being attacked.

Redundancy
By managing one account with Multi-signatures, even if one of the signatories lost the private key, the rest of them can still get access to the account that is being protected by multi-sig.

Department Authorization
A matter that must be approved and signed by multiple departments before it takes effects. Every signature can be traced and it is transparent to all parties.

Assets that supported by NULS Multi-signature
Our multi-sig comes as a DApp, which is compatible to NULS and NerveNetwork blockchain The Multi-sig DApp can be used to manage NULS and Nerve mainnet asset , also including assets bridged from Ethereum/Polygon/Arbitrum/BSC/Heco/OEC/Cronos and other blockchains to NULS through NerveBridge(currently not compatible with NRC20 assets )

A quick starter on NULS Multi-sig DApp
How to use Multi-sig DApp in NULS network

Connect Wallet
To get access to multi-sig DApp, connect wallet by Nabox or Metamask.
Click & Down extension wallet here.